There is a—twist in the air, a rippling distortion like the world is a blanket and someone grabbed a double fistful and wrung it out hard.

A girl falls out of it, drops a couple of feet to the ground, and lands with a definite thump. She is curled up in a tight ball and whimpering very quietly, and seems totally unaware of her surroundings. The air untwists as soon as she's clear, and nothing of the distortion remains except a faint echo of magic.

...Kaede tries to hold onto that echo while he quickly runs over to the girl. "Are you okay?"

She is unresponsive. Still curled up whimpering.

There's magic in her, too, but it's different from the magic that brought her here. Mostly. Maybe. It's complicated and unfamilliar, hard to get a read on.

Oookay he'll look at it more deeply later—did he even manage to hold that weird echo?—anyway he tries again in the two other languages he can speak.

Nope and nope. She is clearly in a lot of pain. Maybe she's just too busy to notice him.

The weird echo has slipped away by now; it was never very solid to begin with.

Okay, pain he can deal with. He spends a moment internally debating whether using a spell on her is a good idea—it'll mean he'll have to pretend to be an arcanist around her and he's gotten in the habit of pretending to be a non-mage around other people—but it's not a very long debate, and a second later words start pouring out of his mouth, balancing incantation length and spell urgency.

It's a moderately complex spell, with two parts: one, fix whatever physical injuries it can within a certain well-specified severity bracket; two, eliminate all physical pain, be it natural or magical in origin, for half an hour.

He casts.

She stops whimpering.

She stays still for a moment, then uncurls and looks around, confused and slightly nervous. When she sees Kaede, she asks him something in a totally unrecognizable language.

Ooookay, he's not super good at languages but he knows enough to know this is definitely not a language spoken anywhere he knows of. He tries the three languages he does know again, now that she's responsive.

...she looks slightly perplexed, and tries a few more languages herself, all of them as unrecognizable as the first.

Oookay, erm, he raises a hand in a universal "wait" gesture and sits down.

She waits.

Okay. So he starts another incantation—this one is longer, he has more time, and it's in plain language to be as cheap as possible. It is also significantly more complex than the previous one, and while he says it there is absolutely no feedback at all, no sign that he's doing anything other than saying random things while sitting down cross-legged.

And then he's done, and he tries to send the girl a telepathic message: Hi?

Hi...? Where am I? Who are you?

You are basically in the middle of nowhere. I'm Kaede. Are you alright? I cast a spell to make pain go away, it should last half an hour, but I didn't know what was wrong -

What he's sending isn't words, really. It's—meanings, thoughts, it's the thing words stand for. It might take some focusing to notice this, though, because it feels like the pure understanding that one would usually associate with their original language.

I'm - that just happens to me sometimes - I would've been fine in ten minutes or so - well not fine but it would've stopped on its own - what do you mean you cast a spell, that's a weird way to put it...?

Weird way to put what? And—why does it happen sometimes, what was it, and how did you suddenly appear out of thin air? Also I—"think I'm going to talk while I do the telepathy thing because that might help with language."

"Yes, do that, good idea," she says, switching to the same mode of communication. "It's - you did magic, people don't cast spells outside of folk tales...? Unless I've been transported to a folk tale. Which would be interesting. Um, sometimes I just collapse in unbearable pain for no reason. My parents pissed off the wrong mage."

"—weeeee are probably not talking about the same things, here. Permanent effects on other people are impossible with any magic as far as anyone knows. And you did appear out of thin air, here."

"I have no idea how I did that, by the way, I was a little busy at the time. And what do you mean, permanent effects on other people are impossible? How's that manage to work? If you break somebody's leg with magic does it go away after ten minutes?"

"I mean permanently magical effects, like, you can't make someone else fly forever or feel sourceless pain every now and then for no good reason. Er, I'm not sure how much I should be explaining, everyone knows how magic works at least roughly so you probably come from somewhere really different."

"...Pretend I know literally nothing about magic and go from there," she suggests. "Then I'll try to do the same for you and the magic I'm used to."

"—four types of magic, or maybe three and one type of not-magic. Arcanism is what I just did, you imbue words and gestures and actions and symbols with magical effects and then spend mana to make the effect happen; elementalism is imbuing yourself with a magical effect, permanent for as long as you're using it and have enough mana; enchanting is imbuing inanimate objects with magic to give them effects for as long as they're charged up with mana; metamancy is being able to notice and see and manipulate the other types of magic, very taboo. People are born a given type of mage, very few of them, but they only find out whether and which type of mage they are if they try actively performing magic. That's the two-minute version."

