After a while, there is a kobold. She's a very quiet kobold, and doesn't come in through the door, so it's entirely likely that Sadde doesn't even notice her until she happens to look up and see a new person sitting on a stool a little ways down the bar, watching curiously, the napkin on the bar near her apparently unnoticed.

Sadde has finished talking to the bar. She is now drinking something chocolate-y and looking around, with an almost hungry look in her eyes. Her gaze eventually settles on the adorable thing. She scoots over to the adorable thing. She doesn't coo, but it takes all she has. "Hello!"

The kobold tenses up as Sadde starts approaching, but then relaxes and grins. "Hi." "Am not sure of..." She pauses to consider something. "Let me try... okay, that seems to work, good. Interesting translation magic you've got here."

"Not me! The bar's. She's a really great bar." She notices the napkin, and points to it. "Look! This is how she talks."

The kobold blinks, and then examines the napkin. "Huh. Well, hello, then, and I'm sorry I didn't realize you were a person; I have my own magic to get food and drinks with if I want any, but it's nice of you to offer. And... am I right that the translation magic is just in the air or something here, and you didn't cast anything on me?" She reads the resulting napkin and nods. "Thank you."

"So, you have the privilege of being the very first person from another universe I've met! Want to tell me your story?"

She takes a moment to consider. "Well, I'm a kobold, to start off - I don't know if you might've heard of us before, we usually keep to ourselves. I personally am also a Speaker and a mage; I help my tribemates work with people from other tribes when they need to do that, and I know a lot about teleportation and a little bit about a few other kinds of magic. And I've done a bit of diplomacy, too, but I'm not sure I'm going to keep working on that - the teleportation magic is new, and it's much easier to enspell my tribemates to be able to teleport away from danger than to stop other kinds of people from being dangerous in the first place."

"Where I'm from kobolds are fictional. And more... lizard-y than you? Wow I have a lot of questions right now and I think if I just list you all of them you'll forget them by the time I'm done one second." She reaches into her robes for her notepad and pen and starts writing. "I'll start with: what's the social organisation where you're from like? You can assume I'm totally ignorant, I don't mind relearning details that I may already know from my world."

"Of kobolds?" She thinks for a moment, and then directs a question to the bar: "I can tell you have a lot of magic here; will any of it let someone go to my world? ... All right, thank you." She returns her attention to Sadde.

"We live in tribes; sort of medium-sized ones, maybe a hundred people each. Every tribe has a chief, who chooses where the tribe spends the year in between meetups and who's in charge of keeping an eye on the whole tribe and making sure there aren't any big problems; they're allowed to order people around, to do that, but if they do that when there isn't a good reason, people will start leaving and they might not have a tribe to lead at all any more. Most tribes have a Speaker - it used to be that every tribe had at least one - who helps the chief and other tribe members deal with people from other tribes, since most kobolds don't talk and it's hard to communicate with someone you don't know very well without that. And then all tribes have mages - our mages mostly do defense, we don't have any straightforward attacking magic - and hunters and parents and crafters and things. A lot of people don't specialize very much - everyone gathers, no matter what other jobs they do - but it's very unusual that I'm both a Speaker and a mage, since both of those jobs need special training."

She ticks the first question off her list while she adds a bunch of new ones. "That's fascinating! I have questions about that and I'll get to them. But one of my old ones: are there other sapient species where you come from? Usually fiction back home that involves kobolds also has other sapient species, like humans or elves or dwarves or a bunch of things."

The kobold's mood darkens noticeably when Sadde mentions elves. "Yeah, we have all of those. The forest I live in has elves," she makes a face, "and tigerfolk, mostly; we get a few other kinds of animalfolk passing through every once in a while, too, and one of the other tribes has a goblin as their Speaker. And there are humans and dwarves, which don't live near us and I've never seen one, and some of the stories I've heard have demons and were-creatures and gods and things in them, but I don't know if those are real."

