There appears a girl, mid-yelp and beautiful and winged,

and a boy the same age, far less remarkable.

She startles, almost falling over but catching herself.

(Here: an abandoned house, grown over with vines and dust and lost memories, windows broken, siding missing, a dark sky outside limed with the first hints of dawn. Here: a woman, her age hard to place, wearing a knee-length dress made of oranges and blues and blacks with a window cut over her stomach to reveal a strange eye - a tattoo, on second glance, though an incredibly realistic one - and a witch's hat on her head. She's sitting in the middle of a circle of salt, a variety of crystals arrayed in front of her, incense holder to one side and a small homemade broom to the other. The air smells strongly of incense, with a fading layer of dust and mold and despair).

She quickly mutters a somewhat butchered incantation to break the circle ("spirits thank you west south east north the circle is open", all run together) and stands as the salt obediently swirls into a tidy pile.

"Are you okay?"

"Where are we?"

"I don't think I'm hurt. Xander?"

"In one piece, I guess... unless I got hit on the head and that's why I can't tell how she's pulling off the blue and orange..."

"We're in West Virginia, near the northern bit of the Virginia state line. What happened?" They could have been veiled and then unveiled, but they seem surprised... She's not aware of many ways to appear suddenly without illusions, except from myths...

"Cryptid, uh, ate us. I guess West Virginia isn't awful, though I don't have my ID on me for a plane, Xander, do you -"

"No."

"...Cryptid?" Possibly a term from a coven she's unfamiliar with.

"It wasn't even a pretty one! Looked like a fuckoff huge snake with a big mirror for a face!"

"No, uh, 'what do you mean by a cryptid.'"

The girl tests the floor gingerly with one hand, folds herself into a more comfortable sitting position. "The thing magical girls turn into if we overdo the shapeshifting? I don't know if there's a West Virginian regionalism for it."

"...I've heard of new shifter witches having a hard time turning back sometimes?"

"Aren't... you a magical girl?"

"I'm a witch. I think some younger witches use 'magical girl', partially ironically..."

"Do you have an Internet-enabled device handy."

"Yeah, one sec..." She pulls out a colorful, somewhat clunky smartphone and holds it out to Isabella. It appears to be a Nokia. "Though reception's usually bad out here."

"Thanks for the heads up." She attempts Wikipedia.

"You're welcome."

The lock screen loads first - it's a bit before eight in the morning, October fifteenth, twenty twelve. The 'witch' has a background of an autumn forest on her phone. There's one bar and a little 'LTE' icon. Wikipedia is willing to load.

...2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_girl ?

Magical girls (魔法少女, mahō shōjo, also known as mahou shoujo or majokko) traditionally belong to a sub-genre of Japanese fantasy anime and manga, but it has gained traction in non-Japanese formats, such as animated television series, graphic novels and webcomics. Magical girl stories feature young girl heroes with superhuman abilities, forced to fight evil and to protect the Earth.

Wikipedia also seems under the impression it's 2012.

Bella hands the phone back. "Hi, we're from an alternate universe where among other things there's magical girls and it's 2004."

"...Okay that's new."

"Yep."

"Do you - know how to get back?"

"No."

"What year is it here?"

"Twenty twelve. It's mid-October."

"...flying cars yet?"

Laugh. "No, sadly. I have a flying broom, though."

"That's cool, that's cool. I mean my sister can fly but she can't share, you know."

"Flight here's finicky and difficult and a huge time investment to learn and totally worth it. ...Though we can only fly at night in deserted areas."

"I'm not going to be able to walk down the street, am I."

" - Magic is largely a secret, but witchcraft's actually extremely specialized toward perceptions, either enhancing or messing with. I'm not great at illusions, but hiding people is a really basic survival skill. I can keep the unaware from noticing you until we can get you to an illusion specialist, if shifting to normal human's not on the table."

"Can't get all the way human, no. I can get less conspicuous but not baseline."

She pauses, and then, a bit slowly: "It's - in some ways up to you and how much risk you feel like taking. My illusion could fail, but it's unlikely, especially in passing with people not anticipating non-human features, and anyone able to see through it should already know magic exists or desperately needs to be initiated anyways."

