"You’re holding a country together by military force or by personally talking everyone into following you, not because an otherwise stable country voted for who they thought would do the best job of governing and picked you."

"Ah. Yeah, definitely closer to the first thing than the second thing. The deal is that I did something kind of objectively stupid that left me with enormous amounts of magical power and then I killed my father and took his empire and extended it to the rest of the continent, and that was all thousands of years ago so by now people are just kind of growing up knowing that I've basically always ruled the world."

"Power doesn’t really come in degrees like that where I’m from and so far I think we’re lucky that way. Congratulations on your conquest, though."

"I was pretty young and stupid at the time but I like to think I've grown up a lot since then."

"Sounds likely! Is however you’ve lived that long for sale?"

"I can make other people immortal but I've got no idea what you'd pay me for it."

"I could make your belongings unbreakable or make you immune to extreme temperatures or some kinds of injuries or other people’s magic but we should check that I can actually do that. I could pay in cash. I could tell stories. I don’t know, what do you want most?"

"I want to make my empire more prosperous. But I don't know how to do that."

"I might! Which if any of germ theory, printing presses, electricity, computers and vaccines are unfamiliar?"

"...the printing press is pretty new but we have it, I want to hear more about the rest."

"Bar can sell you books on all of them, just so you know, but - so, some contagious diseases are caused by creatures so small you can't even see them, like how it's hard to see mites but much smaller, just kind of eating you from the inside, and they can be gotten off of surfaces by washing with soap and they can usually be killed by extreme heat, so for example by boiling water before you drink it. Vaccines can teach your body to recognize them in advance, which - so, you know how some creatures only get some diseases once in their lives? Vaccines let you skip straight to the part where you don't get them again. Complete with the thing where if there's anything really wrong with your immune system you'll still get them. They're like a nonmagical and slightly worse version of a disease ward. Computers are objects that can remember information and do math and do small nonmagical illusions of images and sounds, which in practice means you can do things like write a letter and have it sent almost as fast as if you were using paired artifacts, or ask it to multiply a bunch of numbers, or even have a public discussion forum where it's possible to remove instances of people showing up just to annoy everyone by reciting the entire alphabet. And if you don't already know about those, it's likely you don't know much about nonmagical automation, either - that's a thing where people use steam or electricity to make their tools move on their own. I would definitely recommend getting some books - and reading them here and copying them out by hand because they won't be in your language if you take them home."

"Hmm. Yeah, that sounds worth doing. What kind of immortal are you looking to be? An indefinite natural lifespan is pretty easy, an indefinite natural lifespan and being kind of hard to kill is a bit of a job, I've never actually given my full immortality to anyone else before and would have to put some thought into figuring out where to even start."

"I'm already kind of hard to kill! Just not dying of old age would be good."

"Oh, that's a snap, then. You want that now?"

"Unless there are downsides I should know about. Do I need to drop my wards to let you do it - actually, can we check whether you can do that through my wards? I don't expect you can but it'd be good to check."

"Sure, lemme see..."

He extends his magic, not trying particularly hard to bypass any defenses that may be present.

It's like there's something almost glassy, except that real glass has friction and texture and things can cling to it or adhere to it. Valanda is simply not a thing one can do magic to.

"Well, there's definitely something in the way. How hard do you want me to try to get past it?"

"What kind of trying harder can you do? I know what I'd do if I were trying to, I don't know, kill someone who had a ward like mine up, but that's not what you're trying to do and I don't have any idea how your magic works."

"I could put more force into it, which often helps but runs the risk of side effects—I'd stop before I was in danger of making the tabletop sprout leaves or anything like that. Or I could try to get clever, like—at first glance it feels like you're somehow just not something I can do magic to, but you're someone I can talk to and something I can see and hear, and when I do magic that sort of thing matters, so it's possible I could get to be able to do magic to you if I learned enough about you and possible I could learn enough about you very fast with magic if I was smart about it."

"Huh. Learning more would help?"

"Yeah. But 'learning about' might be the wrong way to put it, it's not like the amount of facts I know that makes the difference, it's the amount of... connectedness? The amount that your presence has affected me, or the amount I'm familiar with you?"

"My magic doesn't work that way at all. Does that make it an especially good idea in your world to retire to a private island and never have anything to do with anyone?"

"I wouldn't think so especially? Having a lot of connectedness only starts to matter when you're doing really crazy stuff like resurrecting the dead or, apparently, trying to do magic to people who can't have magic done to them. The rest of the time, there's not that big a leap between knowing someone is there to do magic to at all and being able to do whatever it is you're after."

"Huh. Where I'm from we have other magic that might also keep you from using magic to learn about people but I don’t use a lot of it."