"What does it do, why is it good for Anavel Sani? I am not an expert on transgender medicine, by the way. Might not be able to help there if anything is wrong."

"I don't think anything is wrong. I don't know how to explain more because my English is mediocre. I want the other people to know if you can see the magic ones."

"Well, maybe we can get you set up with some vocabulary courses after this. Keep the mind off things. And we'll see, I suppose! Let's head back to the examination room, shall we?"

"We shall." He'll go wherever and look around in case he recognizes anything.

It's not very much like the medical equipment they use in New Dover! Well, he recognizes some things. That's a chair, that's a sink and countertop. Some of the medical tools are similar enough, if not really the same. Stethoscopes are still used in the 23rd century, for example. But there's a lot of her pattering on a bit dryly while pointing various things with screens at him or asking him to hold them while stretching or breathing in a certain way.

He can stretch and breathe in all sorts of ways.

Her conclusion is that he's reasonably healthy - not, like, professional athlete with a carefully managed diet healthy but doing just fine - and grew up in an Earthlike place with very little background pollution. Several things about him are kind of odd, to the point where it's easy to say he's definitely not from Earth or Elysium or the six other planets she has aggregate medical data for, and his implants and genetic augments are nothing she recognizes, either custom or proprietary or foreign.

"I don't know that anything I'm seeing is what's responsible for the 'magic' with a sample size of one, mind you, but you're definitely not from around here."

"That is enough! You will tell them I am not wrong and not in character. I am the governor of Ira Sani in the Harish Empire and I do things," he does the walking-on-air trick again, "and people say my things are magic and I did not get an augment."

"Well, would you look at that."

She experimentally kicks the invisible surface gently.

"Nobody believes anything they read on the internet if they're smart so it won't help with strangers, but I'm glad to help. Oh, I can give you a little DNA drive with your scans, that might help your case going forward - genetic code drive, it stores information as nucleotides instead of binary." She sighs. "Real interesting stuff, but I can't make heads or tails with it, without a bigger team and more equipment. And I probably shouldn't do research on you without permission anyway, heh."

"I do not want you to write it on the internet. I want you to tell Morg. I am going to give some magic to some people because the people gave me food and doors, and later I am going to go away. - I do not know why I am here now but I travel a lot. If I open many doors, then I will go to Milliways later again. Maybe you will also go to Milliways because this place has the March Days and Hermes-Ishtar."

"-The doors are important how? I'll tell folks here and keep mum otherwise, sure."

"Sometimes a door is between two rooms and it gets a magic and it is between one room and one different room. The different room is in Milliways. Unless a door gets a magic, you cannot go forward to Milliways. You cannot go left to Milliways. You cannot go right to Milliways. You cannot go up to Milliways. You cannot go down to Milliways. Milliways does not touch anywhere else. Unless a door gets a magic. The door magic likes me."

"-Has someone invented personal scale wormholes, God in Heaven. Or are - if you're talking magic do you mean a place you can't get to by going anywhere, even if you were as fast as light?"

"I don't know what a wormhole is. I mean a place you can't get to by going anywhere."

"That's a lot harder to believe than a strange boy with strange augments being lost and confused, or in character. I'll tell them what I found though, and this thing seems real enough," she gestures at the solid air.

"I am not afraid or angry if they don't believe it. I can ward things. I will ward things if you say you want it."

"I don't know how that works, you should tell someone else about it. And wormholes are things that make a short path between two far away places. They're really hard to make so we only use them to go between stars."

"I might want a book about wormholes."

"I bet there's something. Morgan and Reynaud are probably still waiting for you, you can go now if you don't have any medical questions. I'll call them and say what I said I'll say, okay?"

"Yes, thank you." Off he goes to talk to them again.

Valanda can hear the nurse making a call as he goes out. "Hi. Yeah, so- Valanda's ward or whatever is real, he's healthy, he's not from Earth, Radiant, Columbia, or..."

Morgan and Reynaud meet him in the hallway. "Hey," Morg says, "Two quick questions about the wards. Since they're apparently real and all. Thanks, by the way. Does it run out of anything if you just leave one somewhere? And how tough are they? I think if you're willing to use it for us some nice panic rooms would be my choice. There's already suites with their own self-contained air supplies, I don't even know why."

"Allergens. Spacers get real bad allergies sometimes."

"It does not run out of anything but it can break if you break it. There are different ways I can make wards and they will break for different things. Or for nothing if you are very sure you will always want the ward."

"Never? That sounds a bit..."

"Hubristic. Bad idea. I wonder who we should talk to about this?"

"It's not like anyone's in charge anymore, that's the whole point."

"Right. Doesn't run out ever? I almost want to put it on some structural beams but, hubris. Utter disaster if it suddenly fails, and making it never do that is a bad idea too probably."

"Yes, making it never fail is usually a bad idea. We have not seen wards run out in, um... thousands of years? But maybe they run out in a thousand times a thousand years. We have not seen wards for that long yet."

"Well, it's not gonna be my problem by then," Reynaud laughs a bit nervously.

"Why don't we show you the stupid Aero Flow suites and you can do it how you think best?"