"On Earth."

He puts his hands on his face. "I'll shut up now please just explain and I'll hold questions until you're done."

Topher pats Teddy's arm briefly. "It's okay. It's a lot. But I will continue the explanation. Sorcery, it's divided into gifts and rituals. You can have one gift per lifeforce aspect, and it will only do that one thing and be fueled by that aspect. What we just used were gifts, the freezing I did was a stamina gift. Rituals are different, they involve steps like actions, speech or symbols and can do many things, as long they are well constructed. They may also mix what aspects they drawn power from."

"Rituals are very much a kind of engineering." Adam tells Teddy.

He nods. "But the - masquerade? And where else is there but Earth?"

"There is Elsewhere, which is where sorcery came from. It's a pocket dimension about the size of Russia. And there are other planets in their own universes: Elan, Efross, Exile and Epoch. The last two don't have native populations."

Claire purses her lips. "...I'm going to go try and get my husband back in here."

Terry sits there awkwardly.

"I am sorry for the inconvenience."

"Are you okay?"

"Not really? I'm just. Re-evaluating a lot of things."

"Yeah, that's reasonable. I guess the nerdy types would be shocked the most."

"I'm not sure how this isn't common knowledge. Er- Please do explain more?"

"I will pass to the history lesson then. Elsewhere is very old. Some wards make the dating a bit unreliable, but we can be very reasonable guess it to be around fifty thousand years old. It was inhabited by an ancient civilization that fell through unknown means. The worlds known as Epoch and Exile were attached to it then and likewise lost their civilizations. Elsewhere stayed empty for a long, long time and then it attached itself to Elan. Meaning that Elan starting to get naturalborn sorcerers."

"That was four centuries ago," Stephen continues when Topher takes a sip of Adam's water - since his own is frozen. "and something we didn't mention is that every naturalborn sorcerer is eventually teletransported to Elsewhere, just once, but always. These first Elan sorcerers found Elsewhere and started exploring, eventually learning how to use magic."

"So if you didn't warn me I would eventually be yanked to - Elsewhere - anyway?"

"Yeah, just stepping through a portal will solve that. And at your age is a possibility, but not 'we should run to the nearest portal possible, right now'."

"It's also why Earth doesn't have that many magic users today. The ones from Elan eventually figured out how to go back, but creating portals is hard to this day and the other end of the portal is pretty much random. When the sorcerers from Earth started popping three hundred years ago, they could either figure out how to get access to the difficult magic - which could take years - then land somewhere random around the world and try to make their way back home. Only to then outlive all their neighbors and possibly all their children. Children which would also be naturalborn sorcerers and face the same thing. Or they could give up and stay."

"Don't forget that they would be welcomed by people who would be oh so very interested in the newly arrived sorcerer, often powerful rich people of marriageable age or with children of marriageable age."

"So portals were impossible for a while and now Elan is a home... I suppose that makes sense."

"...Wait, what?"

"What part confuses you?"

"Outliving neighbors and. Marriage."

"Oh, I guess we didn't explicitly mention that the extra youth and the extra health grant extra longevity."

"I believe your expected lifespan is nearing three centuries. It's also hereditary, so anyone that values their descendants having longer and healthier lives, not to mention easier access to magic, and often social standing... Well, they have an incentive."

(His sons make a face.)

"...Er. Gamete donation?"

He chuckles. "Sorry. I am sure that are quite a number of people that would appreciate that thing. But I wouldn't call it a norm."

"It seems... Kind of obvious?" He shifts uncomfortably. "If there's a way to make people live longer and have magic, why not try it?"