"Also, revealing magic to Earth would be trivial, doing so responsibly or safely would be the problem. Which doesn't mean that open relations between worlds wouldn't be beneficial."

"...so I could help with that, huh?"

"I love the way you think."

"I firmly maintain that it's the only sensible way to think."

"It most certainly is. Even if all you could do was replicating portals that would help immensely."

"Isn't it good that I can probably do a lot more than just that?"

"I think he is trying not keeping his hopes up, because he might pass out with joy if you can do targeted portals."

"I'm not sure I could get quite there, but at the very least I can replace lost vitality things, yeah."

"Any help is appreciated, a whole lot."

She grins. "Any more history?"

"We pretty much ran out of things to say about our worlds. How about yours?"

"Mmmine, right. So there are four types of mage, and with one potentially huge exception, all magic in my world was produced by one, and none of it can have permanent effects. People are born a certain kind, and mine cannot produce any magic natively, but we can see and manipulate all sorts of magic. Also there's a religious taboo about it and if anyone in the theocracy that is my world discovers you doing metamancy you are excommunicated and executed."

Katur nods solemnly; he received most of the explanation earlier. "Is that the only religion? How would they react to sorcery and our worlds cluster?"

"It's pretty much the only religion. There might've been others, but not for hundreds of years. Or, I guess it's a religion template—there are local variants with minor gods and saints here and there. It's just, everyone agrees that there are the four main gods, one for each kind of mage, and the metamancer one is evil." She shrugs. "I'm not sure how they'd react. They might conclude other worlds have other gods and therefore work differently—there certainly are enough economic incentives for this, here."

"Nothing like a little money to make everyone become a better person."

"Well, there are some people that are not moved by economic incentives, but we can at least outcompete them by virtue of all the shiny new magic and technology that we can distribute to everyone that is more sensible."

"That might nnnnot be that easy. The cultural taboo is really strong, and there were some wars in the past where a single metamancer was a match for an army. A lot of history was lost, then, and because of the taboo. Now my continent has exactly three countries, except they're pretty much the same political unit."

"I was thinking more in terms of how they would react to sorcery and possibly the other kinds of magic."

"I know, and I mean they might get suspicious of you on similar grounds, that your magic is evil or something."

"Simply because it's weird and new or something else? Maybe the lifeforce cost? Any idea on how we could make them think positively of our magic?"

"Maybe we could use Daliad or some other faith to portray sorcery on a positive light?"

"I think it's because it can do large-scale stuff that our magic can't and that's always been by default what metamancers can do. Starting with your limitations might help, like, what you can't in fact do—or with ours, like, your magic can do permanent effects, right? Ours can't, so that's obviously not a metamancer thing and not automatically bad."

"Yeah, if you want to be technical about it. We can do long-lasting things, but considering they can reach millions of years."

"And some of Synth's bio-manipulations are hereditary, so there is that too."

"Yeah, probably open with that." Pause. "I just realised Bar might have books on the actual history of my world."