"Desperately needs to be initiated?"

"Some people get magic without having been taught it by a coven, and using magic untrained isn't always safe or - good at remaining secret. Initiating someone means bringing them at least into the secret of magic, if not into a coven entirely."

"Oh. Magical girls aren't secret at all where I'm from, so - an illusion will probably be good if that's convenient for you, I don't have habits around being secret."

"An illusion's convenient. And witches didn't really used to be secret, and then we nearly got wiped out in the sixteen hundreds. There's a lot of younger witches pushing for unveiling now, but - anyone old's pretty hesitant."

"We're useful for fighting swarms, but maybe you don't have those either, in our world they and magical girls appeared within a year of each other."

"I haven't heard of those, no. And we don't actually know how long we've had witches..."

"Huh. What things do you guys do besides illusions? It sounded like you - learn various techniques instead of just each having some, like us."

"We have to train, yeah, though some people have visions even untrained. The base is - pretty much perceiving what's normally unseen. Illusions are basic, and so's divination and speaking to spirits, mostly of the land or the dead. Mental curses - forgetfulness, madness, sleep - are also considered somewhat basic, as an extension of illusions, though they're also controversial... Some people can speak to or possess animals, and fewer people can change their shape entirely. Healing and causing diseases and wounds is also - not simple, but it's a common thing to strive for, as is encouraging or blighting specific plants and predicting the weather. You can make protective items, if you're worried someone might be cursed or simply unlucky, and you can lift curses. Speaking across long distances is a common trick. Flight's complicated but possible. Most witches can extend someone's life by a few years or decades, though rarely more than that."

"There's some - mythical powers, too, that no one on record actually provably has. Changing the weather, causing earthquakes, changing or binding fate, immortality..."

"And most witches specialize; I'm specialized in dealing with spirits."

"...can we have some anti-curse items."

"Yeah. I can get you basic ones, at least."

"What's a spirit?"

"A kind of complicated category, mostly - things that don't necessarily have a physical form. Ghosts are a central example."

"No shit, straight up ghosts?"

"What are those like?"

"They're mostly not harmful. There's actually one in this building I was working with. She's pretty much just lonely... Though most people don't become ghosts."

"When do they become ghosts and - you mentioned immortality as a special, legendary power, why does being a ghost not count, it'd be inconvenient but -"

"Most ghosts aren't very happy, for a lot of reasons. And we're not actually sure why some people become ghosts, so it's hard to count on."

"Bummer."

"Should we go somehwere..." She looks around the dilapidated house. "...else?"

"That might not be a bad idea? I don't think she minds us being here, though my car is also pretty close, and I wouldn't mind getting back..."

"Yeah I don't mean is the ghost evicting us this just isn't, uh, an especially hospitable structure."

"Oh yeah, it's not very dangerous, but it isn't exactly cozy…"

Xander helps his sister up and they head for the door.

Her car is just outside. It's bright orange, in an overgrown lot that probably used to be graveled. The trees are mostly yellow and orange and red, with barely any green remaining, and there's a nip in the air. The woman pulls something out of her glove compartment - crystals and twine - and makes rough bracelets for them both. "Here," she says. "These will give you both some basic protection, and also give me something to hook an illusion to for you..." she turns to Bella, then pauses. "Oh, I'm sorry, names slipped my mind - I'm Nausicaa Uzun. What should I call you two?"

"Xander."

"Isabella."

"Xander and Isabella, then." She gives them their charms. "I'm going to need to circle Isabella a few times, chanting, to cast the actual illusion properly."

"Do I need to do anything?"

"Don't walk around - you can shift and such, but you need to stay roughly in the same spot until it takes."

"Can do."

The language she uses isn't one Isabella recognizes. Still, the casting's fairly quick, and seems to involve calls and pauses and a few gestures.

Isabella feels some pressure change around her, like her ears are about to pop, which then subsides. Still, colors now seem a bit unusually bright, like someone turned up the saturation on the world. To Xander's eyes, Isabella briefly looks like a normal girl, utterly unexceptional, neither particularly notable nor ignorable, until Nausicaa gestures to him and pulls her hand over her eyes and then his sister looks like her usual self.

"That was weird."

