"Ooookay this is absolutely nothing like my system and unless magic in the north works way differently it might be safe to say you're from much farther away than I'd previously imagined possible."

"I'm pretty sure the place I'm from is not 'the north' compared to you. 'The south' compared to Eianvar is underwater and full of deadly monsters."

"Alright. I—kinda want to find the most important things we should be talking about because this telepathy spell has a time limit, but I have no idea what that'd be."

"Um, I should probably learn your languages rather than the other way around - how long have we got and how much language can you teach in that time—?"

"About twenty minutes," and that comes with an appropriate mental impression of how long that is, "and I'm pretty terrible at languages in general so I'm not sure how much I can actually teach as opposed to just hope it rubs off on you."

"Guess I'll do my best to be attentive, then. Okay. How about local politics and geography?"

"Okay, so, we're more-or-less in the middle of nowhere in a country called Laokab—er, you expressed confusion about religion, do people not have religion where you're from or?"

"Gods are people with all the kinds of magic. Sometimes people worship them, or used to, back when there were any. Sometimes people worship ones that everyone else is pretty sure are dead or maybe never existed in the first place, and they still do that, here and there. But if you don't have magic the way I'm used to, I don't know what your gods could be instead?"

"The main religion here posits four—one for each type of magic. They're associated with several things other than just magic, there are stories about their avatars arriving here several hundred years ago and about them creating the world and stuff. This continent has three kingdoms, each named after a god: Laokab, where we are right now, is named after Laoku the Enchanter; Bezanab after Bezana the Elementalist; and Teinnab after Teinn the Arcanist. The last god, Vinkar the Metamancer, is said to be opposed to the other three and the source of all evil in the world. Metamancers are likewise seen as corrupt and indirect tools of Vinkar's will, to the point where 'metamancer' is a rude word." He keeps a perfectly neutral tone while he explains this.

"Well, as long as they're not sinking any continents, they can argue all they want and it's all the same to me," she says. "Laying all the evil in the world on one fragmentary god who can't even do anything except meta-magic seems silly, though. There's plenty of evil in my world and no Vinkar to blame it on."

"—'anything except metamagic' is probably not the right way to think about this. Metamancers can, ah, steal other people's magic and use it. Any magic. There was a big War a few centuries ago with a metamancer who could take on an army."

"Steal it? That's different from what gods do," she says. "I've never heard of a god who could change the - being-a-mage that a person has, just the magic people have done and put in the world. If I put a blessing on you, another Light mage could break it, and a god could change how it worked, but nobody could change that I could do that."

"Oh, not—that way. I mean, as far as anyone knows you can't change that someone's a mage. But, remember when I said that the different types of magic require mana—magic energy? Metamancers don't produce any of their own, but they can steal other mages' mana and convert between them and use any kind of magic like that. If a metamancer steals all of a mage's mana the mage will still continue producing more mana and eventually have enough to perform proper magic again while the metamancer won't be able to do that and will need to get more mana off other people if they run out."

"Huh. I can see what you mean about metamancers being dangerous but I still kind of think it sucks to be them. Even Light mages don't depend on other people for everything we can do." And she holds up a hand and makes little shimmers of light dance between her fingers, blue and green and violet like a tiny aurora.

He grins at that. "It really does suck to be them, especially because, like I said, taboo. There are laws about it, metamancers can't hold public office and performing metamancy is a crime punishable by death. People who discover they're metamancers are supposed to retire to a life of meditation and self-effacement so they won't corrupt anyone else and so they can have a hope of resisting Vinkar's machinations." He doesn't manage to keep the sarcasm off his voice, this time.

"That's fucked up," she says. "It's not like it's their fault. - Oh, my name's Ruava, by the way. Kadiran Ruava. You told me your name but I was distracted."

"Kaede," he reintroduces. "And yeah, it kinda sucks but the going theory is that if they're a good person and not being influenced by the 'evil god' then surely they won't complain about minimising any possible influence said god can have, right?" Yup he's completely failing to contain his contempt for the whole thing, it's even leaking from his thoughts while he translates simultaneously.

"Well I kind of wanna tear your whole religion to the ground now, not gonna lie."

...well he's grinning pretty widely now. "Okay so I have a confession to make I'm a metamancer." Beam. "And you have no idea how nice that actually is to hear—or talk about."

"I kind of figured on that a little bit," she admits. "Can you do anything with my magic? I don't use mana, it's a whole different thing, it'd be cool if you could just borrow some and then have it forever - but I don't know if you can even use Light magic without being a Light person..."

He's not even sorry he let it on, most people from his culture wouldn't have guessed this and anyway this conversation wouldn't have happened because people just don't talk about metamancy. He sends this idea to her without words in front of it, then says, "I can definitely see your magic—or whatever it is I should call this sense. Like, I know it's there. I saw something—in space—when you arrived, like a ripple. I don't know if I can do anything with it, yet."

"Sounds like a good occasion to experiment! But maybe after the telepathy spell runs out."

"Probably. Anyway, I was talking about geography and politics. So, ah... The continent is roughly triangular, as are the three countries," accompanied by a mental image of a map, with appropriate names. "North of here there's the Eternal Storm. If it's magical, which not everyone's convinced it is, it's the only permanent effect anyone's ever seen, been around for as long as anyone knows. There are some islands around the continent and another continent to the west, very sparsely inhabited, and another to the south, cold as everything. We're hereabouts," and mental image of a completely unremarkable point on that map, in Laokab.

"'No permanent effects' is so weird," she says. "Any mage can do permanent effects where I'm from. What does the Eternal Storm do? Just... be a storm, persistently?"

"Yeah, pretty much. Like, Elementalists are technically permanently under one blessing or another, but they're only using it for as long as they have enough mana. And when an enchanter turns an object into a magical artefact it is technically permanently an artefact, but if it runs out of mana it's perfectly mundane until someone dumps mana into it again."