"Are you gonna follow the—how much can you understand?"

"If you lose me I'll say so," she assures him. "I have a good memory and I've been listening."

"Okay. So, first, metamancers can, ah, steal mana off—anything. Artefacts, scrolls, people. Drawing mana off a scroll destroys it, drawing mana off an artefact removes its charge, drawing mana off people... well, makes them have less mana."

"And you said you can - convert? Between the types of mana?"

"Yeah, but it's always lossy."

"Your magic," she says, shaking her head in amused disapproval. "What else?"

"I can make an artefact into a nonmagical object, or allow it to be changed. I can detach spells from incantations, or make them more mana-efficient. I can transfer mana between an elementalist's blessings, or allow them to recharge while inactive. I can detect whether someone has magic even before they've Expressed, and figure out what they need to do to Express and to do it more safely. I can help a mage understand their magic better and use it more effectively."

"Wow, we really need to make people start approving of metamancers," she says. "You make everything suck so much less!"

"That we do, yes—except of course it's not exactly easy to do it given people's terror and tendency to behead us."

"I won't let anyone behead you."

...well is this the most attractive person Kaede has ever met, yes or yes?

"You're quite quick at figuring out this language," he says, admiringly.

"I was listening!"

"Well yeah but I'm sure I never said the word 'behead' before!"

"It means - hurt, right? Like—" and she makes a neck-chopping gesture. "Because 'head'."

"It does and I understand that you'd use that to conclude it, but still, I don't think I'd be able to pick up a language nearly as well as that if my life depended on it."

"My ability to communicate depends on it!"

"Which is of course much more important, my bad." What no he's not at all crushing on this absolutely gorgeous and incredible girl who literally appeared out of thin air, nope. "Anyway, how would you prevent me from being beheaded?"

"I dunno. I'd think of something."

"You know, for some reason I believe you."

She grins at him.

"So, what can you do with my magic?"

"I don't know! I might find out if I knew more about it, figuring it out from scratch is—the metaphor I usually go for is like figuring a language reading a book in that language without any pictures or telepathy but honestly I bet if you did that you'd take two hours tops. That's the general ballpark, though. Knowing more about it is sorta like giving me the telepathy and the pictures."

"Okay," she says thoughtfully. "Well - here's light manipulation." And she makes the aurora dance between her fingers again, covers herself in a faint blue glow that cycles down through green and yellow and red, turns into a lightless black silhouette and then flares bright white for a moment— "Does seeing it doing things help?"

"Yes, quite a bit. I can see what effect it's causing and what it's doing behind the scenes and—I guess I could say I can see where I'd look at if I wanted to figure out where the magic was coming from in you."

"Cool!" she says, with colorful little bird-shapes made of light circling in front of her. Then she dismisses those.

"...so there's something else about my magic and - it's sort of hard to explain..."

"I still have mana for several telepathy spells, I just don't like spending a lot of it since I don't produce any new mana of my own, but I could cast it again?"