And, not too long after, there's a small sound from downstairs as Villanelle returns.

She puts the book away and goes down to meet her.

She's unloading things out of a small bag into the storage rooms - looks like she got a lot of canned and dry food, a good sized pile of fresh fruit (which gets put into a big chest carved with odd runes), a lot of bottled water and other drinks, and some stuff from a hardware store, as well as a pile of CDs (which get piled on the floor, presumably to be moved elsewhere).

"Hey!" she says when she spots her passenger.

"That is more CDs than I've seen in one place in ten years."

"Less investment than your digital stuff, won't run out of batteries, still something I can rip onto a better storage method - I think the records would've been easier, but those were mostly more expensive, and I can make these work."

"It does make sense, since we're not sticking around."

"Yup! Also got some poetry books..." She shrugs. "I need to work on repairs before we take off. It's safe enough for you to hang around and watch me if you'd like, and easy enough I can explain stuff while I work."

"That sounds like a good time."

"Cool." She finishes putting away the food and water, moves the CDs and poetry books to an upper room, and then gathers the hardware supplies and leads Ellie over to the storage room containing the ship's guts. "What'd you get up to while I was out?"

"Reading, mostly. You have a bunch of books."

"Yeah. Reading's fun, and a good way to pass the time - astral voyages can get long."

"I found some references to the Astral Sea but the books were- difficult to follow."

"Oh, yeah, sorry - I don't think I have any primers on board. I can explain what's up with it, though." She starts working on a pipe that'd been dripping pink fluid into a bucket.

"That would be great."

"So, planar basics - the place you're from, Earth and its surrounding everything, is all together a plane of existence. Planes are usually coherent, singular places - they have the same physics throughout them - and you can get around within them without magic usually. So, you could strap a rocket to a ship and eventually get to anywhere in Earth's plane, though it might take you way longer than your lifespan. You couldn't get to Aitania that way. Planes can be any size, and they can have basically any laws of physics. All known planes were created, usually by very powerful beings. A plane's creator can alter it, and often will stick around, though a majority of known planes have a dead or missing creator. Most are a lot smaller than Earth's plane, and a lot more magical."

"The Astral Sea is the stuff between planes. It's made of magic, and it's pretty deadly if you aren't made of magic too. Spelljammer ships are how people get around that - a spelljammer helm is a tremendously powerful magic artifact that generates a sort of magic knife ahead of it and a planar bubble behind it, protecting ships and allowing them to move between planes."

"Magic is a substance. It's kind of like light - it's fundamentally made of stuff that only makes up magic, and it moves in certain weird ways. It has a constant speed, and if you cast a spell it'll move at the speed of magic - which's basically instant on human scales, but it can take a few days to get between planets in a solar system."

"How does magic being a substance work with casting spells?"

"It reacts to thinking minds - or, well, most thinking minds are able to interface with it. Having a mind that's particularly strong in one trait - like self knowledge, or intelligence, or social grace - makes it easier to manipulate magic. Certain gestures and words can also make it a lot easier to manipulate magic, probably because of the patterns of activity in your brain when you make those motions."

"Some people's minds can naively interface with magic, like yours - so I'd call you an innate caster. Most people need to learn the trick, though."

"Huh. Is it known what makes some people innate casters?"

"There's a couple of ways. Sorcerers usually pop up when someone has a more magical species in their bloodline somewhere - like dragons or angels - and are the most common kind of innate casters. Divine innate casting can happen just through being sufficiently in tune with yourself, or from a spirit or deity deciding to spontaneously grant you magic. Psionic innate casting can be from a bloodline - there's some psionic species - or just luck. And rarely exposure to a lot of magic can kindle something in you."

"Does it matter how far back for the bloodline stuff?"

"There's a range - within two or three generations, you'll typically just have magic as normal for whatever species, rather than being a sorcerer. But there's not an appreciable drop in each individual sorcerer's power over generations after that, though there's a drop in what percent of someone's descendants become sorcerers. The current theory is that eventually the bloodline will exhaust itself, but if so that takes a really long time - and the main proof I've seen for that is that there's historic bloodlines of long dead species that no one has anymore."

"Kind of weird to think there's a dragon somehow in the family tree."

She laughs. "Some of them can shapeshift, though 'dragon' is hardly the most adventurous anyone's ancestors have ever gotten..."

"For Earth, that's pretty adventurous."

She opens her mouth, pauses, then -

"...How old are you because if you're a tall fourteen year old I don't want to make the joke I was about to make - "