Charlotte giggles.

"Mana fountain!" He repeats that a couple of times (not that he needs to, he's been generating new mana for a while now) and then closes his eyes and thinks. And frowns. "No, it doesn't click. Can't remote-watch Galatea at all."

"Dang."

"Yeah," he sighs. "I don't suppose it's possible to, like, look at my DNA and... figure things out from it?"

"It might! I won't know until I look at it."

"Ooh."

"We have samples of DNA from various points on our evolutionary chain," she adds helpfully. "Comparing your DNA to various points on the chain, if it doesn't match precisely to ours, could be illuminating."

He nods. "It's just really weird is all, but Edie pointed out that it's more likely I'm regularly human since I recognised, like, fruits."

She nods. "That is a strange coincidence...unless it's not a coincidence at all."

"Hm?"

"Magic exists. I don't know how it would be not a coincidence, but..."

"Some form of—of metacausality?"

She frowns. "Or something."

"We'd probably need access to more reliable multiversal transportation to run any experiments on this."

"Hopefully we'll get there."

"We definitely will! I just need to go through a personal milestone or five."

She smiles broadly. "Of course."

"I should look into—or at—the spell that brought me here in the first place, though, that's a good place to start that doesn't rely on how achievable my goals are or how much I still have to grow as a person."

"Yes, that makes sense...I'm not familiar with the spell in question, mind, and I don't know how badly it was disrupted."

"How did you disrupt it, by the way?" he asks Edie.

"Hit him with a polearm while he was casting."

"—okay that's less promising than if it were another spell but I can keep it in mind."

"Sorry. Oh well."

"It's not completely useless, if the spell has, like, any visible parts that you could point at to go, 'this is the part where I hit him' it can help me triangulate what exactly could've messed up..." He adopts an abstracted look, and if Edie looks at what he's thinking it's very—nonverbal, sensorial, involving the metamancer sense and the extra sorcery sense and trying to figure out interactions and what a spell like that could do and how...

"I can't sense magic."