"On my world we had a lot of evidence that all animals in the entire world were part of a single family that had been around for billions of years. The first members of the family were thought to have lived in the ocean and gradually as the family grew it also grew apart turning into ever more diverse beings through a very gradual process until there were millions of different types of beings that typically couldn't have children together."

"... huh."

"Well, our record keeping isn't that good," Terrance muses. "So if the process were slow enough, I suppose it might be possible. But what kind of evidence could you find, for that sort of thing?"

"We had several lines of evidence, the first thing is that we observed groups of the same birds that had been stranded on different islands and changed in response to the conditions on those islands. We found other cases like that over the years especially when we started looking for them.

"The second line of evidence is that very rarely animals die in a way that lets their remains turn into rocks and then much much later we found those rocks and we could analyze them and use information about where we found them and how deeply they were buried to determine how long it had been since they were alive. 

"Our third and most recent line of evidence comes from understanding part of how animals inherit traits from their parents. A lot of the way that inheritance happens is encoded in an enormously complicated substance we called DNA. And by comparing the DNA of different animals we can determine which animals are more or less related to other animals and use that information to put together an enormous complicated family tree."

"Well, your home certainly has the advantage of us as far as natural philosophy goes. It would be curious to see whether the same thing holds here."

"Yeah I am too. My world had a lot less types of people who could communicate with humans effectively. I'm not sure if that's evidence one way or another though."

"My initial guess would be that you'd have more types of people who could communicate if they were all related, but I also recognize that I know next to nothing on the topic, so it's probably pointless to speculate," Terrance muses. "What kinds of people do you have in your world?"

"That's something we debate because none of them can communicate complicated ideas in ways we humans understand. Some people think that Humans are the only people because of that. I think there's compelling evidence that dolphins, some other whales and some other types of Apes are people. It isn't enough to be definitive though."

"Well, if you do have dolphins too, and everyone on your world is of a family, that suggests that they probably aren't descended from Harrat the Just," Terrance points out. "Although I'm not sure what an Ape is, and I'm pretty sure whales aren't people here, so the whole situation is a bit confusing. If you ever go back to your own world, you should take a polar bear — their special talent is understanding and being understood, so they might be able to help you translate."

"Ape is our word for a collection of types of animals similar to humans that includes humans. We have something we call polar bears but they aren't people. That sounds like a special talent I would really like to copy though. I already have some powers like that but redundancy is good."

"Well, they can't really tolerate the heat, so if you want to meet one, you'll want to head north at some point," he advises. "There's regular ships between Kingsport and Iceholm, so that's probably easier than trying to cross the mountains."

"I'll have to go there at some point then."

"Have you found a reference for all the different species and their talents? I don't know whether that's something hatchling wizards normally look up, or whether they're just expected to know it."

"I tried to look for something like that in the library but I didn't find any one book that had that so I pieced together the talents for a number of sorts of people across a bunch of different books."

"Ah; yes, I'm not surprised. I don't recall any scholars who tried to do a broad-but-shallow overview like that. They mostly prefer to specialize. There was that one fellow ... oh, what was his name ... Dolman, I want to say? Who tried looking at the patterns of different special talents, and claimed that there were clearly a few possible ones that were missing, and hypothesized that there were undiscovered species to embody them. I'm not sure if I have his book, or if I traded it to Thalia ..."

"That's an interesting idea, I wouldn't really expect special talents to have a clear enough pattern for that from the ones I know but there's a lot I don't."

"I think his project was primarily based on the observation that — hold on, this is one of the times when I envy people with hands. I'm going to try describing a table, the columns of which are 'air', 'water', and 'land'. The rows go like this: whirl-the-winds breathe and swim in air, drink water, stand on land; mermaids neglect air, swim in and breathe water, stand on land; dolphins breathe air, swim in water, and stand on land; water-walkers breathe air, stand on water, swim in land; humans breathe air, drink water, and stand on land."

"So his theory was that there should be people who stand on air, who breathe land, and so on. He thought that travelers — that is, water-walkers — whirl-the-winds, and mermaids were cousins of a sort. Anyway, he was largely considered mad, and nobody really believes his theories. But his book does have the kind of comparison you might be looking for, although it leaves some species out."

"I'm not really sure what swimming in land or walking on air would mean but if it describes a bunch of talents in the same place that does sound useful."

"If I recall correctly, he eventually died while exploring a bunch of caves to see if he could find places where the grain of the stone had been disturbed by the passage of a swimmer," Terrance remarks. "Because water-walkers usually stay near the surface to avoid drowning, unless they're diving for gems. But, as I said, he was largely considered mad, so I wouldn't read too much into his theories."

"The interesting thing about dolphins and whales at least in my world is that they're more closely related to dogs and other four legged creatures like that then to fish or creatures like frogs. They even have tiny bones where the rear legs they don't grow anymore would be."

"Hmm."

He thinks for a moment.

"I'm afraid we've strayed rather far from my areas of expertise," he admits. "I don't know anything about dolphin medicine. Or funerary practices, for that matter. I occasionally exchange letters with a book collector in Merriterra, though; I could write and ask her if she has anything about dolphin skeletons, if you'd like."

"It's not really what I'm focusing on either. It might be interesting to know if bits like that overlap but I think it's pretty clear there's also a lot that's different. One question did just occur to me though. Have you tried to become a wizard or do you know turtles that have?"

"Personally I haven't; I considered it, but I don't really have the head for it. Plus, as a turtle you learn the value of relying on your citizens. I don't have a wizard in residence at the moment, but I did have one a few years ago, before he moved away to study alchemy."

"My niece Tara wants to study to become a wizard, though. She's just gotten her first building, so she's a bit young for it, but she's enthusiastic. I will say that wizardry is not as common among turtles, though. It's hard to get resources and tutors out here when we can't really visit either of the major centers of learning. My ... let me see ... great-grand-uncle Thomas was a wizard, though. He disappeared in mysterious circumstances a hundred years or so before I was born, so I can't tell you too much about him. Why do you ask?"

"Mostly just out of curiosity. Some of my abilities also make me better at teaching and passing on magic to others. I haven't really tried using that yet though. I could give you a copy of my special talent if you're interested though it might require us spending more time together first."

"That's a tempting offer," he admits. "I'm not sure how useful I would find evaluating potential relationships day to day, but I could see it being useful when doing hiring interviews. How would the teaching process work?"

"I only notice it when I try to think about it. As for the teaching process I think I would just need to try to give it to you."