"...There's - three? Six? Seven? types of magic where I'm from. The base elements are Earth, Air, and Light. Most mages are one of those. Earth focuses on the self, Air on the world, Light on other people. I'm a Light mage. Then there's Wood which is Earth and Light, Fire which is Light and Air, and Water which is Earth and Air, for people who are exactly balanced between two of the base elements. And if you're exactly balanced between all three, you're a god. Gods can manipulate other magic directly; no one else can."

"...interesting. And you've never heard of—any of these things I'm saying? How do people get magic where you're from, are they born with it? Is there, er, religion about it?"

"...I don't know what you mean by religion... Some people are born mages, but they don't find out what kind until they express their potential, which happens at some unpredictable age between about ten and twenty years old. It's really obvious after that. Earth mages can sense and manipulate earth and stone, Wood mages can do it to living things, Light mages to light, Water to water, and so on. Gods can do it to all six things plus magic itself. Or so I've heard. There haven't been gods since the last bunch all killed each other and sunk the southern continent, a few thousand years ago."

"Ooookay this is absolutely nothing like my system and unless magic in the north works way differently it might be safe to say you're from much farther away than I'd previously imagined possible."

"I'm pretty sure the place I'm from is not 'the north' compared to you. 'The south' compared to Eianvar is underwater and full of deadly monsters."

"Alright. I—kinda want to find the most important things we should be talking about because this telepathy spell has a time limit, but I have no idea what that'd be."

"Um, I should probably learn your languages rather than the other way around - how long have we got and how much language can you teach in that time—?"

"About twenty minutes," and that comes with an appropriate mental impression of how long that is, "and I'm pretty terrible at languages in general so I'm not sure how much I can actually teach as opposed to just hope it rubs off on you."

"Guess I'll do my best to be attentive, then. Okay. How about local politics and geography?"

"Okay, so, we're more-or-less in the middle of a nowhere in a country called Laokab—er, you expressed confusion about religion, do people not have religion where you're from or?"

"Gods are people with all the kinds of magic. Sometimes people worship them, or used to, back when there were any. Sometimes people worship ones that everyone else is pretty sure are dead or maybe never existed in the first place, and they still do that, here and there. But if you don't have magic the way I'm used to, I don't know what your gods could be instead?"

"The main religion here posits four—one for each type of magic. They're associated with several things other than just magic, there are stories about their avatars arriving here several hundred years ago and about them creating the world and stuff. This continent has three kingdoms, each named after a god: Laokab, where we are right now, is named after Laoku the Enchanter; Bezanab after Bezana the Elementalist; and Teinnab after Teinn the Arcanist. The last god, Vinkar the Metamancer, is said to be opposed to the other three and the source of all evil in the world. Metamancers are likewise seen as corrupt and indirect tools of Vinkar's will, to the point where 'metamancer' is a rude word." He keeps a perfectly neutral tone while he explains this.

"Well, as long as they're not sinking any continents, they can argue all they want and it's all the same to me," she says. "Laying all the evil in the world on one fragmentary god who can't even do anything except meta-magic seems silly, though. There's plenty of evil in my world and no Vinkar to blame it on."

"—'anything except metamagic' is probably not the right way to think about this. Metamancers can, ah, steal other people's magic and use it. Any magic. There was a big War a few centuries ago with a metamancer who could take on an army."

"Steal it? That's different from what gods do," she says. "I've never heard of a god who could change the - being-a-mage that a person has, just the magic people have done and put in the world. If I put a blessing on you, another Light mage could break it, and a god could change how it worked, but nobody could change that I could do that."

"Oh, not—that way. I mean, as far as anyone knows you can't change that someone's a mage. But, remember when I said that the different types of magic require mana—magic energy? Metamancers don't produce any of their own, but they can steal other mages' mana and convert between them and use any kind of magic like that. If a metamancer steals all of a mage's mana the mage will still continue producing more mana and eventually have enough to perform proper magic again while the metamancer won't be able to do that and will need to get more mana off other people if they run out."

"Huh. I can see what you mean about metamancers being dangerous but I still kind of think it sucks to be them. Even Light mages don't depend on other people for everything we can do." And she holds up a hand and makes little shimmers of light dance between her fingers, blue and green and violet like a tiny aurora.

He grins at that. "It really does suck to be them, especially because, like I said, taboo. There are laws about it, metamancers can't hold public office and performing metamancy is a crime punishable by death. People who discover they're metamancers are supposed to retire to a life of meditation and self-effacement so they won't corrupt anyone else and so they can have a hope of resisting Vinkar's machinations." He doesn't manage to keep the sarcasm off his voice, this time.

