"How confident are you that your world's disintegration problem is a local phenomenon that doesn't, say, possess agency and want to destroy other locations?"

"I have never heard of any evidence that it had agency. Maybe there's evidence no one ever mentioned to me, maybe it's well-known and I just don't know, it's - not much evidence when a mage hasn't heard of something - but I do know it behaves in a really predictable, basically unchanging way, and that I never previously heard of anywhere else disintegrating and that I do think there's a reasonable chance I'd know everything extremely obvious about other worlds because I'm a scout. I think... if I had to guess... I don't think the magic is anything reasonably glossed as scared, and I do think the magic would know what it's up against, but that's a very speculative line of thought for something there might just be an answer to."

""Is the disintegration associated with— actually, you mentioned backups to me earlier, could you tell me more about that?"

"If you're remembered by something with the power to reconstruct you, from a state it's safe to restore you from, you can be brought back. In our case, for humans, sleeping in our universe does it."

"Elaborate on 'remembered by something with the power to reconstruct you'?"

"People are ways of relating to information. That's not actually a statement of fact, it's a definition I'm using because it's intuitively reasonable to most people I know. If you have similar intuitions, then you'll agree that if you stop being conscious or doing things forever it's just as bad whether your corpse disintegrates or not, and that if all your goals and desires and opinions and ways of making decisions are replaced with just wanting to kill people and nothing else then that's death no matter how intact your body is, I guess unless you wanted that to start with but no human I have ever heard of started out wanting that. So if someone's going around being a perfect duplicate that wants what you want and thinks of the kinds of things you'd think of and feels how you'd feel, most people have the intuition that you're not dead, and most people I know still think so if you're missing some memories and in a worse mood, even if it's the worst mood of your life. If you're sentimental about your specific atoms, in some cases you can even be resurrected using them."

"I do agree that it seems like a sensible definition of identity. My confusion is that it's apparently feasible. And also whether 'replacing goals and desires and opinions and decision processes with just wanting to kill people' is a real-life example for you, it is what happens in Suaal if you try to put an extremely badly damaged dead soul back in a body and I'm trying to figure out whether the factors that I think cause that in Suaal also cause it in your world."

"It's what happens if you see the magic. What's a soul?"

"Broadly speaking, a soul is the substrate on which one's identity is stored. Most commonly, this is a brain or a somewhat-intangible magical construct with properties that vary on a per-world basis, but sometimes it's a machine or something else. In the case of Suaal, the soul is a somewhat-intangible magical construct. Many people's next question is 'do you have a brain, and if so what does it do', and the answer is 'yes', and it does sensory processing, motor control, and cognitive enhancement."

"Huh. Okay. And they get magic-touched if they're not in bodies and you have a guess as to why?"

"They get omnicidal if they're damaged enough, and they accumulate damage when they get disconnected from the body or when people try to hurt them or various other things. I don't think 'magic-touched' is the right characterization, magic to a first approximation isn't harmful to observe in Suaal, and to a second approximation, the main harm of observing magic is that if it's very strong you can get briefly distracted by an unpleasant stimulus. I do have a guess as to why, but I'm concerned about security so I want to keep asking you questions without saying what my guess is even though that's probably rude."

Shrug. "If you've seen magic and you're having a civil conversation and don't agree that it's harmful then your magic is probably a different entity. Which I already thought, because we don't have unexplained power draws that can't be traced to our world and it seems like it'd be hard to set us a separate self-contained budget. And because the translation in here is directly mind-affecting and doing something like that back home would be a terrible idea, and because I touched Bar and didn't notice any similarity to how our magic feels."

"There is harmful magic, including magic that it's harmful to see, but the normal examples of that are something someone did on purpose – 'reading this text causes the text to turn into a snake and attack you', for example. Does your magic have a name besides 'magic'? And is it more like a physical phenomenon, or more like an intelligent being, and if the latter do you have any idea what its preferences are? I'm confused that it makes people omnicidal if they see it but is also usable to restore them from backups, I wouldn't expect those properties to coexist."

"It's pretty hard to get it to restore them instead of something that looks like them and will kill you. If it has a name for itself, we obviously can't ask. It's agentic. I obviously can't ask it 'so, what are your preferences?' and other people would know more than I would and I might be completely wrong but I think it has preferences about things like magnetism and having people around and numerical sequences and, uh, I think it means well, and I'm not sure if you'd really say it prefers that people be in pain - it, uh, it eats pain. As a very approximate gloss."

"Huh, eats pain. I've seen magic that eats the caster's blood, inches of height above the ground, gemstones, et cetera, so possibly I shouldn't read too much into it. Is it possible to perceive post-disintegration regions or the disintegrating factor or such, and do you know what the effects of that are?"

"I don't think there's anything there to be perceived. I guess I could be wrong."

"I can ask Bar about publications. I'm still not opening my door, but I now wish I could, because it seems very important to check if your magic entity is just confused about how to interact with people without driving them mad, and maybe explain to it how to do that. My world has specialists in that sort of thing but I am not one of them."

"I expect so, it doesn't really do things that make me think it's malevolent. Other than the obvious."

"Is it at all movable? Bar's very mentally resilient."

"...Sort of."

"How so? I do agree that making a safe path through a populated area for it would be very expensive, it just seems potentially worth it anyway."

"Oh, that's not the problem, the problem is I can only transport small fractions of it."

"Ah, okay. That seems potentially useful, but I'm not in a hurry and you don't seem to be either, so maybe we or the rest of your delegation will come up with a better plan first."

"Maybe. It'd be convenient to be able to look at it safely but with the ability to move here and take a break without needing to worry about the world ceasing to exist I think at minimum we can make everyone a lot better off."

"Possibly! Bar's probably suggesting plans for that, she doesn't like to have one group monopolize things but that doesn't close off that many options if you're treating her as a nice area to rest and hang out, that's pretty core to her nature."