"Yeah. And my kinds of mage wouldn't have any trouble doing permanent things, we don't - run out of magic like that."

"You can just do—whatever it is you do—whenever? As much as you like?"

"Pretty much? Big stuff can tire us out, but it's not like running out of magic. And if I made you glow pink for the rest of your life, or if an Earth mage turned themselves into a dragon or an Air mage made an artifact, the magic wouldn't run out of that either."

"Ooookay I am going to ask so many questions once the telepathy runs out but I should be the one talking, here, not you. But I'm good at talking. Okay." He leans forward, cross-legged on the floor. "Do you want me to explain more about magic or should I talk about the political structure around here or something else?"

"Explain more about magic!"

"Okay! So, from the moment an arcanist or an enchanter is born, they start charging their mana up. It's quite unconscious and happens continuously at a constant rate for their whole life and there's no limit to how much mana they can hold. Elementalists work a little bit differently, they technically also have infinite mana but it's divided into an infinity of finite chunks. And like I said, metas can't generate any mana at all, on their own."

"An infinity of finite chunks?"

"Yeah, an infinite number of them. Way elementalists work is, they define an effect they want to have active, on them, like, say, flight. They want to be capable of flight, so they are, and they have a finite amount of mana which they can spend on flight. When they're not flying but have flight active, they recharge this mana up to this maximum amount. If they're flying, they spend mana, spending more per second the faster they're going—and, ironically, the closer they are to the ground, although that one I figured out from personal observation rather than anyone else knowing it. And to the extent there's an infinite number of effects one can think up to have, they have an infinite number of chunks of mana."

"...that's really weird," she says. "Your magic is really weird."

He grins. "I mean, I find it perfectly normal. Oh, and if two effects are similar enough—like, immunity to gravity and flight—then they're bundled up into the same thing."

"...that seems even weirder? Do you mean that going for either of those things uses the same mana chunk, or that you can't do immunity to gravity if you already have flight, or...?"

"First thing, if you try immunity to gravity or flight or applying a force as strong as gravity's but up they all use the same mana chunk."

"...if I was an elementalist I would spend all my time trying to pry that restriction apart with my bare hands."

Well. That's hot. That's—really really hot. Okay. He doesn't send this part.

"Restriction seems to be in similarity of effects, or something like subset and superset? Technically flight is immunity to gravity plus being able to apply momentum to your body in whatever direction."

"Okay, so what if you - I don't know - I don't know how elementalism works, can you just pick any effect you want? Turn yourself into a bird?"

"Pretty much any magical effect, yeah. That'd need a shapeshifting blessing, and since it's an animal it'd cost mana to keep the shape."

"How about just growing wings, then? Would that come out of the same bucket as flight, or the same one as shapeshifting?"

"Shapeshifting, but you wouldn't be able to actually fly with them, humans are heavy enough that the weight of the extra muscles needed to power flight make us too heavy to be lifted by them."

"So get lighter."

"How? You can't shapeshift the actual material of your body into something that light, that would have all the effects biology and physics would be expected to visit on you and elementalist blessings have in-built safeties that don't let you harm yourself directly—you can fly very high and just drop but you can't shift into something that would kill you—and if you want to affect the way gravity is actually interacting with your mass while shifted wings then that's yet a third blessing and as a general rule blessings that combine the effects of other blessings are much more mana-expensive, to the extent it can be compared."

"Yet a third blessing? On top of the wings and...? Also, wait, does that mean you could come up with three hundred different unrelated cheap effects to combine with something you wanted and then have three hundred different overly expensive mana chunks for it?"

"Wings and flight, and yeah, pretty much."

"Anyway, the obvious way to get lighter is by getting smaller, I bet I'd have an easier time flying on shifted wings than you. And that would still just be the shifting power."

"You wouldn't be able to become smaller and stay human-shaped, the square-cube law means you'd have to understand your own biology pretty well to shift that way. Magic fills in a lot of knowledge gaps, but not all of them, so while it keeps your brain working—somehow—even while you're turning into a bird or an ant, you can't shift into a giant ant or a tiny human without working out what you'd have to change on the inside to not be instantly frozen to death or crushed by your own weight or whatever."

"Your magic's a bit pathetic," she remarks. "But - would it make you figure out the whole shift like you had only basic life manipulation to do it with, and then also make you spend mana to keep yourself shifted? Anyway, there's lots of real actual birds bigger than me, I don't mean turn into a sparrow-sized human."