"That's fucked up," she says. "It's not like it's their fault. - Oh, my name's Ruava, by the way. Kadiran Ruava. You told me your name but I was distracted."

"Kaede," he reintroduces. "And yeah, it kinda sucks but the going theory is that if they're a good person and not being influenced by the 'evil god' then surely they won't complain about minimising any possible influence said god can have, right?" Yup he's completely failing to contain his contempt for the whole thing, it's even leaking from his thoughts while he translates simultaneously.

"Well I kind of wanna tear your whole religion to the ground now, not gonna lie."

...well he's grinning pretty widely now. "Okay so I have a confession to make I'm a metamancer." Beam. "And you have no idea how nice that actually is to hear—or talk about."

"I kind of figured on that a little bit," she admits. "Can you do anything with my magic? I don't use mana, it's a whole different thing, it'd be cool if you could just borrow some and then have it forever - but I don't know if you can even use Light magic without being a Light person..."

He's not even sorry he let it on, most people from his culture wouldn't have guessed this and anyway this conversation wouldn't have happened because people just don't talk about metamancy. He sends this idea to her without words in front of it, then says, "I can definitely see your magic—or whatever it is I should call this sense. Like, I know it's there. I saw something—in space—when you arrived, like a ripple. I don't know if I can do anything with it, yet."

"Sounds like a good occasion to experiment! But maybe after the telepathy spell runs out."

"Probably. Anyway, I was talking about geography and politics. So, ah... The continent is roughly triangular, as are the three countries," accompanied by a mental image of a map, with appropriate names. "North of here there's the Eternal Storm. If it's magical, which not everyone's convinced it is, it's the only permanent effect anyone's ever seen, been around for as long as anyone knows. There are some islands around the continent and another continent to the west, very sparsely inhabited, and another to the south, cold as everything. We're hereabouts," and mental image of a completely unremarkable point on that map, in Laokab.

"'No permanent effects' is so weird," she says. "Any mage can do permanent effects where I'm from. What does the Eternal Storm do? Just... be a storm, persistently?"

"Yeah, pretty much. Like, Elementalists are technically permanently under one blessing or another, but they're only using it for as long as they have enough mana. And when an enchanter turns an object into a magical artefact it is technically permanently an artefact, but if it runs out of mana it's perfectly mundane until someone dumps mana into it again."

"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."

"Yeah but birds have their biology all made for that, their bones are hollow, stuff like that. You could turn into a large bird. And, the thing with spending mana to keep yourself shifted is that the magic needs to keep you running—" Pause. "Let me start this from scratch. For you to turn into something, you need to have an idea of what it's like, what will change. The less you leave for magic to fill in, the less the actual shift costs. Then, if the thing you'd turn into wouldn't be able to exist, or survive, running only on physics, you have to consume mana to stay shifted. For something like becoming a sparrow-sized human, the total cost is high enough that the magic won't let you turn into that because you'd either die or run out of mana too fast to shift back and then die. For something like becoming a sparrow, the continuous mana expenditure is due to running a human mind in a sparrow brain. For something like becoming taller or changing your biological sex, you can just do the shift once and then be done with it and even switch blessings with no adverse effects."

"A Wood mage could use life manipulation to make someone short and winged, and I'm pretty sure they could fly that way, and if it was just life manipulation there wouldn't be any ongoing magic keeping them like that afterward. But maybe it's easier with life manipulation because you can tell what you're doing? So I guess the next question is, can an elementalist bless themselves with life manipulation like a Wood mage?"

"...maybe? I don't know what life manipulation's like, and I think no one here does, so I suppose it's possible... and if I had access to a Wood mage I might be able to squint at their magic and figure it out."

"Sorry, I left mine at home."

He raises an eyebrow. "What a shame. Maybe I'll be able to look at your Light magic and generalise from that."

"Here's hoping!"

(And is he going to find out—should she explain—how does she even explain—)

"So, I think that's the gist—well, actually, way more than that—of elementalism. Then there's arcanism, which is the thing I used for this telepathy spell and for the healing one. Arcanists pick magical effects and attach them to groups of symbols, and lots of things count—words, drawings, gestures, poses, facial expressions, anything that can conceivably convey meaning. An arcanist defines an effect, chooses a group of symbols that they will attach to that effect, and then from then on for as long as they live whenever they perform the actions related to those symbols—writing or saying words out loud, et cetera—and have enough mana, they will perform the magical effect, which we call a spell. The symbols we call an incantation."

