"Hmm, but -"

Someone behind Raafi tosses a ball.

He catches how her eyes flick to it, and teleports behind her chair with a word. "Playing dirty, hm?"

"Ha! Just wanted to know if it'd work when you didn't see it coming. The words are part of the spell? And the hand signs?"

"They are, but they're not the whole thing - you have to have the spell before you can cast it." He steps out from behind the chair and picks the ball up to toss back to the stagehand: "I'll stay put for you next time. But spells act like physical objects in a lot of ways - they can be transferred between people in some circumstances, stored, applied to objects, and so on. Most of that is difficult, skilled work, but it's possible. Incantations and gestures are how we take a spell in its inactive state," he taps the side of his head, "and bring it into the world as a magical effect. It's also possible to learn how to use them without that, but again, it's a difficult skill that not everyone picks up."

"Amazing. I think you were going to show us a 'summoning' spell, one that gets a magical animal instead of a daeva."

"Sure." He looks at the camera again. "If this works - which I'm not sure it will, I haven't tried it here yet - I'll be summoning a celestial giant fire beetle, for about a minute and a half. This sort of summoning doesn't require payment, and in fact we can't always speak to our summons at all; in this case my translation magic will cover it, and the language you'll hear me speaking is celestial, which the beetle will understand. Celestial creatures are benevolent by nature, but even if it wasn't, it would be perfectly safe; the magic compels it to follow my instructions, and it returns to its home automatically when the spell expires."

He casts, and a golden beetle the size of a small dog or very big housecat with silvery glowing patches over its eyes appears in his lap, its antennae twitching alertly. He speaks a few words to it in a soothing tone, and it settles, snuggling up a bit.

"Wow!" says Brooklyn. "What do you mean by 'benevolent by nature'?"

"That might be a bit complicated to explain, if you're not already familiar with it. One thing some kinds of magic from my world interacts with is moral alignment - a being's tendency to benevolence or malevolence and following their own path or falling in line with others, usually called good and evil and chaos and law. Mundane species of people have the capacity for all of those, though most of them have an innate tendency in some direction or other. The magic of some kinds of magical creatures is morally aligned, though, and those creatures will act in accordance with that morality."

"Huh! Well, that ought to irritate the moral philosophers."

"It's a topic of some debate even for us; the magic goes by intention, not specific actions or their consequences, so we don't have that much of an advantage in figuring out what's right to do." The beetle, which he's been absently petting, fades out.

She waves to the fading beetle. "What sorts of things do you use spells like this most of the time?"

"Summoning in particular I don't do much of - it's mainly a combat magic, and I can teleport away from most fights. In general I mostly use utility magic - I can conjure food, and fly for a few minutes a day, and cast divinations to check whether a plan is safe in the first place, and those are much more useful on the road. In town, it depends on what I'm needed for - healing is the iconic cleric magic, but I might be asked to do anything from figuring out where to dig a well to clearing the name of someone accused of a crime to investigating a suspected monster appearance."

"How do you clear people's names?"

"Most often with a spell that compels people in its area of effect to speak truthfully if they speak at all."

"Amazing! I'd ask to try it but I'd worry it wouldn't look very interesting to our viewers."

"It usually doesn't," he nods, "and I don't have it prepared today anyway. Would you like to see something else?" He looks appraisingly at the ceiling. "There's not enough room for a flight spell to be much fun, but I can let you walk on air for a while."

"That sounds exciting!"

He chants and gestures, and offers her his now-gently-glowing hand. "Lots of spells are granted by touch," he explains.

Tap! She gets out of her seat and takes a tentative step.

The air supports her weight, and she can walk up to touch the ceiling just as if she was climbing a hill.

She laughs on her way up. She walks back down. "You must need a pretty good sense of time to use spells like this!"

"You do get a feel for it, yes. That one will last a while, though - two and a half hours - and as long as you're within sixty feet of the ground when it ends it'll bring you back down gently."

"So you need a good sense of distance, too! Can I sit in the air, like a fairy?"

"Mmhmm. The only difference between that and walking on the ground is that you have to be careful of strong winds."

"Oh dear. Fortunately we're indoors!" She sits; she lies down; she rolls over.