"What do you do back home, run a charity or something?"

"Find ancient ruins and cheat at magic to get money, drop some of that into charity, sure, help young people develop magic, rise in the ranks of the Explorers' Guild to get some political capital, look for the fabled group of subversives who don't think metamancers are corrupted and doomed to damnation."

"...that sounds more complicated than organizing conjured food distribution or something."

"It is but with our magic and without metamancer help conjured food isn't really feasible on a large scale—and my end goal is doing away with the taboo, because I expect that to cause the most long-term positive impact in the world."

"Oh. Conjured food is easy here but it tastes bad so people don't eat it if they can afford regular food."

"Mana and complexity are the two biggest limitations to my kind of magic."

"I guess wizardry is like that too, there's lots of power but we have to channel it."

"How does this channelling thing work, exactly? Your mum said the reservoir isn't really finite..."

"What do you mean how does it work -? We have limits on how much power we can draw in one go."

"That's what I mean, yeah. I suspected it was something like that but wasn't sure. What happens if you try to draw more? And can you draw more if you do it over a longer period of time?"

"Uh, you die, and no."

"Oh. That's very unfriendly magic."

"I guess? It was worse before we could identify people's CCs precisely."

"Are familiars the only known way to increase CC?"

"Yeah."

"Was the spell to get them discovered recently?"

"Not that recently. A few hundred years ago?"

"Okay, that's very peculiar."

"Why?"

"If it'd been invented recently then it could be that there are other ways to do it that haven't been thought of, but this probably means that if there are they're really obscure, or there aren't, and it's weird that there'd be exactly this one specific thing."

"Other ways to do what, check channeling capacity? It was just that someone had to invent a spell for it and inventing spells is a wizard thing and fewer people wanted to be wizards when it might make you suddenly die."

"No, to expand channelling capacity."

"- oh I thought you meant the spell to detect CC, sorry, I was confused. Familiars are older."

"Makes it even weirder."

Shrug.