"I'm converting bits of this magic into mana, it's great and I love it. Much easier to become omnipotent with endless mana generation that doesn't rely on having to keep slaves."

"Keeping slaves is bad!" agrees Ruava.

She giggles. "We should go back a few hundred years and tell a couple of metamancers that, might help avert a disaster or two."

"Make them all mages - my kind of mages - then they won't need to take anybody's mana."

"Well, this magic is kinda slow to convert. If I spent all day doing nothing but converting it into my kind of magic I'd get production about as fast as one of my kind of mages, and metamancers have... all sorts of incentives to go power-mad."

"And it's easier to go power-mad by stealing other people's magic than by learning to use what you already have?"

"It's easier to go power-mad with more than one kind of power all combined into a ball of godhood. Wood is awesome but it's not godhood."

"Well, that's true."

"And everyone spends all your life drilling into your head that being a meta you're corrupted, and you have to either hide it forever or live a completely chaste and isolated life, while watching magic everywhere, never able to really forget it, knowing someone's a mage before they know it, and it's ever so tempting to understand... And then regular human variance means you get some crazies."

"We should make everything better."

"Yeah."

"And then everything will be better and it'll be great!"

She giggles and decides to pounce-kiss Ruava.

In the air. Because they can continue moving in the air while they kiss and it's awesome.

Flying kisses!!!!!!

So many of those!

"I always pretend to be a nonmage because then it's easier to pretend I Expressed later if I need to, but it's so great not to pretend."

"I'll bet it is. It's - kind of great not having to pretend I'm exactly one person."

"I can imagine.—what's she like? We didn't really talk a lot, and she doesn't like being out here I guess."

"She's... I don't know," she says. "She's not like anyone else I've ever met. She's very herself. Very - well, very Water."

"I haven't really grown around all the cultural assumptions about your magic system, other than the blurb you gave me and my correct prediction."

"The elements really aren't usually personality types like that! Like, someone who's very Air might be an artist or something who's really serious about their work, or maybe they're someone who likes to travel and enjoys seeing new places, but there's this common thread of... being the sort of person who pays attention to the world? And she's just - paying attention, all the time, noticing things, really seeing what's around us, remembering details, figuring out what's happening. And then, someone who's very Earth can be just about any kind of person you can imagine as long as they have - a really strong self - and she has that, she has that so much, I don't know how she manages it when she hardly ever does anything and spends almost all her time pretending she's me but she's so, so exactly the person she is and nobody else."

"Heh. Yeah, I definitely noticed the paying attention part."

"It's kind of amazing."

"I was actually hoping I'd convince her I was, erm, good enough for you. Somehow."

"You already did."

She grins. "Yeah, but I hadn't then, or, well. I have a huge crush on you, so I wanted all of you to be okay with that."