Seeing as I am a renewable resource, how do you feel about mana being your wage for being the local guide?

...I was gonna do that for free but sure why not I'm not going to refuse magic.

Any excess mana would just go to waste. There's a national program of mana sharing back home. I'm used to this sort of thing. The going rate is three ergs for one half penny neither of those units meaning anything to you.

They don't. Alright, that sounds like a good deal.

To be renegotiated later if either one of us feels slighted, of course. Talk about the other three kinds of magic now?

She pours more mana into the golden amulet. Way more. Way, way, way more than before.

Okay, so, one of them are elementalists. They can only do magic on themselves, and the kind of magic they do is called a 'blessing.' It's a single power—elementalists can only have one blessing active at a time—and very intuitive to use, the elementalist just has to define the power they want and they can switch to it. Each blessing has a finite mana cap; while it's being used the mana is consumed, and when it stops being used it starts recharging, but when the elementalist switches blessings the inactive one stops recharging until they switch back to it. Example blessings are flight, control over an element, or telekinesis.

She 'listens' intently.

The amulet is now 'full'. She hands it back off to him. It's quite a bit of mana.

He starts draining it as he continues to explain:

Arcanists can generate more or less arbitrary effects on more or less arbitrary targets, but they're all instantaneous or have a fixed duration. Arcanist mana starts charging when they're born and continues on forever. An arcanist creates a spell by defining the effect they're aiming for in their mind and then attaching it to actions or symbols. Then, whenever they perform those actions or emit those symbols, the spell is cast. They can also create magic scrolls that contain a single-use spell that anyone else can use. Mana cost changes depending on spell complexity and specificity and incantation length and theme.

I'm going to have sincere difficulty pretending to be one of those things.

You could pretend to be none of them. I do.

...I hope they come after me. There are teleporters in the UDF's employ. I would prefer to participate in civilization, but living without magic would be. Highly irritating.

Oh I didn't mean not use any magic, just pretend not to. And maybe you could pretend to be an enchanter? Those create magical artefacts which are persistently magical objects that do things.

Artifacts! Right, there are some all around us. Our magic cannot do artifacts. At least, not with any regular basis, someone's special might be to make them. What kinds of stuff can they do?

Lots! It's possible to make anything emit light and sound and project stuff, that's a general capability of enchanters, but other than that they can enhance the object's properties—making a sword sharper, a shield sturdier, a hammer more precise—and get new behaviours, like floating, and even store and process information. Artefacts also have a mana charge and once they run down an enchanter needs to recharge them in order to get them working.

We should probably try to learn each other's language.

"We should probably try to learn each other's language."

...Unless the mana cost of this is trivial. And I could possibly do that - can enchanters detect artifacts? I could make glowy patterns whenever I do magic, pretend to have a very flexible artifact or set of same.

"Unless the mana cost of this is trivial. And I could possibly do that - can enchanters detect artifacts? I could make glowy patterns whenever I do magic, pretend to have a very flexible artifact or set of same."

"You can send while you talk, that should work better. Anyway, no, only metamancers can detect artefacts—or any other magic at all—when it's not actually doing anything magical. If an artefact runs out of mana, for that matter, it's still an artefact, it just needs to be recharged, but it can't be turned into something else unless you have a metamancer around. And the mana cost of this is... as trivial as I can make it. Trivial enough, with you as an endless source."

"...The UDF is going to want to bribe you with all the mana. If I can ever go home. Healing things, better weapons, Neuroi-killer artifacts, communication things, so many things. It feels like I could charge stuff up, too... Got an empty I could try on?"

"An empty artefact? Well, anything in this room is potentially one, I had to charge it up in order to figure out how to open the door."

"Worth trying... Maybe in a while. I'm still sort of reeling."

"...yeah, do you need anything? I can't imagine how it must feel for you."

"I've been uprooted before. Never so much as this, but... Yeah."

"What do you want to do?"

"...Not starve in the wilderness or anything similar. Learn local magic, hopefully use it to solve problems without being religiously executed. Churches." She scoffs. "Always ruining things."

"I'm not too thrilled to find out this problem is not limited to my corner of the multiverse."

"Some of them are alright. The ones that aren't just get complained about more."