"Illusions are kinda strange! They're easier to break if you notice they're weird, though."

"I designed her outfit and her feather distribution! It's supposed to be striking!"

"The design's really good!"

"Thank you! If I ever go home I will do it professionally but perhaps your magic does not care what you wear."

"Hm, it does a little? We have to dress as women, whatever that means to us, and people used to thinking of themselves as male can have a harder time of convincing the magic they're sufficiently female. We also have to have the evil eye," she gestures to the creepily realistic eye on her midriff, "uncovered to use magic, or even sense it properly. But it gives us away in our normal lives, so we keep it covered when not actively witching. And if you're raised in a coven, or initiated early enough, there's things you can do to control where it forms, but there's still some randomness, and people do care about things like 'fashion' and 'not flashing anyone.'"

"Girls get all the luck."

"It's all girls for us too. I don't think there are any boys who've convinced the magic on that point on our world."

"Oh - that's sad. Here 'crossdressing' is sufficient if you're good at... Really thoroughly inhabiting the role? Though straight men not raised by witches tend to prefer not to - the only male coven I know of is all gay and bisexual men."

"Oh well, none for me, I guess, stylist stereotypes aside."

"You wouldn't even like being magic."

"It's the principle of the thing."

"It was something I went after, but it's certainly not for everyone."

"Because you wanted a job as a ghost hunter?"

"I'm more of a therapist than a hunter, most times."

"How do ghosts pay you to therapize them?"

"I've been assuming you also have a day job."

"Working with ghosts is mostly a volunteer thing, though if they've been bothering a local coven the coven might compensate me some - but, yeah, I'm also a licensed therapist as my day job."

"Cool. Uh, if you don't have magical girls, pearls are probably expensive here, if I make some can that compensate you for finding us a place to crash?"

"I don't need compensation for a few days' worth - I'm glad to help out. But, yeah, pearls are really expensive here." And also Nausicaa isn't exactly rich.

"Cool. Uh, I don't know anything about how to efficiently sell them but maybe you can pawn them or something. Most stuff I make disappears if it leaves my person but organics I can grow so they stay put like nail trimmings or whatever do."

She hums and pulls out her phone, typing something in. "...Hm, apparently pearl jewelry is hard to resell, so a lot of pawn shops won't take them, and reselling to a jewelry shop usually doesn't get much more than a few hundred for a very nice strand, less if you don't have any documentation... They don't sell for much at all on ebay... But I'd be fine even selling them slowly, and if you can make them perfectly round and shiny they should be worth more, it sounds like?" Shrug. "It still wouldn't take much to cover any costs of helping you guys out."

"Arbitrarily exotic colors, round and shiny. I can also do, uh, coral? Cool shells? Exotic woods in any shape you like?"

Shrug. "Pearls should be okay, and I'm not pressed for cash..."

"Okay. Just want to make it clear that we're not trying to freeload."

She nods. "I appreciate it."

"Is there... much possibility of local magic being able to send us home?" Isabella asks, trying to squeeze into the car. "- if I shrink my wings will that mess up the illusion or will putting them back full size later do it -"

"To the first: I don't think it's impossible, but I honestly don't know... And to the second: it won't mess up the illusion."

She shrinks her wings to little fluffy cherub miniatures of themselves and gets in.

"Do we have to, like, go talk to a mountain hermit about it or what."

She laughs. "I'll email one, how about."

"Cool, up to the minute mountain hermits."

She nods.

"I'm going to layer an illusion over myself, by the way, so you two aren't alarmed..."

"What for?"

"So I won't draw attention - my outfit's not very normal, and the eye tattoo is both very abnormal and characteristic of witches. I could also just shift back to my normal clothes, but covering the tattoo entirely would make me unable to use magic for a bit."

"Which would - break my illusion, make you vulnerable to something, just be unpleasant -"

"Be unpleasant, mostly, and make your illusion - not broken, but weaker. It'd make me mildly vulnerable to everyday hazards, but would make me mildly less vulnerable to supernatural hazards, which balances out."

"Why are you more vulnerable to supernatural hazards with your eye showing? And is it directly unpleasant or just like, not how you prefer to be for practical or aesthetic reasons."