"...Is it bad to forget your incantations?" she wonders.

"Only if they're very common actions which you might perform accidentally if you don't remember they're magical. Most people don't do that, though. And longer incantations cost less mana so many arcanists develop longer versions of a spell for use when they don't need to be quick—I did that for the telepathy spell."

"Hence why you sat there muttering for several minutes first. Makes sense."

"Yeah. Arcanist spells have to be better defined than elementalist blessings, though. There's no such thing as lumping effects together, a spell has a specific duration and a specific target and a specific effect and the more complex the spell is, or the longer it lasts, the more it costs, so we balance that, too. Oh, and if the incantation is related to the spell somehow—like a fire spell that mentions fire—that costs less, too, so those minutes I spent muttering I was literally describing in a few different ways the effect I wanted in as much detail as I could get."

"Still seems... friendlier than elementalism, honestly. Or at least it doesn't instantly activate my contrary nature."

He shrugs. "Elementalism limits stuff to keep the mage safe. Arcanism doesn't do that—you can totally make a spell to become a sparrow and if you don't make provisions for keeping your mind in the sparrow body you die, or if you turn into a giant ant you'll probably be crushed by your weight. And arcanism can affect other things and people, you can grant them flight and such."

"I'll take dangerous over limited, personally."

"It's not terribly dangerous, most people use tried-and-true spell definitions to make theirs."

"Even better!"

Grin. "Last thing arcanists can do is create scrolls with their spells. They inscribe the spell on a scroll, spend the mana then and there, and they or other people—even nonmages—can cast the spell from the scroll. It's destroyed then, though."

"Of course it is. Anything else would be far too convenient."

"Magic here is always quite finite, yeah," he shrugs. "Anyway. Enchanters do a similar thing to arcanists, but to physical objects. They have to define the effect they want even more precisely than arcanists do, and pour mana into the object they want to enchant while focusing on that effect. The object is forevermore a magical artefact, and for as long as they're charged up they have their effects. If they run out of mana, they become just regular objects, but if someone charges them again, they get their magic back, the same effect that was added to them in the first place. You can't change an artefact's effect, or erase it." He reaches into his shirt, revealing a round stone pendant glowing with a soft blue light emerging from carvings on it. "This is an Explorers' Guild Token. It can be used to recognise other Tokens and for as long as it glows I'm officially a member."

"...huh. Sounds like being an Air mage except more inconvenient in every conceivable way."

"Really? Wh—never mind, I'll ask later. Er, if you have no questions about enchanters I think that sums it up nicely?"

She giggles. "Yes, I feel very informed! What else - hmm - where do you live when you're not wandering in the middle of nowhere? And why are you wandering in the middle of nowhere?"

"Thaaaat is a complicated question to answer—and don't you wanna know how metas break all the rules?—and" the telepathy runs out. "The telepathy ran out," he points out helpfully.

"The telepathy did run out," she says, in his language, accented but understandable. "Tell me how metas break all the rules!"

"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?"

"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."

"I don't, either. ...I wonder what kind of mage I'd be, I'm betting combo between the 'self' one and the 'others' one."

"Earth and Light. Wood."

"What does that one get?"

"Life manipulation! The thing I wanted to cheat at shapeshifting with!"

"Coooould it by any chance let me change my biological sex, do you figure?"

"...Huh," she says contemplatively. "Not sure. I mean - yes, that's something life manipulation can do, but - it might be difficult, it might take a long time to learn how - if you're lucky enough to get shapeshifting as one of your Earth-derived powers, it'd be much easier to use that, but not everyone gets every possible power."

"Are the powers people get also personality-based?"

"Yes. Well, it's not always obvious why one thing and not another, but mostly yes."

"So I'd probably get that one."

"If you became a Wood mage. How would you do that?" she wonders.

"Become a Wood mage? Obvious thing to try is figure out whether I can borrow a bit of your magic without taking any from you and see if it sticks."

"Okay!"

"But, like I said, the more I know the easier this is, if I just squint at you it might take days for me to get stuff. You showed me the Light thing and the Water thing, what else exactly do you have, and how does stuff interact?"

"I don't actually know everything I have," she says. "I haven't had the chance to use it a whole lot. I've got Light healing, I know that much. Need anything healed?"

"Not particularly, but that kinda makes me wanna, I dunno, cut my hand or something just to see it in action."