"Wow. I'm having a hard time getting used to magic being real in my world, yours looks so much bigger! So much stuff! Okay, questions about that later, though I won't ask about elves if you don't want me to." Apparently she did notice, then. "How does this teleportation magic work?"

The kobold nods appreciatively at the bit about the elves, then considers for a second. "It's probably easiest to just show you." She unwinds a loop of twine from where it was serving as a bracelet and closes her eyes to focus on it for a few seconds. At the end, she nods, opens her eyes, and spreads the twine to show that the inside of the loop is now a window to a dim - though not completely dark, there must be a source of light someplace nearby - cave. "That's a portal; if it was big enough to walk through it'd take you to my experimenting cave. I can do direct teleportation, too; enspell a thing or a person to teleport to a particular place under particular conditions."

"Oooh! That looks so interesting! And you can do cross-universe stuff too? Bar said time is paused back home when I'm not there."

"Yup! It doesn't usually do anything to time, though, that must be something about this place. And I can't go to places I haven't been before except by luck - if I'm making a portal that'll go to a random place, I can set what I want in terms of light and temperature and air and things, but it's like... if you're traveling in a cave and you're going someplace you know, you know what turns to make to get there, but if you make different turns from that, you'll definitely wind up someplace but you don't know where until you get there? It's like that, kind of, except I have to pick all the turns when I cast the spell, without getting to see what each part does."

"Can you teach me?" she asks, the other questions—not forgotten, but neglected for the time being.

"I can teach it, but someone with my kind of magic - even just teleportation - can do a lot of damage to the people around them, particularly if those people aren't expecting it and don't know how to defend themselves. If there's a problem you're thinking about trying to solve, I might be able to help without actually making you a mage, though."

"Oh, damage's bad. Why can it do a lot of damage? Do I need to learn a lot of non-teleportation-related things or do I get the potential to learn those things or something?"

"...let me start from the beginning, I've gotten a little bit ahead of myself. With my kind of magic, I can cast on things, like the twine, but I can also cast on people, and casting on people is a little bit different. With something that isn't living, as soon as the thing is broken," she demonstrates by peeling a strand of fluff off of the twine, "the spell breaks, too." She holds it up for Sadde to see, and then wraps it around her wrist again while she talks. "But with people or animals, that doesn't happen; if I cast a spell on someone, it's on them forever. And the spell is whatever I set it to be - a lot of my tribemates have spells where if they want to be back in our cave, they teleport there, neat as you please, but they only go where they want to because that's what I made the spell to do; I could just as easily cast one that, say, sent them to the edge of a cliff when they wanted to go home, or back to the cave every time they sneezed. I wouldn't, ever, but there's nothing in the magic that would stop me."

"Oh. Yeah, that's worrying. And I understand you probably can't trust me with that. There wasn't any particular problem I wanted to solve with that, though, I just really wanted to be able to teleport places. And have more, different magic, that's always a plus. Oh, yeah, I have magic as well—and time's paused so I guess I can cast it here!" She reaches inside her robes for her wand, swishes it and flicks, calls "Wingardium Leviosa!" and now her chocolate milk's levitating. "Technically I'm going to learn how to apparate—that's personal teleportation—when I'm seventeen, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't work across universes."

Nod. "It's not impossible that you could convince me to teach you, but, yes, my kind of magic isn't the sort of thing it's a good idea to teach to strangers. I could cast spells on you, if you wanted, though, that's safer at least from my perspective." She peers at the floating milk. "That's pretty neat. My kind of magic mostly can't do effects at a distance like that."

"That's interesting! Mine's mostly effects at a distance." She lowers the milk. "There are exceptions, like Lumos," wand tip lighted up, "Nox," and no longer, "but most stuff is like the levitation spell. Bublio," she calls and soap bubbles that don't burst when you poke them start leaving the tip of her wand. "A lot of the stuff is hexes and jinxes, though, and most of the non-distance stuff is Transfiguration." She touches her wand to her glass of milk, and it slowly turns into a wooden cup.

