"...I can see how that could happen, but... eugh?"

"Really fucking eugh! Not that most of the enclavers felt that way--but--" her words stutter to a halt and she wraps her arms around herself and takes a few deep breaths. 

"My ridiculous powers meant that the people who everyone else sucked up to sucked up to me, if I gave them half an indication it would get anywhere. I absolutely hated it and I could not blame them, because I was safe and they were not."

He shudders empathetically. "What an absolutely shit position to be in, I'm sorry."

"Varanda. Is her name." She gestures in the direction of the exploding girl. 

"She's the first real friend I've ever had who wasn't my mom."

"One up on me, then," he says wryly.

Okay yeah she's gonna get up and hug him. 

—he startles slightly at first, but by the time she's taken a step he's already relaxing.

"I have two options, see," he says, "I can tell someone who I am, and let them be so terrified of me it warps every place our lives touch, or I can not tell them who I am, and let the lie eat me up inside until either I tell them and it's all terror and betrayal or I stop talking to them because I can't stand not doing that. Or they die, sometimes they die while I'm still making up my mind. It's not any better."

He sighs, and hugs her back.

"I can see how that would happen. I mean, it still seems improbable that over the course of five thousand years nobody cared to look past the fear...but I can see how it would happen. I just--don't see it--not being horrible."

"It's pretty horrible! I've mostly made my peace with it but I do not deny that I would be happier if I had friends."

"Well, if you want to be my friend you have to not kill Varanda, but if you find a way to replicate the accident that brought me here you can chuck her into my universe and let her be our problem."

"I'm not dead set on killing Varanda or anything. What was the accident that brought you here?"

"So, when I say the survival rate is one in four, that's not for every magical teenager, that's specifically for people attending the Scholomance. That's a magical school in a pocket dimension--enclaves are pocket dimensions too. It's harder for mals to get in because you've got much more limited contact with the world. Every year, sixteen hundred magical children are magically 'inducted' from spots all over the world, and every year, everyone who's survived their four years is dumped into the hall at the school's connection point with reality. The hall is full of monsters because there are a lot of protective measures between the hall and the rest of the school--monsters get into the rest of the school anyway, of course, but a bunch of them pool in the hall. Usually about half the year survived to enter the hall, and then half of those make it out again."

My year, about two-thirds of the class made it to graduation, and all of those made it out, because I killed every monster in the place before they could touch them. Well--almost every monster, but that's complicated."

And I...I didn't want to leave. Because I'm from an enclave, and my father made me--must have--and I didn't want to go back, didn't want to face him."

My kind of magic responds to desire and belief. I walked through the gates anyway, but I wanted so very badly not to go where the magic would put me. And my kind of magic runs on a resource called 'mana.' And I get mana from monsters I kill. So I had a lot of mana when I walked through those gates."

Anyway. I didn't end up where I was supposed to be. I ended up in Varanda's village instead."

"...that sounds... hard to replicate. Probably not impossible. Very few things are impossible. But hard."

"Inconvenient but not shocking. I had no idea there even were other worlds with humans before then." Sigh. "I didn't have any plans to get all the monsters, or anything. Just wandering around picking them off piecemeal wasn't going to help much in the long run. But I'm gonna miss my mom."

"Well. I can try to get you home. I just can't promise it'll happen anytime soon. Which unfortunately means it doesn't solve the problem of whether Varanda is safe to leave alive."

"...I have no idea what you expect her to do besides 'kill you,' and she definitely does not want to do that. She...won't...make...monsters? I assume when you have powerful magical people making poor life choices this does not usually involve making monsters but you can see how my priors ended up skewed towards monsters."

"The kind of power I've got lets you do a lot of things. More things than you might think were possible. Starting with—if she has the kind of temper I had at that age, she'll have to learn how to stop killing everyone in sight whenever she gets mad. It's not that hard to learn! But it takes some practice. And then there's just..." he gestures at the chimeflowers. "Casually reshaping the world around you. I had to kill someone once who was thrice-dedicated Land because he'd just... walk through a city, neatly unfolding all the buildings like paper until they lay flat, and then leave it that way. He mostly didn't kill people but it was absolutely fucking the treasury, we couldn't afford to put it all back up—I could personally put it all back up, but I just got too fucking tired of it to keep going, and I couldn't always put things back just how they'd been before, and I couldn't get all the trinkets and keepsakes and tools and valuables that got crushed along the way, and he was killing people, not on purpose, just now and then when they happened to be in the way of all the wood and stone he was moving around. So I told him to stop and he said he wouldn't and I told him he was stopping whether he liked it or not and he said he would and then he did it again and then I killed him. And—with the kind of power she's going for, she'll learn how to make herself immortal eventually, and then I can't kill her anymore. So I need to find out ahead of time if she's going to turn out like that guy, and make sure she doesn't get the chance to start, because if I waited for her to start unfolding buildings it might be too late to stop her."

"Why would anyone do that???"

"I wish I knew! He was really insistent! And, you know, it was very pretty, the first time, I hardly minded having to put it all back, it was just that he refused to stop doing it."

"I do not think she would do anything like that but I have no idea how to guess whether someone would do that because I have no idea what would make a person do that!"

"So you're starting to see what I'm up against."

"Okay, yes, fair. In my defense I am familiar with the phenomenon where many people are unreasonable? And she struck me as a reasonable person? As opposed to the unreasonable people whom I have met--many of whom I would also be shocked to find out had decided to...unfold...cities..."

"Reasonable is good! I like when people are reasonable! But... the best way I've found to catch whether someone is going to unfold cities, or just... be too caught up in their own shit to think about how they're using their catastrophic power... is to talk to them. And it's not really that good. And... the more power someone is going for, the less room I have to be generous with them, because the consequences of letting a bad one through are worse. If your friend gets a taste for unfolding cities and can't stop even if she tries—and I do think he was trying, at least some, that last time—and she's immortal and a match for me in power, then I can't protect people from her."

“Well…you said she wouldn’t be immortal right away, right?”

"Yes, that's something people have to actually figure out how to do, it doesn't come free. But it didn't take me that long to figure out and plenty of people are smarter than I am."