"You can if you want! For knowledge!"

So he produces a knife and cuts his hand.

Turns out hands bleed a lot.

Not for long they don't!

The cut glows faintly, feels pleasantly warm, and seals over. In fifteen seconds it's good as new.

"That was cool. And—different. Light is light manipulation and various other powers that affect other people, yeah? And these powers are sorta personality-based, but no Light mage has them all, even though all Light mages have the photokinesis?"

"Yeah, that's right."

"What other powers do you have? What proportion of people get magic where you're from, and is there any pattern?"

"Some people, not a lot, usually but not always ones who are related to other mages. And I only know about my healing, and we don't know hardly anything about her Water powers because she hardly ever - does things."

"And most things you do are not magic things?"

"Yeah."

"—do you—are you okay?"

"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."

"Well, all right," she acknowledges, "but do you have any other way to find out?"

"I could metaphorically stare at you for a few hours?"

"Okay."

"That'd probably be terribly boring for you, though. I suppose I could tell you what I'm seeing and looking for? But I'm not sure I can translate it well to language, I've never tried."

"Try!"

"Okay!"

So he squints, turning all his attention to the mostly-neglected magic sense.

Her magic is in four-ish clusters. One cluster is attached to the light manipulation and contains the healing. Two and a half clusters are attached to the water manipulation - two of them are more obvious, but there's another one sort of tucked in between them. Parts of all the clusters seem almost... unformed, like it's not just a matter of not having discovered their powers yet but of their powers actually not being defined.

If he squints at it enough, all the clusters seem to sort of spring from a common root, a bit of magic that does nothing but tie the rest together.

...and then there's that other thing, unrelated to all the rest, very self-contained, definitely not belonging to the category of powers-that-she-has.

"So there are—clusters? Bits? Blobs? Clouds? Something like that. There's one bit which was the one that was—moving?—while you were doing the light manipulation, I think... There are a couple of other bits—I'm having trouble telling whether they're separate or together but they're definitely—bigger? not exactly bigger but have more parts—than the part that touched the Light magic, so that's... probably the Water part. There's one other part that's, like... linking those together? I think? It's connecting them, anyway, somehow. I don't think it moved when you did magic but I wasn't paying attention to it then, hadn't even seen it there. And..."

Okay what is that other thing?

Ruava listens thoughtfully to this explanation.

The other thing is... ominous. Ominous is what it is. It has roots reaching into her magic, and into - her brain, maybe, or maybe just her nervous system, something in that area - and there's something there that looks like it's meant to attach to a person, except it's currently tucked away where no one can reach it. Except him. He can reach it.

When he trails off, she—

—looks at him intently for just a moment—

—and then says, "And what?"

"Creepy," is the word he chooses. "There's a really creepy thing there. It's like it's—connected to your brain, or something."

"Please don't touch it."

"I'm not touching anything until I understand what it is—and I guess I'm not touching this one even when I do. Or should I also not understand it? Do you know what it is?"

"It's - not good."

"It doesn't look good. You don't need to tell me if you don't want to, I can restrain my curiosity and probably can just look at everything else without that—it doesn't look integrated."

"The person who made us was - not good. She didn't want us using our magic or - getting away. So she made - that. It. Stops us. Stops us from using magic, stops us from moving, stops us from seeing or hearing or feeling, any of those that she wants, for as long as she wants."

"Holy shit were you running away from them—good on you for doing that, I kinda wanna go where you're from and kick their arse—I bet I could get that off you."

"She let go of it for a moment. I got us away. Now it's - safe, unless someone picks it up again. And normally no one could do that but I think a metamancer could."

"Yyyeah, a metamancer probably could." He frowns.

"I would like it gone."

"I can make it be gone. Might take a while, but I can."

"Thank you."

"What else can you tell me about it?"

"It's Wood magic. Anyone could use it, if they had the connection - she was going to give it to someone else so he could borrow us, that's why she detached it from herself. But only one person can have it at a time and since I got away before she passed it on, I have it now. I could pass it to someone else but I am not going to do that."

"Why was she—why would anyone do that, my gods."

"Do you actually want me to tell you or are you just expressing a feeling."

"I'm expressing a feeling, I don't—want to talk about anything that you wouldn't want to, or that'd hurt you."

"You're a nice person. Ruava likes you."

"I—thank you—I'm not doing this to be nice I'm just—" He shudders. "It shouldn't take an especially nice person to want this, it's the obvious thing, you don't do something like that to a person and you try to fix it if it's been done to them."

