"I want magic!"

"Still a no."

"Doesn't really seem like my comparative advantage here."

"Maybe some other time."

Sigh. "Fair enough."

"Is this a surprise? Did you pursue magic before a lot of it fell on your head in the form of a crown?"

"I took classes in it! I admittedly took classes in lots of things, though."

"I didn't acquire any magic on purpose."

"Your magic is kinda horrible."

"That isn't why, though, the university had a requirement that if you wanted to get access to their artifacts you had to let somebody who'd touched the mind-reading one in range."

"Ew."

"Were you doing something you didn't want them to know about?"

"...what? No, why is that your first guess?"

"Why did they even have that policy?"

"They wanted to screen people for intent to steal the artifacts, I think was the ostensible reason? The only reason I could attend the school at all was that the mindreaders couldn't stop shouting curse words at the top of their lungs, it was pretty easy to keep out of their way under normal circumstances."

"There are so many easier ways to stop people stealing things. Unless they're teleportation artifacts, I guess."

"They did have one of those. The side effect was awful though."

"What?"

"...this was hundreds of years ago and none of my effects do memory. Uh, maybe it was the one where you couldn't use written language any more, or the one that made touching something very common... water?... really painful, or the one that made you need to sleep for most of every day. ...no, I think the sleep one was the one that let you identify artifacts without touching them, now that I think about it."

"Huh."

"Magic sounds neat and everything, it's just that there are lots of other people who can pick it up."

"There are actually some casters whose abilities depend on their charisma rather than their intelligence or wisdom but sadly they're all innate kinds of magic."

"That would be more tempting."

"Sorcerers are usually like that but I'm a weird kind, all cunning no splendor."

"Summoning uses some of that skillset! And was one of my favorite things when I was learning magic."