"Then I guess you'll have an easier time gaining power here than in your former world, won't you?"

“It does sound like that. If I go around with spells up they will just be made permanent after a while?”

"If you were anyone else?  I'd tell you not to get your hopes up until you'd cast the spells so often you could do it without thinking, and fought with them up many, many times."

"You?  It wouldn't surprise me if the answer was, yeah, sure."

“Okay. You know, this could be fun, if we don’t die horribly.

What’s a plausible name and life history for an adventurer like I’ll be able to pretend to be in a few weeks?”

"Okay, so now back to awful practical difficulties."

"If you can make a powerful magical weapon out of an affinityless metal, that nobody needs any specific affinity to use, anybody who hears about that immediately wonders if you're the Summoned Hero.  Or, I did, and it is not the case that everybody else in this town is much stupider than I am."

"We can't pass the guards on any registered dungeon unless you have an Adventurer's Guild registration that you can't get without identity papers you don't have, and even if we manage to find the right sort of criminal with the right sort of connections to fake those for a lot of money, the Adventurer's Guild will fingerprint your affinities when you register, and when they see you have all six affinities they are immediately going to think 'whoa who is this all-affinity person I've never heard of before and is she possibly the Summoned Hero'."

"We can't cross the borders out of Midvale County unless you have forged papers and get a travel permit, which I think we can do without anybody fingerprinting your affinities but is still going to cost money."

"I am... still trying to figure out exactly how we can navigate all this.  I don't suppose you ran into any interesting, incredibly competent criminals before you ran into me?  Or the daughter of the City Lord?  On the theory that reality tries to set Heroes up with useful Companions."

"If I ran into any competent criminals they were so competent I did not immediately identify them as such. You need travel papers to leave the county? This place is so tyrannical!" She says it approvingly. "....can you just, you know, cross the borders while flying and invisible?"

"You can cast invisibility."

"In my magic system, invisibility and mindreading and pocket dimensions are not hard. If they're impossible here, though, I guess I'll have to be cautious about using them."

"Spatial:  Tier-3 affinity, Air, Water, Dark.  Invisibility:  Legendary fucking Tier-3 requiring Earth, Water, Dark for Murk and Earth, Fire, Light for Mirror so at least five elements including Light and Dark.  Mindreading:  Sounds like unusually advanced Creation magic but maybe there's a simpler way to do it and it's just secret."

"I don't suppose your 'Lawful' thing is sufficiently flexible that we could just, you know, declare you're a government and go tax some people?"

"That seems likely to get me into conflicts with neighboring governments! And - I assume someone with the ability to cast invisibility, in your system, also has the damage resilience to go with it, but I presently have the damage resilience of a normal third circle caster, which is to say that jumping off a four-story building probably won't break my bones but I go down to a sword only slightly slower than a commoner.

Can we impersonate, possibly through kidnapping or murdering, someone who does have guild credentials and a legal identity?"

"I meant, like, declare to ourselves that you're a government, and then walk invisibly into the house of somebody we don't like and collect a few years of back taxes."

"Permits are magically bound to users, I don't know what kind of affinity or spells you need to fool those."

"That's a lot of social control." She still sounds impressed but also slightly annoyed, at this point. "I see why you worry about your governments being even more capable of rulemaking. My main worry about theft is that it'll draw attention to us, which is a bigger problem if we can't even skip town; if you're pretty sure people can't scry for items, and we are skipping town, I'm all right with taking some - back taxes - with us on the way out. Who issues identity permits for the adventurer's guild, how hard is it to mind-control them?"

That's... slightly less 'Lawfulness' than Almys had been hoping for, actually, in the Summoned Hero; she makes a mental note not to rely on any of that, until she finds out what 'Lawfulness' constitutes exactly.

"Two-key system, specialized mage and Guild Admin.  They won't have any defenses specifically against mind-control, I would guess, because of the part where that sounds like unusually advanced Creation Magic and doesn't correspond to any other affinity I know - it's not the kind of thing for an affinity, mind isn't like, the inertia of a physical body.  But the Guild Admin will be heavily defended against magic in general."