"Thinking that way makes you nicer than most people we have met."

He purses his lips and shakes his head. "Is there anything else you can tell me about this magic? Do you know how—deeply—it's rooted there, do you have any guesses about what it'd do if I just tried to get it off you by pulling really hard?"

"It wasn't constructed with gods in mind. No one would be able to pull on it like that normally. I have no idea what it would do."

"Okay so I'd better not do that."

He squints some more. Does it have a—physical location? Some magic sometimes does. How deeply is it attached, how many points of attachment are there, is it feeding on anything, does it have edges...

It mostly doesn't have a physical location more specific than 'attached to her'. It's delicately threaded through parts of her nervous system, sort of like a plant with many fine roots coming together into a single stem, where the stem is that tucked-in end that must be the connection for - wielding it. But it doesn't seem very deeply attached; it's mostly just... there, settled in place but not glued down. There's no sign of it feeding on anything.

He reports this, and continues looking. "I'm thinking I should try—touch it, a little bit, more or less. With my kind of magic that wouldn't really do anything but it might do something to you so if you'd rather I not do that I won't."

"Try it."

So he does, brushing ever-so-slightly against only one of the little roots with imaginary fingers.

She does not visibly react.

"Did that do anything?"

"No."

"Okay." Another root?

Nothing.

If he tries pulling it ever-so-gently, to detach it?

"That felt a little odd," she says, but the root is loose, curling in on itself and not attaching anywhere else.

"I detached a root," he explains. "Doesn't seem to be trying to do anything on its own. Should I continue?"

"Yes."

So he continues, slowly, carefully, stopping at the first sign of distress. Destroying things is always easy than creating or understanding them.

If he's waiting for a sign of distress he will be waiting a long time.

The roots all come free, and then the thing sort of... shrivels.

He could probably figure out how to sort out all its parts and attach it to someone else if he really tried. Or he could destroy it. He should probably destroy it.

Third alternative: can he convert it? Turn it into, say, arcanist mana? Something more positive and useful?

The girl who is not Ruava looks at him.

The whatever-it-is... is convertible. It doesn't make all that much mana by itself. Maybe another telepathy spell's worth.

So he converts it!

"I'm done, I think."

"Good. Thank you."

Ruava smiles at him. It is definitely a Ruava smile. It's very - very.

He beams! Gosh she is so pretty.

"I turned it into arcanist mana, to get something useful out of it."

She giggles. "That's amazing."

He keeps a metaphorical eye on her to make sure the thing won't return or anything, but continues grinning. "So! What now?"

"I don't even know. I'm - I never thought I'd be rid of that."

He giggles, too, then. "Glad I could help." And his stomach grumbles. "...I think it might be time to eat."

"Sounds good to me!"

"Okay, I got stuff, here, hold on—" He gets up, dusts himself, and walks over to a little corner near the wall he'd been staring at where he has a backpack. He brings the backpack with him and opens it. The inside is—definitely larger than the outside. "Food preferences? Not that I'd expect us to have similar cuisine, but."

"Oh, let's see what you've got, I'm not picky."

So he grabs a little container with lamb inside it—still warm, apparently. He has some vegetables, and some bread, and cheese. He spreads them out on a towel between them.

Food! Yay!

Food indeed!

"So I found this wall completely accidentally," he says, making small talk. "One of the more common and accessible political structures on the continent is a Guild, and there's one dedicated to finding old ruins and magical stuff, and we usually do lots of research and exchange knowledge, but I just somehow happened to stumble upon this while flying."

"Fun!"

"It is! I really like magic. It's—not very, ah, socially useful, but I sorta use my findings and cheat with metamancy to get money and some social capital that—" Pause. "I never did tell you about the little problem with the plan of me personally being involved in convincing everyone metas are not evil, did I."

"Besides you being a metamancer?"

"Yeah, besides that. This will need an aside into political organisation."

"Okay."

"So... there are three kingdoms, right, each one linked to a god. And the laws of succession have it that the rulers must always be mages. There's some complicated stuff involving the royal families and marriages, and also lots of people pretend they're a given kind of mage, but of course that's punishable by death. Anyway, my father's king of Laokab, he's really an enchanter, and I'm really not, and it. Got out. So I'm officially, ah, wanted, for treason. Because my mother found out about it and hid it and I also hid it when I was old enough for that to make sense."

"That's fucked up."

"It really, really is. There are actually some horror stories I hear every now and then whenever some disaster strikes that 'Laokab's wayward prince' must be behind it. Because I'm a metamancer, see, and I fled instead of meekly accepting that I should spend a life in penitence or something, so I must be up to no good."