"It attracts attention - if a supernatural hazard tried to attack me while I was normal, I'd be a sitting duck, but when my eye's covered they can't tell me apart from random other humans. There's safety, in that."

"And it's - fairly directly unpleasant for me specifically, but I'm a bit odd there."

"Odd how?"

"I don't like not being able to shift shapes."

"Does that come up a lot? When you're in public under an illusion anyhow?"

"Ah, some."

"I'd probably shapeshift more if it didn't come with risks and side effects to go too non-human."

She nods. "We don't have that problem, fortunately."

"Plus you don't have to get all your feathers right painstakingly after every time you get rid of them!"

"One advantage, yes... Our magic fills in the blanks a good bit with illusions and shapeshifting, usually helpfully."

"Do you know how it decides what's helpful? We're in the dark as to what ours thinks is pretty."

"I think there's some theory, but I'm not really aware of a lot... And I don't know anyone's run really in depth studies, most of the theory is - intuition, somewhat."

"I guess not having people publicly aware would really cut down on the march of scientific progress."

"And there's - some cultural stuff? With established witch covens not really liking poking magic too hard - some of it's a belief that magic might poke back, some of it's a sense it'd be religiously inappropriate, some of it's just witches until recently often lacking scientific training... The reveal movement's got some kids who went into science, but they're currently focused on amassing proof that magic exists and isn't something to have a Satanic panic about."

"How do you prove it isn't Satanic?"

"There's not really a lot of agreement on that, and - we'll probably never convince the kinds of people who start those panics. But the usual thought is that if we can introduce and establish it in the realm of useful science, it'll face less backlash."

"Anybody win the Randi prize?"

"Not yet - so far the prepared reveal movement's been good at catching witches who want to reveal, and no one's impulsively jumped at it yet... There's talk of the prize retiring, though, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone gets antsy and breaks ranks soon - and enough witches are preparing for that or a social media reveal or something to happen that it... I guess seems like a less dumb idea than it did thirty years ago? Which I think actually makes it more likely someone will figure forcing the reveal wouldn't hurt."

"What do you think?"

"I think unveiling would've been - extremely risky to do during the satanic panics? Even if it might have been worth it. And that the reveal movement's doing a lot of good work even while laying the groundwork, but... I think we're past the tipping point of where 'people will be skeptical and there might be violence against known witches' is outweighed by 'we could do a lot of good.' Like - no one's gotten this to usable yet, but there's been things like efforts to reverse-engineer ancient earthquake causing spells for earthquake prediction and prevention. Which - there's been some earthquakes recently that made that specifically a symbol of the 'reveal as soon as possible' factions. Similar with other natural disasters, and... I don't disagree with them about it. Even if the only thing magic was good for was giving us more warning on natural disasters, that could easily save more lives than there are witches - there've been two earthquakes in the last decade with death tolls over a hundred thousand. It'd be worth it. And - also we're unsure right now how effectively magic can scale if we teach it widely, and how effective it'd be in eradicating diseases, or in solving world hunger. But - widespread help and support would allow us to figure out magic so much faster."

"Can you teach everybody, or do you just mean, like, being able to swap spells online?"

"We can swap spells online already - without proof, it doesn't really sound different from religious, not-technically-magical paganism. We don't know if we could teach literally everyone, but - usually we're able to teach the children of witches, and anyone the spirit messengers choose, and outside people we decide to bring into the fold. But as far as I know those people are all polytheists - we're really not sure if monotheists or hard line atheists could work magic, because we're really not sure how much of magic is the favor of powerful spirits and how much of it is someone's own power. And many powerful spirits are known to get offended if someone who doesn't worship them calls on them, and even though 'explicitly calling on spirits' isn't the entirety of magic... We're mostly just unsure if there's spirits involved at every point."

"How hard line is hard line? I mean, I'm an atheist at home with a dash of 'the Thaumatologists have like one-seventh of a point' but the Thaumatologists are monotheists, but I don't know what you have going on here."

