"Start a war over you... existing...? Maybe this is my Abadaran talking but that sounds like a terrible reason for a war."

"No, it's absolutely a terrible reason. I think it should actually be possible to tell people slowly and get them to be reasonable about it. It's just hard to predict how large groups of people will react to anything."

"I guess if you have a lot of people agitating for a war because they want to level or what have you that could me dicey."

"There's nobody who wants a war for its own sake. What does 'want to level' mean, I don't think it translated right."

"Oh, casters get better at stuff kind of - choppily? It's smoother in practice, I think, but people talk about it like you're level two or level nine or what have you and that has implications for what spells you can cast, how hard you are to kill."

"Huh. I learn new spells one at a time because I only get better at the specific thing I'm working on, for the most part. Does being harder to kill just mean that people learn a lot of magic useful for self-defense, or is there more to it?"

"No, also just harder to cast hostile spells on - they have a failure rate - harder to stab usefully, that sort of thing. I think the leading theory is that adventuring, which is how people tend to level, involves getting healing magic cast on you a lot, and that's good for you? I don't know if there's been a study, you'd have to pay someone a lot to adventure without access to healing."

"Couldn't you also try it the other way, find people who have been healed a lot because they got sick or had accidents repeatedly? Also, how does magic skill make you harder to stab?"

"Well, magic's expensive, and rich people're also more likely to have taken lessons in magic or at least fencing or something, it isn't a clean experiment. The really high level casters I know are not getting people trying to stab them in front of me but I am a rich person and once one of my apprentices tripped holding a pliers and ought to have driven it through my foot, and I got a bruise? Didn't bother having that fixed though I did get the shoe mended, that's a cantrip, cheap as a few loads of laundry."

Margaret winces at the thought of pliers going through someone's foot. "That's really interesting. What makes magic expensive, if it's not dangerous or secret? Is it just the limit on how much someone can do per day plus it taking a long time to learn?"

"Some of it has expensive components, too, like diamonds for a Miracle or what have you, but for everything else, yes, mostly those."

"I wonder if I could learn some of your kind or if you have to be from your world to do it."

"Huh, I guess I don't know - I don't think you need to be anybody special to be a wizard, or anything but in good with a god to be a cleric, but it's weird if you don't have them and maybe it's because you can't."

"Could you try to teach me a spell? Or do one yourself, to see if it works in here at all?" It probably will, her medallion is still working.

"I'm not a wizard, I don't know any to teach you."

"Oh, the theory doesn't overlap with the artifact-making? I assume that requires materials to get anywhere with."

"Most people who make magic items are also spellcasters, I just found out how to do it anyway. And yeah, there's a kind of metal you can anchor an effect to and it'll power it."

"My magic doesn't seem to need a power source. It does use something, because effects that aren't attached to an object wear off eventually, but whatever resource it needs I can't see where it's coming from. I wonder if it runs off something completely different from yours or if it's the same kind of power but my world has more of it."

"Huh! S'pose you could attach an effect to something to power our sort of magic?"

"Maybe! I'd need to be able to describe what I wanted in very unambiguous terms--not the internal mechanism of how your magic works, just the external effects I'm going for. Or possibly I could do it by reference to an existing object."

"I have some on me. Do they need to be any particular sort?"

"I don't think so. If this works at all it will be because I can use my magic to produce your kind of power the way I can produce electricity, so if it's the same thing across multiple kinds of item it should work the same."

Ismat pulls off a necklace with a stylized hand-shape of lapis lazuli, and hands it over.

"Do you want me to duplicate all of this necklace's magical properties onto a different object, or just a subset? I need to know exactly what effect I'm going for."

"The chain's the power source, the hand does the spell. If you can dupe the whole thing that'd be very cool."