The kobold looks briefly displeased at the soap bubbles, but when blowing a puff of air at one turns out to be effective at making it shoo, she relaxes again. "Yeah, your magic is very different than mine - it's a lot more active while it's working; mine just kind of exists. ...can you see it directly, actually? I can, yours and mine and the background stuff, I have a spell for that."

"See it directly? No, not really. I mean, some magic has visible effects, like Lumos and Bublio" (she doesn't cast them this time) "but most spells don't. What does it look like?"

"Enspelled things appear to glow, basically. Different sorts of magic can have different colors, depending on how the spell is cast - magic-detection is one of the kinds of magic I don't know as much about, so the colors aren't very meaningful, but it's still useful sometimes. And for your magic, I can see how it goes from your wand and moves around the thing you're casting on, or stays with the things it's made."

"Oh! That's really interesting. Hmm... I wonder what you see when I—"

"—do this?"

The kobold blinks, and spends a few moments peering at Sadde. "That's definitely some magic, yep. Are those both natural forms, or both magic, or something else? You've been little bit magic all the time, and you still are, but I don't know if that's got anything to do with this; it might not, it didn't change when you did."

"Both natural forms is a good way of describing it, I guess. I don't have to actually pay attention or spend energy or anything to keep a form. Some forms are uncomfortable to keep, like clothes that don't fit very well, to varying degrees. Like age, if I change my age it feels uncomfortable, more the longer I keep it or the farther that age is from my actual age. Species, too." Duck beak! Then human mouth. "I can't change species completely, but I can adopt certain characteristics from other species at will." Kobold ears!

Huh. That's.... kinda weird. (She is not going to say that.) "Is that something your whole species can do?"

"No, that's a thing very very few people can do. In fact most of my species is not capable of magic, only a tiny minority is, and of that tiny minority, only a tiny minority can do this at will. Everyone else has to rely on spells with their wands or potions. Also magic tends to be hereditary, in that most humans with magic—wixen—have children with magic even if their spouses aren't magical—are Muggles. Then some wixen parents have non-magical children, called Squibs, and some muggle parents have wixen children, called muggleborns. Yours truly is one."

"That sounds like it'd make things really complicated."

"In multiple related and relatedly annoying ways, yes. I'm working on it."

She chuckles. "Good. And that sounds like the sort of project I might be willing to help with, too."

"Really? Now I'm interested. How do you plan to do that?"

"I don't know. If it was just me, and I wanted to try to fix it on my own anyway, the first thing I'd need to do would be to just watch for a while, to figure out what the exact problems are and what's causing them and if there's anything I can do to fix those causes - which there may or may not be, especially with me being an outsider - or anything I can do to to make the problems hurt people less. But it sounds like you already have a plan, so I'd probably just help with that, once I knew enough about your plan and your world to know that it's a good plan and not going to hurt anyone unnecessarily. Or not do anything; it isn't my world, after all."

"Well I'd accept help, but I'm not entirely sure someone who doesn't look human would help with that particular problem. Non-human sapients have been a productive part of society for a while and human purebloods—that's wixen who come from a wixen family—still look down on them and treat them as inferior. Mostly I've been trying to combat muggleborn hate by being particularly awesome, networking, and making bigots' lives more miserable. I'll probably want to work in the Ministry—that's our government—to try to change relevant laws. And of course there's still my standing project of eliminating death and disease but that one's easier."

The kobold goes still as Sadde explains how nonhumans in his world are treated, and doesn't quite listen to the rest of what he's saying. "Well, good luck, then." (Quietly and without comment, she takes her bracelet off and perhaps begins casting on it - her eyes are open, unlike last time, and she already had a far-away look, so it's really not clear, perhaps she's just holding it.)