A bit slowly:

"There's observably spirits - including ghosts, but also things like tree spirits and river spirits. Some of the spirits are powerful enough, with a broad enough reach, that the traditions I'm familiar with consider them gods. We're not sure who all the gods are, or what they'd call themselves - they tend to use the same consistent messengers, but those messengers aren't very good at communicating with humans, and we get a sense the gods aren't good at communicating with them. Like... Calling on Thor to protect your house from lightning is effective in a way just casting a lightning ward isn't, and is - cleaner? More responsive to human concepts? A lightning ward might interfere with electricity, but Thor will just stop lightning strikes."

"But the rituals for calling on spirits in general and especially gods are entangled with worship, and attempts to cut out the 'worship' ritual parts tend to backfire in ways that're hard to analyze. And many spirits will get angry if they feel insulted, which - they don't demand worship all the time? There's some witches who describe their relationship with the gods they work with as friendship, and some witches even end up mentoring younger spirits. But many spirits don't have human psychologies, and - approaching a ritual with a worshipful or... Open? Mindset is, for the majority of gods, your safest bet."

"It's not monotheistic worship, not... Bowing your head, or submitting to a higher authority, or following scripture. It's more like looking at a waterfall, and honestly going - that's gorgeous, that's transcendent, I could never capture that beauty in art but I want to try, and I'll respect it because it's dangerous and old and bigger than me, and because it's a part of this land like I am. And I think some people who're really inclined towards skeptic atheism would have a lot of trouble with that mindset, especially the - submersing yourself in transcendent wonder parts. Some people wouldn't - I suspect a lot of scientists wouldn't - but it'd be enough to put up a warning label on classes, and it might be enough to make... Easing into a cultural mindset that gets along with gods well? Take some time."

"That's - interesting. Thor in particular? Not Zeus, or also Zeus, or - what?"

"Closer to 'also Zeus.' We're not actually sure there's any truths to most myths - especially since we have... Proof that some rituals work? But not that the stories around those rituals ever happened. So it could be there's a lightning spirit that responds to multiple names and rituals, or there's a bunch of lightning spirits and multiple respond to Thor's rituals, or something weirder. We can figure out some things that might be a single god acting, but - not many, and that's mostly patterns among which people messengers point out as 'should get training.'"

"That pattern mostly being 'already kind of into worshipping pagan deities'?"

"Overall, yes, but there's individual patterns among different types of messengers... Like, small deer who mostly approach cis lesbians of Greek descent, or personality preferences - like, the local jay messengers tend to approach curious, intelligent people."

"Huh. I'm not of Greek descent but I wonder if I count as a lesbian."

"I suspect you'd get approached by a different messenger, anyways - people with... Strong personalities? And interesting circumstances? Tend to end up attracting more than generic interest."

"I didn't realize I was actually in a category of likely messenging!"

"It'll depend on a lot? People're usually brought into the fold by witches. And most messengers observe people for a while first to get an idea beyond first impressions."

"They spy on people?"

"Not in private, usually - and usually they'll immediately go to the nearest coven if they notice someone likely, let them handle any background checks and introductions and the like. Some messengers are less cooperative or more impulsive though."

"I'm getting such a weird piecemeal picture of all this."

"I can try to sit down and - explain it all through, but I'm usually not one of the people explaining things to new initiates..."

"You can pawn us off if you want. And I'm not even a real new initiate. Haven't worshipped even one pagan deity. Wouldn't know how if I wanted to."

"I don't mind helping you guys out more - and finding someone just to offer explanations shouldn't be hard..."

"Is that a popular job?"

"It is - it's considered rewarding, and isn't usually much effort. Also covens that don't recruit new members ever usually don't stay as a unit very long, which creates selection effects, and covens that try to be generally nice and helpful without blatant ulterior motives are more stable and attractive to new people. There's also a thing that no one's statistically confirmed but is generally believed, that if you help people you'll have good luck."

"Good luck? Meaning - what exactly, how does 'good luck' break down?"

"...The standard meaning of the words in English? Good dice rolls, lucky lottery tickets, finding an under priced antique at a flea market, a chance meeting with someone who can help you..."

"I mean, sure, but - all those things have causal explanations, and so do things not normally the province of luck like whether your computer program has a bug in it, so - does the spell also fix buggy computer programs, or, if it doesn't, how does it distinguish?"

"I don't program computers, but I'd guess that your program would be less likely to develop a bug? I'm not sure the good luck thing actually happens, though, or if it does happen that it happens exactly the way people believe it does."

