"They're attached but the vision metaphor is very loose. It has way more than just three dimensions and a spectrum of colours to look at, and without knowing that this bit of magic here was supposed to be connected to another bit of magic elsewhere I might not have figured that out for a while."

"...more than three dimensions? Go on."

"Not spatial ones, or not exactly. There's just a certain sense in which a certain magical effect is distributed along certain axes and those axes are not limited to the three spatial ones but they are... somewhat... analogous. I'm running into the limit of my ability to verbalise this."

"You're gonna need to increase your ability to verbalize it, then."

"Yes, sir," he says, raising an eyebrow.

"What? Look, if you were looking for something other than a pushy magic theoretician you came to the wrong guy."

"No, pushy magic theoretician is exactly what I was looking for, the fact that he happens to be immensely attractive is only a bonus. Anyway, way this sense works, magic has something that is analogous to a shape, but it exists in way more than just three dimensions and is not at all physical and somewhat but not completely correlated with what the magic does. Elementalist blessings, where I'm from, are almost invariably surrounding the mage's body, but some are more heavily distributed in specific places, like around the head for cognitive ones. I guess you could say that I can also see a projection of n-dimensional structure onto three-dimensional space."

"And it wouldn't happen to project into visible lines between points A and B -?" He doesn't seem to have registered the "immensely attractive" part.

"Not necessarily. There's also a... an angle aspect, sort of. Depending on the way you project the thing into three-dimensional space, some bits appear or stop appearing, and knowing which way to turn is also something I have to learn?"

"So you can adjust your perspective?"

"Mmmmooore or less. The thing I'm calling 'staring' or learning more things could also be described as this adjustment of perspective. And figuring out new dimensions the magic actually occupies is another part of it, and adding a new dimension means having a lot more freedom for perspective changes."

"Figuring out new dimensions?"

"Yeah, understanding that it's actually there and exists and can be used."

"Is there not a finite number of dimensions, or is there but you're not done learning how to see them all yet?"

"As far as I know there is a finite number of dimensions, I just don't know how many they are in advance. And again, this is more metaphor than anything."

"I'd love to converse in nonmetaphor but your language doesn't have any, why is that."

"No one developed the appropriate vocabulary? And I'm not sure there could have been shared vocabulary around this, given the way all other magic is idiosyncratic I expect metamancy would be, too."

"Inconvenient. Tell me about the dimensions you've got figured out so far."

"They don't really have meanings, they're just, sort of—like up and down, left and right, not particularly privileged, just another metaphorical place things can vary along... You know it's really annoying not having any vocabulary for this, I'd never tried explaining any of this before."

"I don't have a translation spell rated for Draconic, more's the pity."

"'Rated for Draconic'?"

"Magic dragon language, very good at having words for things. Won't cough them up if no speakers have the concept though."

"...I don't suppose it can be taught? Or, perhaps, copied?"

"Not taught, copied, uh, maybe, depends how your thing works."

"I don't know how it works with respect to that in particular, and my lack of vocabulary to explain how it works is exactly the problem we're trying to solve. Would you just—understand whatever I was talking about even if you'd never heard of a concept I was referencing before?"