"Mm... let me try first."

Thoughtful pause.

"...Every person is exactly one kind of mage. Air, Earth, Light, Wood, Water, Fire, or god. But not every person is exactly one person. I'm Light. I - have, am - someone else, too, who's Water."

He blinks. "I'm—not sure I got that?"

"I'm Ruava. I'm a Light mage. I can do this," and she wraps her hands in little auroras again for a moment.

—and something in her demeanour shifts, and the auroras vanish—

"I'm - I don't have a name," she says. "I'm a Water mage. I can do this," and she holds out her hand toward the nearby river and calls a splash of water up to form itself into a sphere and fly into her hand. The magic she uses for this is definitely different from the light manipulation - similar in some ways, different in others - and there seems to be a kind of division between three kinds of magic within her, of which light manipulation is associated with one kind and water manipulation is associated with the other two.

The globe of water orbits her hand once, then she flicks her fingers and sends it back where it came from.

And she shifts back and lights the aurora around her hand again for a moment.

"She's - she doesn't like to be in the world - but you would've found out about her eventually, you would've seen I only use part of my magic. The rest is hers."

He blinks several times. "Is that—common, where you're from?"

"No, not at all. We just are this way, I don't know of anyone else like that. Gods - gods are people who are Earth and Air and Light, and you don't get that normally, most people are only one and some people are two and if you're two you're Fire or Water or Wood - so sometimes people decide to be gods, and an Earth mage and an Air mage and a Light mage make themselves into one person, and then they are a god. And that's probably why gods are usually a little messed up."

Pause.

"I'm Light and she's Water but we're not a god, she would have to be two people who were Earth and Air instead of one who's both."

"How did—she—you—start existing?" he asks, fascinated. "Which of you came first? Does—do you mind sharing a body like that?"

"We don't mind. But how we started existing is - a much longer story," she says wryly.

"I'm not particularly pressed for time, I was planning on spending the next few hours staring at that wall over there and figuring it out."

"What's interesting about the wall?"

"That's part of what I'm trying to figure out! It's an artefact, but I don't have any idea what it's supposed to do, yet."

"Well," she says.

"The short version is - there was another Ruava. She died. A Wood mage wanted her back again, and used life manipulation to build a... copy of her, like a very late twin. And she didn't quite get Ruava, but she got someone who was so good at pretending to be Ruava that I'm really here now, and really a Light mage like the first Ruava was, even though the girl who's good at pretending is Water."

"You just happened to also have the correct magic, somehow, by—dissociating like that? Er, 'dissociating' is—hard to explain as a word, erm, sort of like separating you from yourself?"

"She pretended to be me and got close enough that I'm me enough to be Light. We think - it's hard to tell, without the first Ruava to compare with - but we think she got it right."

"Wow. Wow. That's kinda fantastic." And hot. "You mentioned—when you said your magic focuses on the world, and the self, and others..."

"Yes, I said that - what about it?"

"Did you mean, like, personality-wise?"

"Yes. And in the magic too. Light mages can do things to light and other people, Earth mages can do things to earth and themselves, Air mages can do things to air and things that aren't people. You get the kind of magic that's the kind of person you are."

"So it's—what if you change? Grow up and become a different person?"

"I haven't heard of anybody doing that, but that doesn't mean they haven't, it just means I don't know if they did or what happened."

"Well, you—she—did sorta that? I mean, created a whole new person in your collective head that's a completely different person, enough that they get a completely different magic—so she had the, the potential to get Light magic even though she was not, in fact, a Light mage."

"Yeah, that's true," she says thoughtfully. "I'm not sure if it's the same as one person changing into a different person, though."

"Not exactly the same," he agrees, nodding. "Still, it's—unless you had Light magic in you somehow all along it was either created there or it's just, maybe magic is just something people where you're from have and they could perhaps change themselves to become gods, because being a given kind of magic can change with them?"

"I've never heard of anyone becoming a god that way but... yeah, it should be possible... except I don't know how you'd turn yourself into the right kind of person."