"I mean stuck the way you're born! I hadn't really thought about it before."

Does the Visitor seem sad? She thinks the Visitor seems sad. 

"Why can't you mingle if you're the head of state? You could just pass a law that says you can. I would."

"Ooohhh.  Not as stuck as you'd think, I think, though still probably less than you seem to be used to.  Is that, like, a thing elves are known for, here?"

"...And, well, I could go out there, it just wouldn't accomplish anything because it would be unbearably awkward."

She might be a little bit sad.  It's a kind of resigned sort of sad, she's used to it, and she has other things that bring her joy, but it would be nice.

"...I don't know exactly what humans know us for but it's something we can do! We were made in a different divine image, it varies a little but - we don't have fixed sexes like humans, no, I can see how inconvenient that would be!"

She shrugs lightly. "I think it's actually easy to bear awkwardness. Nothing bad actually happens. And in a way you're mingling now and you're doing really well!" 

"Oh believe you me, I made sure that being stuck like that - someone being stuck in the wrong shape physically - was not going to be a problem."  That one sounded personal.

(She didn't actually necessarily develop it beforehand, but boy would she have been pissed off if magic transition didn't exist.  She'd have invented it herself if she had to.)

"And, yes, I am having a pleasant social interaction here, which is nice, but it's working because I'm not in Villarosa, where the crown is particularly immanent upon anyone I'm talking to."

All right, she's just going to admit it to herself, the alien archmage-queen with non-zero claims on godhood is kind of really adorable. 

"That was really nice of you!"

"Morphological freedom, in all its many...  forms, oh I did not intend to make that pun but I do wholeheartedly approve of it, is a cause near and dear to my heart - no matter that I'm almost painfully vanilla about it, compared to some of the people I've known.  I actually like having opposable thumbs."

"Thumbs are nice, but so are wings. So how much could you design things like that into magic? I wonder how much fun you really had with it."

"They are, I will admit."

...Wow, that was a really weird way of saying that last bit?  Probably just weird word choice and not, she doesn't kniw, passive-aggressiveness.

"It was definitely neat to think about, though I'll admit that mostly I didn't get into the level of detail of picking out individual spells to have, really."

"What I mean is, you said you designed magic as - a system of consistent natural laws? But then you also said you made sure 'morphological freedom' was possible. I was wondering if you built anything else into the laws of reality just for fun. I would have!"

"Oh!  Oh, yes, definitely.  Bags of holding qua things that are bigger on the inside were a specific inclusion, because, well, I just think they're neat.  And the trains, can't forget about those!  ...Oh it has been ages since I've thought about electric motors properly but someone remind me to explain them; I'm fairly sure magnetism is working like it should, regardless of some of my more esoteric knowledge of, hm, carbon-based will do as an adjective, physics being apparently unimplemented."

Elvish doesn't exactly have the word 'nerd' but she's thinking it very hard. Maybe all archmages are like this once you get to know them. She kind of likes it.

"They are neat! They're one of the things we don't really know how to make properly any more but I'm working on it, I have a prototype. What do you mean by 'train'?"

"A large vehicle consisting of a series of - well, train cars - on a fixed track that carries passengers or cargo at faster speeds and-or with much more pulling force than you could get from a horse."

"Electric motors...  Well.  Do you know the thing about moving a magnet through a coil of wire making electricity start moving, and the thing about running electricity through a coil of wire establishing a magnetic field?  Well, I don't recall all the details of how you make the ones that are actually worth using, because I know they're not actually shaped like the easiest practical example, but I forget how they actually work - is it that they move the coil of wire inside the magnet?  I have no idea - anyway!  ...Oh, also, you can get a standing source of electricity out of copper and zinc - stacked together in thin layers, I believe - and some kind of acid.  ...Been a long while since I read about any of that, so maybe ask me for an encyclopedia article instead of just taking my word for it.  Except the magnets-and-coils-of-wire thing.  I'm sure of that and specifically that."

"...Wish I knew how to turn bauxite into aluminum.  I know you can and there's electricity involved somehow, but, well.  Honestly the most specific physical process of production I recall is diamonds."

This is such a strange system of magic. She's still not sure she understands, it feels a lot like she's racing ahead along a line of assumptions, but one minute the Visitor is saying she helped design magic (!) to be... some kind of single coherent system? Because she was annoyed it had been done badly before? In some kind of story? And the next minute there are all these special designs for bags of holding and apparently now 'motors' built in.

If, as she said, she wasn't thinking about all the good she could have done, just to make magic her way, it still feels like she could have had so much more more fun with it! If Naevys were designing the laws of magic - if magic had laws instead of suggestions - the world would be a really interesting place at least. Well, no, that's way too harsh, Alicia does have all those wonders in her world and she implied that was deliberate. 

"I don't know about any of those things! Diamonds are very useful in wizardry, I wouldn't have thought they could be produced easily."

All of this is at the same time impressive, endearing and deeply, deeply annoying. She does not understand and Alicia keeps making portentous allusions and normally that's archmage talk for "you don't want to know if you like your brain between your ears where it belongs" but that apparently isn't true here and so it's just making her want to acquire answers. 

"Diamonds," she says with the tone of someone delivering a well-worn aphorism, "are just fancy carbon."

"It's not exactly easy to make geological-scale heat and pressure, but what it definitely is is simple, especially since carbon is, to a first approximation, charcoal.  Or actual coal."

"...Azerosa doesn't actually operate on the same physics as you do, so honestly I'm glad I remember even that much."

"So... You originally came from a different world that worked more like ours, then went to Villarosa and designed their physics?"

"That is indeed the case, yes.  Except that one didn't have - well, anything that's verifiably magic."

"How did you get to the other one without magic?"

"Random omnipotent being did it, no further details available about how or even, really, what.  I don't remember getting hit by a bus or anything."

"...The romance novels one? Omnipotent sounds really interesting as well I should have realised."

"Yes, the romance novels one.

"Really it's more - random arbitrarily potent being and/or force, but that isn't as snappy.  Somebody who's, like...  At least one level of powerscaling above the gods you have here, at which point I can hardly know anything further about the scale they operate on - but, like.  They could pull a plausibly infinite multiverse out of nowhere for their whim of giving me a planet to fuck around with school drama on."

Oh lovely, another Outer Horror that probably needs killing. They were running low on those, really.