"Yeah, let's fix that."

"I'm all for that idea. Way I've been going about that is, like I said, getting money and social capital as—well, this is not my face, or not my original face at any rate, I changed it a while ago—so as this person who is definitely not the prince. And in the meantime looking for this one group that's rumoured to want to do just that. Don't have much of a plan yet, per se, though."

"...If you can make yourself my kind of mage, I wonder if you can make someone else my kind of mage, too... that would be the kind of game-changer that might make everyone like metamancers a whole lot more," she says. "Maybe."

"Maybe," he says dubiously. "I mean, technically metamancers could be super useful even as they are. There's a bunch of lost artefacts no one knows how to replicate and people say it was the gods that made them but I'm sure it was a mage with a metamancer's help. Golems, floating cities, enormously complex spells. Your kind of mage is really interesting without the mana thing, though..."

"The thing that makes it different is... making people able to do things, instead of doing things for them. Even if you make golems and floating cities, you're still the people making the golems and the floating cities. If you go around giving people their own magic... it's a lot harder to think of you as scary and evil and powerful."

"...I bet they could still spin this to make us evil but I like that idea."

"So we spin first."

"Have I mentioned I like you? Because I like you."

"I like you too!"

"Giving other people magic might not be possible even if I can give myself magic, though. If I try to give nonmages magic of my kind it usually just slides right off."

"Well, if giving it to yourself works, we can test if giving it to someone else works too!"

"Yeah! Borrowing my kind of magic is pretty easy, I don't even need to understand a lot—can I try?"

"Sure."

So he looks again, there's that one bit the other bits seem to be rooted in, he'll try to start with that. Very gently, he tries to see whether he can get a little wisp of it without damaging the whole.

And... yep! Actually, if he pulls a little bit of it away, the gap fills up immediately and now he is holding an extraneous wisp.

...huh. Interesting. So if he tries absorbing it for himself, as if it was mana...?

...it settles in very similarly to how its parent magic-bit was settled in with Ruava, and takes root and grows. A single basic manipulation power, different from either of Ruava's, with two and a half unformed clusters of assorted magic attached—

As soon as the manipulation power finishes coming in, it's immediately obvious what it is. Life manipulation. Wood. He can sense all the living things within twenty feet or so of him, and if he focuses on one he can see how he might tinker with it.

"Whoa," he breathes. "Whoa whoa whoa this is cool I'm a Wood mage!"

"Great!"

"No wait but this is so great I can feel everything all the living things—"

And the first thing he wants to focus on is himself. If he can manipulate living things...

He could cause himself all kinds of horrifying injuries if he felt like it. He could also repair those injuries, although it's a little trickier to get that right. He could make his hair grow rapidly or make it all fall out. He could change the shape of his face, make himself taller or shorter - if he wanted to be really tricky about it, he could alter not just the shape and construction of his body but the plans written in his cells that make him turn out this way or that. The more complicated the intended change, the more he has to study himself in order to figure out how to make it happen, but there don't appear to be limitations per se - as long as what he wants to turn himself into is a biological organism, and as long as he doesn't kill himself or render himself unconscious or anything like that while he's at it, and as long as he's willing to put in the time to learn how, he could turn himself into anything.

"Bet I could use this to shapeshift. Bet I can use arcanism or elementalism to cheat." Can he do the same things to other organisms, like Ruava or the grass around them?

Yes he can! Although the changes do have to be more or less incremental, so the grass has fewer options than a person. He's not going to turn a blade of grass into a bear all in one go. He's not going to do that to Ruava either but in theory if he tried really hard and studied her very closely he might be able to pull it off in a few hours of active magic use after six months of preparation.

"I have intuition for this it's amazing!"

Ruava giggles.

"And I'm thinking of something... I saw your magic refill itself once I got some. If I could convert a bit of mine into mana..." He tries doing just that, a tiny amount of it as a proof of concept.

Now he has exactly the same amount of being-a-Wood-mage, but a tiny bit more mana.

Theoretically this is an infinite mana hack; in practice, with the quantities involved, it's more like a 'generate as much mana as a normal mage, maybe, if you do nothing else with your time' hack.

Can he try to turn all of his newfound magic into mana?

He can try!

He can't get it all at once, though. The root regrows faster than he can convert it. Stubborn little thing.

"Well, I can now generate mana. Less fast than a natural mage but still, will do in a pinch."

