"...paid?"

"Like, work tends to suck, but I always assumed that at least the, like, having a job kind of work sucks less if the money you get doesn't feel like a drop in an ocean?" She shrugs, somewhat embarrassed.

" - right, mundanes work for money. ...adults usually also get money if they're building mana for someone else, but as a bonus, mostly we - we get mana from it." She swallows. "Most people at school do exercise or, like, knitting."

"And you need to exercise how long to get anywhere useful?"

"It - varies a lot, you get less if you're in shape and more if you're working through an injury, and less if you keep stopping to chat - adults have numbers for it but when there's dozens of people working for months, you can average out - " on the one hand she wants to explain the entire history of lilims and on the other she'd like to answer the actual question and stop talking.

"Uh. Even if you're in good shape you'd get something out of" thirty push-ups that's too low you could do that now "a hundred push-ups."

Zeph raises her eyebrows, appropriately impressed.

"And that's just the light, not anything good enough to blast a magic monster?"

"Could be enough to blast some monsters and set up shields against the rest or not enough for a steady flame, it varies. A lot."

"Beats having magic monsters and no magic, I guess."

Basira spends several seconds genuinely convinced Zef is speculating about other, unrelated worlds with magic monsters before she successfully parses that.

" - no, the mundanes are fine, if you don't believe in magic they're not even monsters. Some people go to normal primary school, all the kids and teachers keep them safe."

"Sounds like a pretty bad deal, then," Zeph says, but sounds uncertain.

"For - what?"

"For you? For wizards? I mean, magic sounds cool and special, sure, but—I think I would rather never need a weapon than have one. Than have to orient my entire life around having it."

It's been so long since she thought of Georgie she's forgotten how to not think about Georgie. Georgie, who's probably still alive, walking and breathing and eating—unless they screwed up any time in the last year—even if she's only half-alive in some other sense—

"It - is my life, it's - there's not another one somewhere."

"...fair. Sorry." It sounds... thought-through. Sincere.

She's quiet for a moment.

"You like it, then? Even with all the—costs?"

"I - wouldn't want to lose it?"

"Can people do that? Give up magic?"

"Probably, sure, there's - stories, that someone did that sometime, purged their energies and hid in the desert somewhere -

- I don't know - of anyone in real life who did, on purpose."

"What do you like about it?"

"Knowing how the world actually works. And sometimes it does what I want, because I said, so... that's nice."

"It really does work the other way if you don't know about magic, though, doesn't it? Or..." She hums and shrugs. Then a detail from what Basis said before stands out to her.

"You know of someone who did it not on purpose, then."

"All kinds of weird mals out there."

What?

It doesn't matter,

something

It's not that Basira's consciously thinking that it's easier to talk about Georgie because none of what happened was her fault. (It's not that Basira's never blamed herself for anything that happened to Georgie.) It's just that when she starts talking again, she says

"One of them got a girl I knew. Grew up with. Georgie. It broke her ability to build arcane energy, to even feel that doing things took effort - "

"...wow." Zeph rocks back on her chair, lips pressed tight together. "So, like, killed her real slow instead on the spot."