"Oh?"

"I have something for it that I left in my room, if you want to test whether you can get past it. It works the same way as making things invisible or silent."

"Sure, why not. Up to you how much you want to mess around with magic experiments before letting me make you immortal."

"...Right, your magic fails in a different way than doing nothing. Even if you're only using it to try to look at me?"

"I'm not gonna push anything to the point of doing damage to nearby stuff while I'm in Milliways, that'd be rude. Mostly looking at things is safe, anyway. I did once smash so much knowledge into my head at once that a boulder felt like a good remedy for the headache, but I've learned better since."

"...How much do you have to learn at once to feel like that?"

"Well, I can't exactly tell you, because I blacked out when it happened and woke up later surrounded by broken rocks and had to piece it all together from what I could see and the bits I still remembered. I know I was trying to learn how to do healing right, because I'd seen enough people do healing wrong to know it was harder than it looked, and I did come away knowing a lot more about how bodies are put together than I did before, but I've never been sure just how much information I hit myself with to get into that state. My best guess is it was something like the shape inside and outside of every human body that had ever lived, but it might have only gotten as far as every human body alive at the time. And I don't know how much detail it went into, though I'm pretty sure it was a lot."

That's... a decision.

"I don't think knowledge magic where I'm from does that. - Anyway, I'm curious if you can get past my defenses that way."

This man has made so many decisions.

"Sure, I can try it," he says, and gazes thoughtfully into the middle distance.

Sekar can perceive things in the manner that he does when using this ability.

Is it possible to be nostalgic for that time you accidentally lit your brain on fire trying to know too many things at once?

Whatever. After half a minute he blinks and shakes his head. "Okay, just getting really familiar with you isn't doing it. There are some more things I could try but they get stupider from here, and I don't really want to try erasing you from reality and replacing you with an identical copy that I can do magic to."

"You think you could? - Milliways security is guaranteed to be able to protect people and now I really want to know what they can do today."

"I am not going to attack you just to find out what Security could do to stop me. But I do think there's a decent chance erasing you from reality would work, if I hit enough of your surroundings at once that it wasn't specifically targeting you. Which would, separately, also be a really dumb thing to do in Milliways."

"It really would be. And we could ask them what kind of magic they have."

"Sure, if you want."

"I also want to know about your stupider ideas."

"Besides 'use more force' there's also—I don't really have the vocabulary to describe this one, it's sort of like 'convincing reality that I should get to do magic to you' but, like, in sort of the same way that carving a piece of wood is convincing it to be a different shape? I am also not doing that one in Milliways. Seems rude."

"...I wonder if I could protect against that but yeah, it seems dangerous to test." He looks around for the security door.

Sekar follows his gaze and takes a half-step back to get out of his way so he can take the lead in getting there.

"It would be so stupid to spar with you but I kind of want to," he says along the way.

"I'm kind of reluctant to try any of my stupid ideas, but if you catch me in the right mood I could go for a pointless fistfight."

"Maybe." He opens the door and holds it in case Sekar wants to go in first.

The office on the other side is very tidy, and contains a desk, some shelves with labeled cardboard bins of paperwork, and a petite blonde girl with teal-tipped ponytails, wearing an oversized pink sweater over skinny jeans and sparkly white Converse with rainbow laces. She's just getting up to answer the door, as though she heard or perhaps sensed them coming.

"Can I help you?"

"I just got curious about your magic - I don’t know if that’s the kind of question people answer for free where you’re from."

"Oh? Curious in what regard? I don't mind answering a few questions as long as I'm not busy."