"Huh, it's not converted from anything?"

"Apparently not! It does make me worry that this might mean I'm not able to do it either."

"That'd still be interesting but it'd answer the question of why no one in your world invented it."

"Yeah. Unless it's contagious somehow but what little I could see didn't seem to indicate anything like that."

"Not much investigation has been done on offworlders, so we wouldn't know."

"I still find it kinda bewildering that other worlds are known of and summoning is possible and yet there's so little of it."

"It's considered a dangerous field."

"Well sure but you have population in the hundreds of millions perhaps billions and the potential of a multiverse..."

"Billions. Summoning spells are also pretty expensive to cast? I dunno, I would've gotten around to it."

"I wonder if it might be possible to do it with Galatea magic and it just hasn't ever been tried."

"Which kind?"

"Arcanism, probably."

"Seems most versatile."

"Kinda, yeah. It's why I keep my mana in arcanist form most of the time."

"Is conversion lossy?"

"Yeah. And given that I can lower mana cost of spells by making incantations longer and more involved I typically do that rather than converting to elementalist mana and using a blessing when this is relevant, I can get the overhead cost to be less than the conversion loss."

"Are there units of mana?"

"No. Or, not discrete units, it's a continuous quantity."

"But you can have a pail of water or two, are there measurements at all?"

"Yyyyes, objectively there are, but without a metamancer around to tell people that there is actual disagreement amongst scholars."

"Really? What does the disagreement look like?"

"Well, since different spells or artefacts or blessings or whatever work off individual mental architecture, even spells that ostensibly do the same thing can cost different amounts of mana for different people. And people Express at different ages, and when they do they spend different amounts of mana, and they don't have very good internal measurements of how much mana they have and only moderately good intuitions for how much mana, relatively, different things intuitively cost. End result is a lack of consensus on whether elementalists have the same mana cap per blessing, or whether it makes sense to say different blessings have the same cap, or whether mages recharge mana at the same rate, stuff like that."

"Huh. So what's the answer?"

"Everyone recharges at the same rate from about the same point in development before they're born, all of everyone's blessings have the same cap, differences in mana cost seem to just amount to differences in brain architecture."

"It's weird that brain architecture would do that."