"So that's probably a bad plan. 

...do you in fact have a way to get maybe-spellsilver cheaply? Weapons might be conspicuous, but I could figure out some headbands and then we could revisit options for getting a legal identity."

"Depends on how alerted you think people are about a Summoned Hero already.  My previous plan was to find an office with a Transmuter Device - introduced by the last Summoned Hero, we don't speak his name because he ruined the city of Omelas, which was the proudest jewel of our planetary civilization before that - anyways, find Midvale's transmutation facility, ask them for sample jars for all the kinds of pure metals that Transmuter Devices can make, have you come in and look them all over and say as little as possible, and then I'd order fifty pounds of whatever you pointed out.  It'd be around - a week's cost of living, for me, probably?  The main thing it'd be helpful to have beforehand is a plausible reason for why we want fifty pounds of a metal that has to be kept in oil to prevent it from oxidizing; it's a bit much for us to be metallurgists trying to invent a new steel alloy, and I couldn't bluff my way through that conversation anyways."

"Also, what are 'headbands'?"

"A kind of magic enchantment that makes the wearer cleverer. I could stand to be cleverer, if we're going to do all this. Does this world have metal enchanting that isn't distinctly summoned-hero? Spellsilver's very malleable, I could imagine it being useful for other things if it were cheap."

"Dungeons make affinity mats in general, including metals.  It's theoretically possible to get affinity mats without a dungeon or a rare natural source, but it's way harder, unless you're trying to literally make Water-affinity water or Metal-affinity metal.  The weird parts of your creation wouldn't be that they were enchanted metal, it would be that they were enchanted metal without an affinity."

"Maybe it wouldn't look affinityless, though?  I don't know very much at all about your magic at this point."

"Is wearing headbands mandatory for your Companions?  I might have - at least some questions about what they do to people, you've discussed concepts like 'soul' that sound like they take parts of a person's mind out of them and, do something with them, and - this is not a kind of magic I find familiar."

"Headbands...make you think better? You don't have to wear them, though where I'm from everyone who can does. There's also a spell that does the same thing. How do things look like they have affinities? Is there a spell to check or is it just something you can see by looking?"

"If somebody with a decent affinity touches an item or mat with that affinity, they'll usually be able to tell.  If the item was made to accept mana with that affinity, they'll definitely be able to tell that by running mana through it.  People with very strong affinities can sometimes tell each other the same way, just from getting close.  Professional mages with high affinities have Skills for perceiving those affinities of mana that are supposed to be almost as sharp and effortless as vision."

"The concept of a headband that makes you think better again raises so many questions.  Like - is planning to ask a Summoned Hero for a higher salary a bad thought, which a headband will help you not think, because it helps you think better thoughts than that."

" - I don't set what better is, it's just - well, are there skills that make you move better - walk faster, not trip, balance on things, climb more easily, dodge more easily -"

"Sure.  If you practice a lot of dodging and do a lot of combat dodging you'll eventually be able to dodge magically accelerated crossbow bolts."

"Yes, that's how it works where I'm from too. And if there were a magic item that made you better at moving - which there is - you wouldn't expect it to mean 'makes you march up to the caster and go where they tell you to', right, it'd just - improve all of those skills?"

"The entire reason that normal people practice dodging instead of there just being, Bracelets of Dodging, is that, if you tried to make a Skill-infused bracelet like that, it would make you Dodge the way that the bracelet's creator or first wearer had practiced dodging.  And the whole point of martial arts schools where everybody learns to dodge exactly the same way is so they can have items like that getting passed down through generations of masters."

"- huh. Our equivalent just, you know, improves your reflexes and reaction times. You dodge your own way but you're better at it."

"Boosting your dodging speed is all kinds of much easier.  That's just Mass affinity to lower your inertia."