"Er. Did I say something wrong? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend."

(Yup, casting: the loop becomes a portal, similar to the last one.) She gives Sadde a long, assessing look, and her posture softens just slightly. "Other people thinking I'm not as good as them doesn't actually mean I'm not, or that I'm less effective. It means I need to take that into account, and be thoughtful about what I do and how, but I have a lot of practice at that," she says, her tone soft and level but her shoulders going slightly tense as she speaks. She reaches into the portal without looking at it and retrieves a small waterskin, which she takes a drink from.

"Oh. Erm, I don't think you're less effective? But yeah, erm, a lot of humans back home don't think much of nonhumans, it's ridiculously silly and makes no sense and I'm definitely going to try to fix that as well. And I'm not saying you won't be good at that, it's just, kobolds don't even exist there."

She gives him another assessing look - this one with tones of 'are you really this dense, or do you just think I am' - and then repeats his earlier words back to him, her imitation accurate enough to make itself obvious: "but I'm not entirely sure someone who doesn't look human would help with that particular problem."

He tilts his head. "I'm not sure what you're getting at? Unless you mean to do lots of magic, you would have to do it the same way I do, politics, and other humans would take you less seriously because you're not a human, and it could take years before you could make a difference and I wouldn't expect you to want to spend years fixing the government of a tiny minority of the population of a world in another universe."

"...you know what, don't worry about it."

"Well I'm kinda curious if you have better ideas, now, I could definitely use them. Also I'm having a hard time not offending you here, aren't I."

Sigh. "It's not that I have ideas, it's that I'm pretty sure I could come up with some, if I knew more about the situation. Politics is important - I've done more than a little of that myself - but it's not the only way to approach things, especially if you have an advantage that they don't know you have."

"Okay! I mean, I personally don't have an advantage they don't know I have, they're all magical and have wands and there's only so much I can do by impersonating other people or looking differently than I do. So. Politics it is, at least for now. ...I'm also twelve, that's pretty young for humans, I dunno how kobolds age, people take me even less seriously, and I haven't really done anything yet though I'm working on it. Do you wanna know more things about the situation?"

"Sure, tell me more."

"Okay, let's see. Humans are by far the most numerous species on my planet, we number about six billion now if I'm not mistaken. Nonmagical humans in general do not know about any other sapient species or about magic at all. They're organised in countries, with various kinds of government from direct democracies to dictatorships. The tiny minority is also divided into a number of individual geographically-based governments, my specific one being the United Kingdom's Ministry of Magic. Years of prejudice means that in the eyes of the law Muggles and nonhuman sapients are various degrees of nonpeople. ...I might need more specific questions from now on."

She considers this. "What's stopping the nonmagical humans from knowing about the magic?"

"The magical humans. There is a spell that lets them edit memories so that accidental exposure isn't a big problem, and secrecy is a matter of international law." Beat. "That is one of the things I'm planning to fix, by the by."

Think think think. "Do you actually need the wand to cast magic?"

"Depends. Only humans use them—in fact, it's also against the law to give nonhuman sapients access to wands. Humans usually need wands to cast most types of magic—my metamorphmagic, that's the changing shapes, is an exception and is innate. Brewing potions doesn't need a wand, drinking them or using them for effect definitely doesn't. Some incredibly skilled humans can do wandless magic, but it's super rare. Centaurs have divination magic but not much more, I think merfolk doesn't have much active magic, goblins do but I don't know much about it, house elves have very active wandless magic but are universally dedicated to serving as chore doers. ...I think that's all."

"So if I hexed someone to have their wand teleport away whenever they tried to change someone's memories, that would probably work. And if I did that to enough of them, and you knew ahead of time that it was going to happen and had a plan for showing the rest of the humans what was going on... it'd be fighting dirty, really, really dirty, to hex people like that, but I can make it temporary, and even if I didn't I don't think that's any worse than what they're doing. I'd want a good idea of what they might do in response, though."

