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"What are you talking about?"

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"--Your species? Like, I'm half-wraith" she goes insubstantial "half-halfling," she shrinks to about three feet tall and goes fully substantial again, "what are you?"

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"I'm... a... human??" he says, gazing down at her in utter bewilderment. (And she's so tiny and frightened and - no, come on, focus.) "Like everyone else on the planet?"

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She glances at his lap, blushes, looks away, and reverts-through-insubstantiality back to full size.

"Well, I don't know what planet you're from, but on this planet frost giants and elves are the most common species."

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"Earth. And a week ago I manifested as an empath and now I'm all kinds of shit I don't understand, including apparently a shapeshifter."

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"Empathy is the human magic?"

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"No."

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"Don't look at me like that's obvious." Still scared, but also annoyed. "If it's not then how did you have it? And what is?"

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"It's just not, there just - isn't -"

He makes a frustrated sound and turns into a jaguar and back and finally just clumsily shoves meanings in her direction.

His telepathy, such as it is, is not a precision instrument. What comes across is: he is frustrated at the situation, at his difficulty communicating, at the fact that even though he inexplicably speaks this language that he's never heard before in his life there are still so many bizarre differences in context that he seems to run into them at every turn. He is unsettled by all this unrelenting strangeness; he feels off-balance and insecure and these are some of the worst things in the world to feel. His new senses and powers are amazing and bewildering and he wants to play with them until he figures them out but he reluctantly acknowledges that it's probably more important to figure out what the fuck is going on. He is attracted to her because she's pretty and small and afraid.

And all of that is incidental, carried along with the actual message, crowding around it densely enough to nearly drown it out; the actual message is that multiple species aren't a thing where he's from, species-specific kinds of magic aren't a thing, death tolls aren't a thing, there are humans and there are some humans who are mutants and the mutants have powers and the powers are wildly non-uniform in nature.

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She blinks for a few moments.

"Wow," she says. "...If you stay in the area you'll probably hear several death tolls before the week is out. I, I don't--know how to--make you--less off-balance."

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He scowls and turns into a jaguar again and stretches and turns into a human again and - looks at her - and then puts his face in his hands and sighs heavily.

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"I'm sorry." (She means it. She has no more idea what to do about his situation than he does, is just as off-balance albeit from a less stable starting point.)

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"Thanks," he sighs.

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Nod nod.

"...My foster parents hurt me. No one believes me--I was really clumsy as a kid and they're--good at not leaving more bruises than they can explain away--and they hurt me worse if I try telling so I mostly. Don't. But you don't--have more of a reason to believe them than me--please don't tell I told--and I'd try to, to get them to let you stay with us at least for a while but they'd--it wouldn't end well."

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"Wouldn't end well like how?"

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"Like they'd say no and hit me extra and if they saw you they'd associate you with me and assume you were up to no good or something."

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"...are these people, like, useful to you," he wonders.

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"If I tried leaving they'd find me and drag me back--maybe not now with the war on but--there's a war on, they're better than--being caught by soldiers who don't even have to pretend to care about leaving me in any condition better than 'reusable'--"

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"...how magic is magic? I mean - what kinds of things can all these various species do -"

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"Uh, I showed you what wraiths can do--most wraiths go from a little shorter than me to a little less than twice as tall, I'm smaller because I'm half halfling, halflings are about as short as the smallest I was--halflings are really good at surviving--frost giants are cryokinetic--striders teleport--sirens sing really really well--oracles generate arbitrary, objectively true facts--orcs do plants, especially food--elves do babies--dryads can do weird stuff with trees--"

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"That all sounds... kind of small-scale," he says. "I was kind of small-scale too, yesterday."

He touches the trunk of a tree. His skin turns to bark, rough and grey and pale, starting in his hand and sweeping up his arm and over his shoulders in a slow wave. He shrugs, and the bark cracks and falls away, leaving his own skin underneath. He digs his fingers into the tree like it's made of clay and pulls away a chunk of living wood. The tree bleeds sap from the gaping wound, then heals rapidly until a few seconds later it's not possible to tell there was anything wrong.

"I don't know what the fuck is going on with me now, but it's sure not small-scale," he says, rolling the chunk of wood between his hands. It shapes itself into a ball. He tosses it in the air and catches it.

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"...Gosh. Yes. I've never heard of anyone doing anything like that. I mean, um, I don't know a lot about dryads, maybe they could--and frost giants' ice powers aren't super small-scale, you hear about frost giants sailing on ice boats sometimes--"

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The tree withers, going from healthy and tall to scattered on the ground in cracked and crumpled pieces over the course of a few seconds. Then it sprouts anew from the stump, healthy again. The pieces remain.

(He doesn't notice the faint green light starting to glow under his skin. It's pretty subtle, and he has other things on his mind.)

"Ice boats aren't super small-scale," he acknowledges. "Still."

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