Taimi may be no spellcaster but she's still asura and she can also further help bridge the gap and ask relevant questions.

"Okay but then," she asks eventually, "you do need to have access to this Shadow Plane, yes? A, a portal or a connection of something?"

"Well, that's where the spell construct comes in. It's no more or less difficult than conjuring a fireball from the Plane of Fire. - I suppose it's slightly more difficult, Shadow Conjuration's one circle higher."

"A what higher now?"

"That's what's weird about their magic!" Bol says abruptly. "It's not discrete!"

"...Oh. Where we're from... a spell is divided into one of ten circles of complexity. And you have to have a certain amount of personal power and whatever form of mental acuity you use to cast, in order to effectively learn a spell from one of those circles. Um, if I had to guess, I'd say you were... fifth circle? Based on your alignment aura. James and Kasmeer both, I dunno about Braham, Rytlock I'd say you were sixth circle if you used spells but as it is you're presumably just extremely good at killing things."

He snorts again. "Damn right I am."

"Rytlock, language!"

"Oh, come on, I can say damn."

"Taimi, language!"

James rolls his eyes fondly. "Spells here can be more or less complicated but usually you have more powerful versions of them as you get stronger so you can just... use those instead."

"Our spells scale with your power too, but the more complicated ones are still more potent and just - more useful, most of the time. I could cast Burning Hands, and that's more powerful than it was when I was learning sorcery because it can draw more power more efficiently, but Fireball covers a larger area, with more versatility, and it burns hotter too."

"Okay but back up," says Taimi who has just finished reeling, "what do you mean your magic's discrete? How can magic be discrete? Magic is just... magic."

"It's how magic naturally shakes out. ...on the Prime Material. In the same way that you can twist a shape around but it still has the same number of sides or dimensions - it's fundamentally topological, it's how complicated the spell-shape is when you're preparing it. Or when you're branding it into your mind, in the case of sorcerers."

"...Kas am I going crazy here or..."

"No that just made no sense you're right."

"So, what I'm hearing is that your form of arcana doesn't involve a university degree in topology. What does it involve instead?"

Magic!

So magic in Tyria is divided into four schools and a lot of aspects, sometimes also called elements. Before the human gods arrived, Taimi says in an entirely non-malicious way, anyone could wield any magic and it was a free-for-all.

Then they came, brought the humans along, taught them magic, and set them loose.

This has made many people very mad and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

After destroying half of Tyria in wars of conquest (even amongst themselves!!!), the human gods decided that maybe leaving every type of magic available for everyone to use is not such a great idea, so they split it.

Kasmeer is made somewhat uncomfortable by the account but more or less in the same way one is made uncomfortable when reminded that their ancestors committed atrocities. It is in fact the case that past humans destroyed a bunch of stuff with the magic the gods gifted them.

The four schools of magic are aggression, destruction, preservation, and denial, and after the gods performed a ritual that keyed local magic to a huge stone, sealed it with a sacrifice, and broke it in pieces, no one was able to use all four schools. Nowadays, usually when people are teenagers and deciding what they want to do or be, they pick three of them to lock themselves into, two major and one minor.

Eight of the possible ten are commonly used: necromancers are major preservation and destruction and minor denial, for instance, and the other common ones are mesmer, elementalist, ranger, thief (yes they share a word), engineer, warrior, and guardian.

"Also there's whatever Rytlock is right now but it seems to be working for him. That would be..." She squints at him. "Major preservation and destruction, minor aggression."

Snort.

"...huh. That's very much not how our magic works. We've got schools of magic - abjuration does protection and prevention, conjuration does summoning and creation and teleportation, divination does learning things, enchantment does mind stuff, evocation does energy manipulation, necromancy does poorly defined but generally unpleasant things involving negative energy, transmutation makes changes to creatures or things. And there's a couple of oddball spells that don't fit, but most of them are metamagic. And what you can cast depends on how you learned magic, but - not in nearly as systematic a way as it sounds like you've got, and anybody can use any school unless something weird's going on. Like, sorcerers and wizards, who learn magic through personal investment, cast different spells from clerics, who get their spells from the gods, and clerics cast different spells from druids, who get their spells from some kind of primordial nature spirit."

"We're almost there," James interrupts the conversation to say, and indeed if they pay attention they can hear faint sounds of... people, and machines. In the distance.

 "—sorry, please carry on."

Kasmeer giggles but turns back to Haruk. "So, um, yeah, we can learn to do any magic that's based on our major schools, and any magic that uses our minor school plus one or both of our majors. People mostly specialise in magic that use all three of their schools just because they tend to be more powerful but there are some things Braham and I could do the same, if we both forgo our minors."

"Wait, really? Like what?"

"Mesmers and guardians have denial and preservation as their major schools, so mostly barriers, shields, things that make magic not work..."