"I have no idea, that was completely outside my hypothesis space, I need to think. Do you hex the person so that the wand does that no matter which wand it is?"

She nods. "I could cast on the wand, but it probably makes more sense to cast on the person."

"Alright, let's see... There's a whole department that does it in the Ministry, but hundreds or maybe thousands of people do it worldwide, and unless you could cast it simultaneously on all of them they'd notice before you were through. But I think the biggest problem is the Muggles' reactions to magic. They did almost eradicate themselves without it."

"I can set up the spell so it doesn't trigger before a certain time, same as I can set it up so it doesn't trigger after one. Thousands of people would take a long time to hex, though, and as soon as I cast the first spell I'd have a deadline for getting them all done if we wanted all the spells to go off at once. Knowing how the Muggles would react is important, too, though, yes - what do you mean about eradicating themselves?"

"About fifty years ago there was a war and they discovered nuclear bombs, which are bombs that can disintegrate an entire city and leave it uninhabitable for many years, even decades or centuries. That technology still exists, and in fact for a long while after the war two of the largest countries started a cold war where they just kept designing better and better weapons without actually ever using them, and there were a few close calls when they almost used them."

"...we should probably fix that before we fix the magic stuff."

"Well you're not wrong, but that was lower priority in my list because there's—well, there was—a much lower chance that I'd be able to do do anything about that, and also we've been pretty peaceful for the past fifteen years and there are international moves towards disposing of nuclear arsenals."

She nods. "I can find an uninhabited world to put the weapons on, that's easy enough. I assume that getting to them to teleport them will be harder, but I can probably figure something out - get the other mage to teach me scrying and see if that works nicely with the teleportation, maybe. And then we'll want to wait for them to calm down about that before we show them the magic, so they don't realize it's connected... this is shaping up to be a pretty long term project, but I can fit it in around my responsibilities to my tribe, I think."

"You're awesome! But also, there's the problem that the bombs aren't exactly a finite resource. I mean, the knowledge to make them exists and is public-ish in the sense that it's possible to get it without being a government. ...getting the resources for that is another story, but still."

The kobold grins at the compliment. "How long would it take them to make more, about? Would they, even, if they've been getting rid of them? If they would, that gets trickier - if they've just made them, they're more likely to use them; it might actually be smarter not to mess with the bombs at all, or to do something else."

"I'm actually not sure about how long they take, but I'd be surprised if nowadays it took longer than, say, a year. And I'm not sure how this bar's translating the different time and season units but I hope that made sense to you. And they might because seeing the bombs disappear might make them think it's some hostile attack or something?"

"I mean, if I'm enspelling the bombs anyway, I could make them teleport at the same time the hexes start working, if that makes more sense. It means you have to be more careful with how you tell them about the magic, but it sounds like taking their weapons away would get their attention in a big way; even if that makes them react in a worse way it probably makes them more predictable, you might be able to do something with that. Or I can probably enspell each one to teleport as soon as someone tries to use it? I'd need to know more about how they work, for that, I'm not familiar with bombs."

"Well, the problem with predicting that is, well, six billion people, a few hundred different countries, about as many possible unofficial and official reactions respectively, and then there's all the interactions, I'm not entirely sure I'd ever use the word 'predictable' to describe human society like that. There'd have to be coordination as well between the bomb hexes and the memory hexes since even if it's not technically their fault wixen would probably want to work overtime to explain that away, somehow. As for how the bombs work, I'm not totally sure of the mechanical details, and—well, I don't actually know whether our physics are the same. Do you guys have atoms? Subatomic particles? Radiation?"

"So enspelling the bombs to be there but just not usable is probably the way to go, then, it keeps everyone safe without adding too many complications - I should probably explain how triggers work with my magic, though, it sounds like you're a little confused about that. Physics, I don't know - none of those concepts are familiar, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, just that I don't know about them - but I only need enough details to be able to set the spell up to activate at the right time, it's probably not as complicated as you're thinking."

