"Yeah, but if you want a lot of magic, like me, you have to do magic all the time. That's why I like it here, I don't have to do that - Milliways stops my momentum. It doesn't go up but it doesn't go down either. So I can sleep eight hours in a row, or read a book."

"What, really, you can't stop doing magic enough to sleep? You must never have any free time there! What sorts of books do you like reading here?" 

"Oh, nah, I sleep, I just do it in chunks. Last one I read was this novel about people with no magic at all, on a farm, growing corn. It doesn't sound like much plot but they have no magic at all so things are horrible and there's a lot of drama about it."

"Ooh, drama! Tell me more?" 

He will summarize his book! The characters get sick and run out of candles and lose a sheep to a bobcat and have to put down an injured dog!

It's surprisingly gripping! Though, Lissa has to admit, it's not very exotic for her, those kinds of things still happen a lot in her world. Even with magic. Only some of the people have magic and they can't be everywhere at once. 

"See, that's sort of a more hopeful genre? Because somebody might come and fix it, even if they don't get to everybody. This is interesting because they know as soon as something bad happens that it's just going to be bad."

Lissa frowns. "I mean, someone could have come in and fixed it. A nice neighbour could have given them candles or a new sheep, or medicines that aren't magic. It's just, people don't normally do that? If they've barely got enough for themselves. And - my world is like that too. Lots of places where someone could choose to be nice and come to the rescue, but it's almost certain no one will."

To her own surprise, her eyes are burning a bit. "...Then again, sometimes people do. Whether they've got magic or not. I fought in a war, recently, and once it was over I was helping repair the border regions – and, gods, it was awful out there but people were kind to their neighbours. Even when they had almost nothing themselves." 

"My world's nicer to live in but maybe your world has people with more character, or something."

Lissa drifts a bit further into the office. "Well, that's interesting, isn't it. What 'character' means. It sounds like in your world, it doesn't cost people to be kind, mostly, it benefits them personally." 

"It still costs time? And if you're not trying to maintain high momentum it's not that useful to whoever's helping. But yeah, it's not the difference between having enough light or not."

Lissa nods. 

"...What other fun activities do you miss out on back home because you can't stop doing magic?" she says. "I'm meant to be on vacation right now, only instead of doing vacation things I've mostly been trying to help Cam with his problem. But it seems like I'm not much use for the part they're on now, and I'd like to actually have some fun while my world is on pause." She points her best winning smile at him. 

"I can do most stuff for a little while if I'm, like, floating or something at the same time. It's stuff that you want to be really focused on or relaxed during that I have to skip. I probably don't even know about all the stuff people who aren't sorcerers do for fun, honestly."

Lissa drags her mind off the intriguing possibilities for things-that-might-be-done-while-floating. "Well, I like dancing, which I find is best when you're relaxed. Do you dance?" 

"I've never really tried it!"

"Wanna give it a try? I've never taught someone to dance before but I bet it'd be fun." 

"Sure, why not."

Lissa glances around, gauging if the office has enough space for dancing. 

It's not huge but there's enough length to it to go back and forth, enough width to twirl.

"Well, then." She holds out her hands. "You start like this." 

And meanwhile Leareth is back in the bar area with Cam. "Would it be at all informative to test it here, in Milliways?" he asks. 

"Test doing magic? I know some of it works, Vanyel's done a little bit. I don't think it's very informative because Milliways clearly has very idiosyncratic rules about what does and doesn't work."

"If you're going to test Gating, I'd appreciate a warning so I can be elsewhere," Vanyel says, a bit sourly. "Cam, do you think it's worth bouncing around ideas before we can test it, or should we just wait?" 

"We should probably have a clear plan of what to do during the test so we don't waste Nechar's time."

"If we are concerned that Gates in particular will not work elsewhere due to needing access to the Void, then a toy Gate demonstration would suffice," Leareth says. "I could step out and then raise a tiny Gate between two nearby thresholds, for example one in the palm of each hand – this ought not take long unless there is any complication in accessing the spell, in which case I would want to make several attempts before declaring that it does not work."