He fails to contain his glee at this, and sorts of sways to the sides happily.

It's adorable. He's adorable.

"You look so happy!"

"I am! I can actually do magic that is my own! It's so cool and I'll be able to help so many more people now!"

She beams at him.

"—I wonder if I can make you into a god."

"...How?"

"Well, I can see the... three parts? Of magic in you. Except two are all melded together—that's water. Maybe if I could join them somehow..."

"I don't... think you can do that... what happens if you try and then mess it up?"

"I have no idea, this'd be the kind of thing I'd probably want to really really study up before even trying."

"Yeah."

He finishes up his neglected food and stretches. "You know... I mean, you said you wanted to help fix the stuff that's wrong around here, but... I don't know, don't you want to go back where you're from?—far away from your maker, but."

"There wouldn't be anywhere far enough."

"...that's fair. Okay, you can stay here, there's no reason why not."

(Eeeeee.)

(No this is terrible she was abused he should offer—something, some comfort—)

(Eeeeeeeeeeeee~)

"Is there anything you want me to do? Other than the basic decency things like finding you a place or whatever?"

"Find me a place, help me save the world..."

(Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee~)

"Okay that I can do."

(Is he even hiding it? He's not sure. He's not sure he wants to hide it.)

He might not be hiding it.

She's grinning at him again.

Gods she is so pretty.

"It's getting a bit late," he says, gesturing at the setting sun—where did the time go? "I have a tent here in my backpack but it... doesn't really fit two people. I could cast a flight spell on you, now that I can just regenerate any mana I spend, and we could fly to the nearest town?"

"How small is this tent?"

"Er... wait, I'm gonna—" He tries to turn the grass around him red using his new magic, in an approximately five square yards rectangle.

It takes him a few seconds to figure out how to accomplish 'turn grass red', and then a mere moment per patch of grass to actually do so.

Ruava observes the indicated size of the tent, and grins at him.

He raises an eyebrow. "I sense a lack of objections."

"You're very observant."

He does not blush, because honestly he is probably biologically incapable of it, and also he's too aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa and eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee to blush.

"It only has the one mattress," he warns.

"Good."

Well then. That's. A thing.

"Okay," he says, grinning at her, too. He pulls the tent from the inside of his backpack—it actually consists of a long-ish metal tube that starts unfolding into a typical triangular tent as it touches the ground.

Ruava really does have a spectacular smile.

She does it's kinda ridiculous.

He is also pretty sure that—" You know, I find myself wanting to kiss you."

"Good idea," she says, and kisses him first.

Oh gods and heavens and stars yes okay good this is happening so much kiss.

So much kiss! So delighted! Better not think too hard about where she got all this practice!

...yeah shit okay he pulls away. "Erm."

"What?"

"Are you—sure you're okay? With this and. Erm. We just met and."

"I really like you and you're really cute and I want to save the world with you and - I don't really know what being okay is like but I'm pretty sure this is it."

"—okay, I guess that makes sense. Tell me to stop if you want me to stop, though, okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay."

Back to kissing?

Back to kissing!

Eeee! He is also very experienced at kissing, from less dubious sources!

He is not sure what to do with his hands so he will just keep them on her back, that's a safe place, right?

Sure, if he likes.

Ruava is not nearly so shy.

Well he's not shy he's just, you know, letting her dictate the pace. He can mimic her.

Oh good!

So maybe they could move all this kissing into the warm magical tent's bed?

Yes. Good plan.

Good! So tentwards they go, and they can do this horizontally. It is a quite comfortable magical bed, all things considered.

Comfortable magical beds are the best kind of magical beds, clearly.

There should be fewer clothes going on here. Also, Ruava is glowing faintly.

Should there? Kaede can take off his—" You seem to be glowing."

"Yeah."

It's a lovely shade of pale lavender, shading into violet. It fades a little when he calls attention to it.

"Light mages do that sometimes."

"—well I'm not complaining," he says, and resumes removing his shirt.

Shirtless Kaede! What an excellent flavour of Kaede!

He likes to think so, yes! This day is going way better than he'd expected and he has zero regrets and he is kissing this gorgeous girl from another world and he will keep doing that.

Excellent.

Ruava is also wearing a shirt. Ruava ceases to wear a shirt.

(Click here to skip the explicit content.)

Oooooooh this is definitely a flavour of Ruava Kaede enjoys! Speaking of flavour he thinks he would perhaps like to taste a bit more of Ruava than her lips and face, like, say, her neck.

Good plan. She approves. And glows very prettily.