A universe is all the stuff you can get to by moving through space - walking or flying or whatever. Universes are huge! A crowded one might have millions of kinds of people in it! And there are more places you can't get to by moving through space, no matter how far you go. Those are other universes, and you need another way, usually magic, to get between them. So far all ways of getting from one universe to another will only let you reach some of them from each universe. You can think of those as "next to" each other. So it takes more teleporting to get between "far apart" universes than "neighboring" ones - though it's always possible someone will find a shortcut.

Maiar are a kind of magical being that come from a kind of repeated world called "Ardas".

A wizard is somebody who's studied the kind of magic she knows.

Can anyone learn to be a wizard? Or is it like being a mage where you have to be born that way? 

Lionstar is still turning things over in his head, but he overhears snippets of this conversation, and sidles up closer to listen in. 

"You don't have to be born with it, but you have to be smart to learn the spells. But there are magic items that make you smarter in the right way - it's sort of like being good at math and sort of like being good at reading sheet music - so if you want to do one of the higher-demand things people can do with wizardry, you can get someone to front you one of those items."

One of the girls starts jumping up and down. "You should teach Ativa! He's really good at math! Lionstar is teaching him how to do gee-oh-metry so he can make better houses when he's grown up! Lionstar knows eeeeverything, you know." 

     "Geometry," the older boy who looks like her corrects. "I am good at math though." 

"What's a sheetmusic?" 

     "Can people learn how to do the kind of magic that makes food out of fluffy stuff?" 

"Sheet music is music that's written down," says Natsuko, "so you can play or sing a song without having to hear it first. And, no, Cassiel got her magic by being from a particular universe and then dying, most people don't wind up in that afterlife with powers like hers even if they go to her universe before they die, but some people get powers sort of like hers 'wished on', there's a neighborhood where you can get a wish granted and some people use their wishes to give batches of people magical powers. The wish-granting only works in a certain universe neighborhood but the powers wished on work anywhere."

At some point Lionstar should really step in and ask the more important questions, like 'can we have access to those other worlds' and 'what do we need to do to get in on the wish-granting'. It feels important to get right, though, and he doesn't have the heart to interrupt the children, who are happy and excited and, despite the bleak unrelenting slog of their entire lives, somehow not at all weighed down by fear. 

(In some important sense, they have less to be afraid of. They're not one of the parties responsible for nearly destroying the world.) 

"What kind of magic gets you between universes? Is that a power some people have? Is it one you can have the person who makes wishes make a wish to give you?"  

     "How do you get between stars??? They don't look that far but Lionstar says they're so so so so far!" 

"Are you from a place that's just very far away or a place that you need magic to get to?" 

     "What do other planets look like? Is the sky the same color?" 

"There are several ways to get between universes! Nelen's teleport spell works that way, and I have a way to do it with wizard magic, too. People like Cassiel can be summoned to adjacent universes magically, and then if the person who summons them wants, they can send them back - if something weird happened to us and we got stuck, that's one thing they might try, to find out what went wrong, is pulling her back to her home. Stars are really really far but the teleport has no range limit at all. All of us are from places you need magic to get to, none of us have even been to your universe before today! Blue skies are common but not all planets have them. Would you like to see some pictures?"

Yes!!!! The kids would like to see pictures!!!! 

One twelve-year-old girl very timorously asks if, since it would take too long for Cassiel to make food for everyone in the world, and probably other people are hungry too, maybe they could summon more of the people like Cassiel so that all the towns could have someone? If those people wouldn't mind? 

"All the other towns we could find have groups of people too! They don't all have angels but they all have someone who can feed them," Cassiel says. "We're just one team and we're focusing on the people who are around here."

Natsuko can show so many pictures.

"Oh." The girl looks thoughtful about this. The others crowd around to stare at pictures in awe and make appreciative noises. 

It's a while before she speaks again. "You're...really nice. I'm glad it's people like you who're finding other universes and other planets and not bad people." 

They're all - almost all - such decent kids, despite their lives so far, and now they're going to have a future and that's probably the only thing that matters here. 

"S'like Lionstar," she says earnestly. "He was with the people that tried to run away through a Gate west - that was when Gates worked - and they ended up sooooo far west and got lost, only it was good because the other side of the mountains didn't get bad weather. But Lionstar wanted to come back to help us and he had to sail halfway around the whole world to get here. But then he found us." 

"That was very brave of him," says Natsuko.

"Well, I think it's brave of you too! To just go to other places even though they might be scary or dangerous or have a lot of bad people."

Her face scrunches up a little. She's clearly choosing her words carefully. "What - do you do if you go to another world and people are doing bad things there?" 

This conversation is quickly edging toward dangerous ground and yet the last thing that Lionstar wants to do is tell her to stop, even if he had a way to do that without making the visitors incredibly suspicious, which he doesn't. 

"Well," says Natsuko, "it depends on the bad things. It tends to work... pretty badly... for one civilization to come in and conquer another civilization and go, 'hey, you have to stop doing things your way and start doing things our way' - even if their way is really awful! So we try, really really hard, to always just offer ways to do things that they'd like better, to get the things they care about."

He’s so dubious of this. It would be…impressive, if it were true.

“And that works?” the girl says, frowning in thought. “Could you give the bandits and the horse-riding-people who try to attack the city other things they’d like better. I think they mostly want food. And jewelry even though that seems silly. And raping people but maybe there’s a different thing people would rather do instead of that, if they could.”

She says this as though it’s a perfectly normal thing for a twelve-year-old to know, and talk about in front of six-year-olds.

"- yes, it's much less common for people to attack cities for food and jewelry when they can easily just buy food and jewelry. Rape is a little trickier but there's usually something."

The girl fidgets. “Um, but if you try that and they don’t stop doing bad things, would you kill then then?”

Lionstar, still listening, is wishing possibly harder than he’s ever wished in this lifetime that he still had Thoughtsensing and could read this person’s mind. It - she sounds sincere but it seems impossible for that to mean something, for it to be a promise anyone should put weight on. 

Urtho always sounded sincere. He probably believed he meant it, right up until the end.

"Not usually. There are a few very very powerful entities we don't have a good way to imprison humanely. Those sometimes get killed, though we hope that one day we'll be so rich and so powerful that even they can have somewhere to live harmlessly and all the people they hurt won't even have to worry. But for normal people we can put them somewhere comfortable and safe where they can't hurt anyone. Prisoners in Vanda Nossëo can choose which prison they live in, if the one they want has space and is qualified to hold them, and they have plenty to eat and stuff to read and people to talk to and opportunities to learn better things to do with their lives than commit crimes once their time is up."