"As far as I know my type of magic can't be learnt, you're born with it, but it won't take two hours, no, more like ten minutes."

"Sure, go ahead. I can give you a magic lecture about the types of magics I know about in return if you want to."

"I do! But okay, so, about one percent of people where I'm from are born with some kind of magic. About thirty-three percent are elementalists, another thirty-three are arcanists, another thirty-three are enchanters. Some people—it's hard to know how many—are metamancers instead. You don't know which kind of magic you have super early, though. To figure it out, you have to, like, actively try to do magic, and it's different for everyone so you won't ever know for sure you don't have magic—you could just have failed to find the right way to do it. Most people find theirs before they're twenty, but there have been some cases where a sixty-year-old managed to Express."

Nod. "Metamancers have a harder time to express their magic or are they just rare? No ways to detect it or only metamancers can do it or something else?"

"Only metamancers can detect magic—it's how we know people are born with it rather than just getting it later—but they're rare, and, er, there's a. Taboo. About metamancy."

"Taboo? Why?"

"The main religion says that there are four gods—Laoku the Enchanter, Teinn the Arcanist, Bezana the Elementalist, Vinkar the Metamancer—and Vinkar is opposed to everything that is good, and to all of creation. He manipulates people and gives them the magic that lets people manipulate other people." Shrug. "Historically, metamancers have been able to use—and steal—other people's magic, and build armies to try to conquer the world with their power. So they're said to be, er, 'tainted.' By Vinkar."

"Ah, ok. So religion and war also exist in your world, good to know. Is this universal or more focused where you live?"

"The Three Kingdoms formed after a war where a metamancer tried to conquer the continent. Each of the kingdoms is said to be blessed by one of the three main gods, and there haven't been any big wars—at least not large scale like that, there are local scuffles here and there—since they formed. But the religion thing, yeah, universal. I... take it you don't have anything like that where you're from?"

"I was noting that you have those too. My home world seems more fractured than yours, more religions and more kingdoms, not sure if we have more wars, but I'm guessing we never reached your level of military escalation. We only had one native form of magic, called Synth. Before Elsewhere was known, religions had all sorts of views on Synth, then we discovered the other kinds of magic and the opinions multipled to the point I don't think one would ever get enough traction to be universal."

"I mean, you don't have a taboo—although I guess with several religions some would—but not you, personally?"

Katur snorts. "Hell, no. My height isn't all natural, my ancestors were Synth-augmented and most cultures that have a problem with magic have a problem with that."

"Oh okay good then I can just tell you I'm a metamancer."

"Sorry about your world religion... Are you okay?"

She waves a hand. "Fine. That's not even the worst part. Anyway, I was explaining how my magic works."

"Oh, right. Please continue."

"So. When you try to Express your magic you figure out what you are. Elementalists have 'blessings,' which are persistent states of magic they cast on themselves. An elementalist always has one and exactly one blessing active. So, a possible blessing is flight, and while an elementalist has flight active they can... fly. At will. But there's a mana cap, and if they run out of mana they can't fly anymore. Only way to recharge mana is by having a blessing active but not using it. They can only switch blessings out while they're not using them, too. They're called that way because it used to be really common to get blessings that control the elements."

"That explains the name. And they can have multiple inactive blessings? Do they have to learn individual blessings or they just wish for one? Is the mana cap fixed and the same for everyone?"

"All of the blessings they don't have active are inactive, and they always only have exactly the one blessing active. While a blessing is inactive the mana's frozen. Mana cap's fixed and the same for everyone and every blessing, inasmuch as that makes sense for blessings whose use costs less. They don't really have to learn blessings, they just have to think up what they want to have and switch to it. Very similar blessings get lumped together—like, antigrav and flight are the same thing."

"So it makes no difference if they pick weightlessness without native propulsion? Does "make an area zero-gravity" get lumped together with flight?"

"They can't make an area zero-gravity, blessings only work on themselves, and yeah, weightlessness and flight get the same thing, only difference is that propulsion costs more mana."

"Oh, right. I feel like annoyingly poking at each possible way blessings can or can't be lumped together, but I'm not going to annoy you with that. I do ask, is 'breathing fire' possible?"

"As part of fire control in general, yeah."

"So you can get fire control but not gravity control?"

"Yeah. Gravity is—a force? And not, like, a thing. Fire is a thing. So they can control fire. Elementalists can also get telekinesis."