"I guess I'd have to try one to determine how skeptical to be."

"Yeah. There's some stuff that might actually be more testable - mild good luck charms, rather than stuff in the genre of 'helping people makes good vibes around you' - though magic's... Finicky, sometimes."

"Finicky?"

"It's really hard to tell if other people's charms and spells are having an effect except by watching for impact on the world, and if you see a plausibly magical change in the world it's also really hard to trace what caused that. It's often also hard to sense the external effects of your own magic - if I decided to use magic to hide myself, I might not be able to tell if it was working until I observed people ignoring me. You can get a sense for workings you're very familiar with, but - it's more like feeling a vague pressure in the air."

"That sounds really annoying, not having feedback on your spells."

"Yeah. I think it slows down figuring new things out, too - witches are pretty willing to get creative, but then you need to filter for whether your creativity actually helped to keep advancing..."

"Yeah, it would be very hard to do science to it if you can't measure."

"Should still be doable with the right set up, but, yeah, I've heard that complaint, especially from people doing reverse engineering work on spells you don't want to test broadly..."

"Like..."

"We have - not exactly reliable - documentation of spells that cause earthquakes being used ever, but no documentation on how to cast those. It's possible to do the opposite of most spells, so the theory's that related spells should be able to predict and even suppress major earthquakes that threaten population centers - but I think we're also not sure if suppressing even a few earthquakes is safe, since brute force preventing natural processes is the type of thing magic can get iffy about."

"There's some people working on general disaster prediction, moving from standard divination, but as far as I know the witches in spell development are pretty sure they'll need the earthquake spell as a base to reverse for prevention..."

"There's also even more unreliable documentation about weather control spells that've also been lost - and I think there's a feeling that we should have better abilities to predict and model natural weather before we try directly messing with it."

"What would happen if magic got iffy about the earthquake suppression? - ideally you'd probably want to spread out bad earthquakes into much smaller earthquakes, several of them per. Ideally at predictable times so no one schedules their elective open heart surgery for right then."

"I think spreading them out is the general consensus? But we don't actually know how to do that safely. If we suppressed clumsily - usually if you're entirely stopping a natural process, instead of working with it or redirecting it, you get... Kind of a backlash or build up that causes worse, related problems down the line. Even if that doesn't mechanistically make sense."

"How is that best modeled, is it like - the natural world's union is pissed off and rebelling, or what."

"It's..." She pauses, thinking. "Some of it's clearly that we don't have a perfect understanding of physics. But - everything has a spirit. Things want to happen, in meaningful ways - a union protest is... Close in that conflicts of interest are happening? But - it's closer to 'we live interwoven with other sovereign nations, and sometimes our needs and goals conflict, and no one's invented the spirit UN yet.' A union and a company generally share a nation, and there's some common authority you theoretically could appeal to that has an interest in defusing conflict. There's no such authority for spiritual matters, and - a general conflict between spirits and witches wouldn't be the type of thing either side could win, because we're interwoven."

"...Also because everyone effectively disarmed, modern witches are significantly more conflict averse and more into - essentially hippie 'we are all sharing this Earth and are one people' philosophies than ancient witches typically were. If you angered earth spirits by preventing earthquakes entirely, you could maybe just overpower them and force the matter, but..." She pauses, apparently struggling for words. "...That wouldn't even occur to most witches nowadays, I don't think, at least not as an actual option. It's so obviously - against everything we are, and also so obviously blisteringly dumb."

"...I'm accustomed to people not having it occur to them that bad things are bad, like, say death in general, but earthquakes do kill people and stuff. If I ran a country and another country wanted to occasionally kill some of my citizens that is in fact the sort of thing it's conventional to start wars over."