"Yeah, maybe. Enspelling them to be not-usable sounds good, yeah. As for activating at the right time, maybe if the bomb starts falling? Although I can't guarantee that they'll continue doing that in the future... Well, basically, in my universe, practically all matter is made up of these tiny, tiny particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons. Then, all basic elements—gold, hydrogen, oxygen, water is made up of two parts hydrogen one part oxygen by the way, et cetera—are made of particles that are themselves combinations of equal numbers of each of those. So, like, one atom of oxygen always has eight neutrons, eight protons, and eight electrons. Except for heavier atoms they have to have more neutrons than the other two to hold it all together otherwise the protons just repel each other, and then some of those are really unstable so if you shoot an extra neutron at them they get divided into lighter elements but then there are more neutrons full of energy that just got released and they hit other atoms and it's a huge chain reaction that releases a lot of energy."

"I can enspell something to teleport as soon as it drops, but that might activate before we'd want it to if they ever move the bombs around besides using them. The other thing sounds like something I might be able to use as a trigger? I'd have to have an example, to see what it looks like to my magic, though."

"Er, yeah, I really don't think you should have an example. I mean, I'm not sure we can ever do that safely, I don't know enough physics for that—wait, actually, there are nuclear energy plants that might be useful, they use the same principle but instead of going boom they harness the energy to get electricity."

"I can spellsense things at a little bit of a distance, if that helps - maybe thirty or forty feet if I know exactly where to aim, but it goes through walls and things no problem - it's a different thing than the magic vision I was talking about earlier. ...actually, the magic vision might be exactly what we want for this; there aren't many situations where I'd want something to teleport as soon as there was magic nearby, but this is one. Would that work, do you think? Enspell the bombs to be able to see magic and teleport if they ever do?"

"I mean, it's probably a thing that's possible if you say it it, but how would it help?"

"It'd just be a safety measure for while you were telling them about the wixen, but it should be a pretty good one - they won't be able to attack any magical people or places, is the idea, and if they don't try, they don't even know that the spell is there, so it doesn't upset them. And there's... not much chance, anyway, I suppose there could be magical people around the bombs for reasons we don't know about, I can add a timer to the trigger just in case... of the spell getting activated when we wouldn't want it to be. It'd be better to get rid of the bombs entirely, but if they can just make more, that's not really an option."

"Well, nuclear weapons aren't the only thing they can bring to bear upon us. Machine guns, napalm, more mundane kinds of bombs. If it came down to it, Muggle culture would be enough because they view powerful artifacts as knowledge that can be distributed freely around. Also there are way more of them than of us. But I don't think they'd want to destroy us, at any rate. Well, some would, like religious nuts who would say we were devil worshippers..."

She blinks. "I'm not sure why you'd want to stop magic being a secret at all, then - it's one thing if someone needs a bit of a shock to get them to stop and think, and something else again if there are going to be problems even if they do. Or did I misunderstand something?"

"Well the main reason is that our magic is really good at, say, multiplying food or creating water, and it's actually possible to become immortal with it though only one person ever did it and they decided to go ahead and die anyway for some reason. We're also basically immune to regular non-magical disease and strife, and even without magical immortality elixir live far longer than Muggles do. So, uh, basically I just want to help everyone and uplift the species and eradicate disease and death and poverty and suffering."

The kobold takes a few seconds to consider this. "I think you're trying to do too many things at once."

"Hmm, maybe, though I'm not actually doing all of them. My current project is the networking-and-getting-influence one so that muggleborns will be treated more like humans, and then that can be expanded to nonhuman sapients. But there's precedent for both a thing that creates an elixir of immortality and a substance that cures all diseases, and the branch of magic that's used for that is uncommonly learnt and has certain other characteristics that make me confident I will be able to replicate those things when I know more."