"Long story, let's talk about magic some more."

He furrows his eyebrows. "If you're sure." He takes a second to remember where he was, then asks, "How do you discover new powers?"

"Depends! Sometimes you try to do something and it turns out you can do it; sometimes you get a sense that you can do something and then you try it and you can."

"Is there a fixed number of powers each person gets, or does it vary between people, or in time?"

"Varies both."

"Can anyone ever lose a power they got?"

"I've never heard of it, but I don't know everything."

"Okay, does—your counterpart—mind if I ask her to demonstrate what she does know of her powers?"

Headtilt. It's kind of astonishing how visible the shift between personalities is; it goes right down to every part of their body language.

"I've only ever done one thing and it was bringing us here," she says.

"—self and the world, that's incredible—were you, er, aiming?"

"No. I had very little time and we needed to be somewhere else."

He nods. He's very much not going to ask unless she wants to tell, this screams personal territory and they've known each other for less than an hour. "Do you have any feel for what else that power can do, or how it does it?"

"I think it might be - for moving from place to place. But I'm not sure I want to experiment, in case it doesn't aim well. Ruava likes you."

"I like her, too," he says, smiling in spite of himself. "Makes sense, not to want to experiment. I could—probably—figure out more about it, without needing experiments."

"Useful," she says.

"Yeah, I try to be," he says, wryly. And wow does he feel scrutinised by this girl. He tries to look as—upstanding? good? kind?—as he can, whatever that means.

She looks at him, very unreadably, and then—

—smiles. "Huh, so she did it, that makes a lot of sense."

"You didn't know?"

"I was busy, remember?"

"—right. Sorry."

She laughs. "It's okay."

"I think I've run out of useful questions to ask about your magic."

"I want to see if you can borrow light and water manipulation," she says.

"Yeah. I'm... a bit wary of doing that, because you don't have an obvious renewable magic fuel like our mages do. I wouldn't want to accidentally take it from you."