"So... Humans and spirits are already frequently in conflict, but there's no... Path you can slowly escalate through? Between 'diplomacy with the occasional fist fight' and 'mutually assured destruction,' and in an all out war humans would lose first. And... Spirits don't usually directly and intentionally cause disasters, we don't think, they're not that powerful, but hindering natural processes usually harms spirits - us declaring war on spirits over related disasters would be kind of like if a species harmed by oxygen tried to destroy all oxygen in the atmosphere rather than wearing space suits, and said our biosphere producing oxygen naturally was war on them. The relationship's less direct, for earthquakes, but - from what we've managed in talking to earth spirits, the... Way they live? Is tied to it, and to the - spiritual health of the planet. And there's - a sort of flow of spiritual energy through the ground, that harms them if it's altered - so they do get mad about drilling and mining, sometimes, and we suspect blindly barring earthquakes would cause worse problems. We don't think the spiritual energy itself is what's causing the problem for us, though - it doesn't build like water behind a dam, or anything - but it's possible spirits trying to shove disturbances back to livable ranges for them cause over-corrections."

"Wildfires are about it, I think, for disasters you can solve purely diplomatically... But the wildfire starts on its own and spreads on its own, and it generates fire spirits, who can influence it and even make it go away, but are all small children. ...And possibly earth-mountain spirits could redirect avalanches, but they can't actually sense humans."

"This all sounds so frustrating! If on my Earth somebody found a way to prevent earthquakes - I might be able to do it somehow myself, though I'd need to be much more powerful - then they could just do that. Which I realize doesn't help you at all but it's what I'm mentally comparing to."

"Yeah, it's immensely frustrating and hard - and there's a lot of tragedies that are hard to avoid, because there's a lot of... Just innately conflicting life needs. Witches - possibly could fix a lot, if there was enough of us, living long enough to get actual experience and power. Which is also hard, because - the witches who don't want to reveal do have legitimate reasons to be afraid, the satanic panics were recent enough and our main defense is obscurity, and even if we went open - scaling up magic education blindly risks things like 'terrorists with earthquake spells.' Which, maybe we could have regional defensive spells hindering that - but we're not sure."

"On balance I think it's worth it to reveal - to try and get enough people that we can have large scale divinations constantly running, and can have open diplomatic teams, and can at least negotiate about and advise on things like logging, and even with the few people we have right now could talk to disaster prevention and scientific research teams. But those advocating being constantly hesitant and risk averse aren't entirely wrong."

"I guess it's hard enough for humans who disapprove of logging to get anywhere with that and spirits who kind of don't give a shit about people will be more difficult to integrate into the negotiation process."

"Yeah. There's a lot more than just a language barrier."

"There are humans that disapprove of logging, though, what are there in the way of spirits sympathetic to human-typical concerns?"

"Plenty - some get attached to one family, some to one human building... Some just really like humans. Usually either - ones that are very young and small, or ones that are older but have been interacting with humans for a very long time. The older ones sometimes are more like - a different polity you can ally with or work against, but some will go out of their way to help humans. Spirits attached to plants and water are unusually likely to be human-friendly, for some reason - witches tend to do really well with search and rescue and the like because very often we'll get trees practically shouting at us there's someone in trouble over this way. I don't know how much most spirits understand about large scale problems like mass disease or war, though we can sometimes get a plant to make its best guess about whether some part of it is edible or medicinal or toxic."

"The plants don't mind being harvested?"

"None of them I've spoken to mind taking nonessential parts off - many of the edible pieces of a plant are meant to be eaten anyways, to spread their seeds - and the spirits of plants like corn and wheat usually just reattach to next year's crop. Tree spirits are - a bit unusual, for plant spirits, in being so thoroughly attached to one home. ...Though, thinking of, I don't actually know if spirits on tree farms with rapidly growing species get as attached as spirits that naively expect to be in one place for decades or centuries..."

"Huh. I guess that's convenient that feeding people doesn't require constantly antagonizing assorted grain spirits."

She nods. "Lumber's the biggest problem, really - and enough negotiations and careful experiments probably could work something out. Just..." she sighs a bit. "Witches aren't a massive secret cabal pulling at the world's strings or anything like that, and until very recently we've intentionally stayed away from anywhere the spotlights might shine. Magic could get us to the negotiatingtable, easily - but I know enough about people and politics to say that a seat at the table doesn't always get you far."

"Farther than no voice, of course, which is a large part of why I support the revelationists..." She rubs the back of her head. "But the secretists have actual concerns we need to address - and valid fears we need to hedge against coming true. And I don't want to go into any revelation right on the heels of a schism."