"It sounds as though it is a very big universe - multiverse? - and you cannot explore all of it at once. You would have needed to be here thirty years ago, for it to matter." He looks down at his hands. "There was a war between two countries. Each of them had one of the most powerful mages in the known world involved. It - escalated out of control. One of the countries was winning, so the mage from the other - destroyed his own fortress, the best academy of mage-craft in the world, one assumes to protect his secrets from falling into the enemy's hands. And he had - created a powerful weapon. Likely no one but him knew it existed until he sent it to be used against the other mage. Probably he did not realize exactly how destructive it would be." 

"We see that kind of thing sometimes," nods Nelen, solemn. "Ah - do you happen to know, people often do know one way or the other, if your people have anything like 'souls' or an afterlife or reincarnation?"

"People have souls." Is he going to say why he's so sure of this, no, no he is not. 

Nelen winces, but only a little. "Okay, that's good to know. Do you know what happens to the souls when people die?"

"We are not sure what normally happens." Not technically a lie. "We think they continue to exist. Somewhere. Maybe some of them are reincarnated, but the people who claimed this said it happened with infants so they would not really remember. Maybe the gods have them." 

"Is there a good way to contact the gods?" Nelen asks.

"Not that I know of." That part is entirely honest. 

"Okay. Uh - is this a good time to explain something that is not urgent but might be saddening?"

Lionstar has no idea where this is going and he almost certainly isn't going to like it but he's still too tired to feel any particular way about it. "Yes." 

"Some people have immaterial souls, like Zanro, or afterlives that don't seem to strictly depend on any separable 'soul' component, like Cassiel. Some people, like me or Natsuko, are purely material, at least under all our add-on powers. Tarwë's soul is a physical object, but it has some special properties that make him a different case from me or Natsuko. Some people reincarnate.

We have resurrection that works for some, but not all, cases. If we can find the souls, we can give them bodies - if Zanro died for some reason right here and now, we'd call for help and get him a new body and his soul could move right in. If I died for some reason right here and now, they'd call for help and someone would make me a new body and then do some separate magic to wake it up.

The situation where we can't do that is - when there are souls and we can't get them. I'm sorry."

"Oh." 

"I -" 

"You should find someone who thinks they might know a way to talk to the gods." 

And of course five seconds after he says that he remembers that it's not their problem, and there's no reason to ask or expect the people of another world to do something very costly and hard for Velgarth. But he doesn't try to take it back. 

"Yes. We'll probably be putting a lot of effort into that for the foreseeable future and I wanted to - contextualize that. We'll try not to let it interfere with helping the living."

Lionstar doesn't know what to say to that at all, for a long moment. He's - reflexively suspicious, of course, but he doesn't actually have a story for why they would lie about prioritizing bringing back Velgarth's dead. 

"I understand." 

He probably should be asking more questions about Vanda Nossëo, but nothing is coming together in his head yet, so he sits in awkward silence. 

Nelen occupies himself taking some photos of people who agree to have themselves or their houses photographed and compiling a report.

Natsuko would like to know if there's a good place she can set up a small base of operations for their outfit here - they'll be operating it as a little shop, and maybe take some of their downtime in it.

The family that lives next to the town hall is happy to give up their house! They can find a place to stay with neighbors. 

The house is reasonably spacious, though with a low ceiling, and the floor of hard-packed dirt is swept and has some rugs woven of reeds, and the walls are sturdy. It's a single room inside, with a hearth at one end and the 'bedroom' at the other. The family will move their bedrolls out now to make space. 

- no, Natsuko doesn't want their house, she wants an empty space where she can create a new house for this purpose by magic.

She can do what???? 

There isn't actually a lot of empty space in the city center, the buildings are packed close together - makes it easier to shovel out paths or in the worst case carve out tunnels between them when they get a really bad winter blizzard - but they can have the spot where Kushti and his wife were going to build a house once the mages had enough mage-energy available to help with the construction.

(Which, in practice, meant whenever the town next got terrorized by bandits or one of the nomadic roaming tribes from further east, which usually results in at least some of them being captured alive. They do not say this part out loud.)  

Natsuko goes to the offered spot and mutters to herself, sketching imaginary lines in the air, and -

- there appears a house. It's trying to roughly match the materials and colors of its neighbors but it's much nicer.

The adults are still wary, but most of the children under ten have been entirely won over by chocolate pudding, and they run up and cluster around the house to stare at it in amazement and ask if it's okay for them to touch the walls and look inside and wonder aloud how you do that and whether Lionstar could do that if he had more magic power and where the people from another star are getting all the power to do that. 

Natsuko will let the kids poke the house and go inside! It's pretty bare in there - no separate furniture, though there is a window seat and a counter and some built in shelves. It's nicer inside where it doesn't have to blend in.

Can she make more houses? Can she make other things like clothes or chairs or dolls or beds? Does she get tired from making things? Does she have to be making something that she's seen before or can she make anything? 

She can make more houses but not too many in a row before getting a mana refill. She doesn't know spells for those things but someone might invent them one day. She doesn't really feel tired when she's out of mana. She doesn't have to copy a house she's seen before.

What's mana? Where does it come from? Does she have to kill people to get it? 

(The five-year-old girl who asked this last question is quickly shushed by her older brother and looks embarrassed, but how was SHE supposed to know that they're not the same kind of magic people as the grownup mages here?) 

...she does not kill people to get it. She can get it by resting in a universe adjacent to the one her magic came from, or get some from a Maia, of whom there are lots all of whom have infinite mana and some are willing to be mana fountains for staff wizards.

What does it mean for universes to be adjacent to other universes or not? They're not sure what a 'universe' is actually. What's a Maia? Also what's a wizard? These kids are full of sugar and also energy and they have so many questions!