"Woah, neat! Flames and telepathy are totally different specializations where I'm from!

I would love a tour! Are there any places you don't want me to go, which I might be able to get to by walking, jumping, swimming, or climbing?"

Katherine stands. "Parts of the main house up that direction are private, you probably wouldn't be able to get in anyway. Magic, you know." She smirks. "But this is a small town, Gale Rocks named for the summer storms, recently amicably reorganized. The manor is a bit outside town, fifteen minutes' walk. I like to think we're relaxed and friendly here."

"That's magic I'm not familiar with, cool!"

She rises, picks up the disk, and clutches it to her chest. "...What's summer? A kind of oscillating storm system?"

"Right this way." Out past the door, a portion of the garden is visible. "I suppose, in a way? The days get hotter and longer when our part of Scope is tilted towards the sun more often during half its orbit, and when the oceans grow too warm they form storms. Hurricanes. Hmm... There's an orrery in one of the sitting rooms, I can show you later."

"Days? Are different from uh [cycles] how, oh... Hm. The planet Scope spins around so fast that you can see it happen?!"

She stops and sits down (in a smooth squat, keeping the disk tight). Deep breath. "Sorry, that's just a little unnerving. I know it shouldn't change anything, but the planet I'm from, which is apparently a whole different planet!, doesn't spin like that.

...I'm still not sure what you mean by 'tilt' but I suppose they orrery will make that clear.

How much of Scope is inhabited?"

"You've teleported here from a different planet?" Katherine grins and bounces a bit. "Wow! I'm not sure how that should be possible. Yes, Scope spins! The Old World is pretty dense now, but we only learned how to kill dragons*, oh, seventy years ago? Before that you couldn't cross the ocean without getting mulched. It's not easy even now. And the people living on the New World didn't densify it anywhere near as much. I guess they're the Old and New continents, not worlds, though."

*Enormous magical sky-storms

"An ocean is a really big lake? How much of Scope is ocean? Does anyone live in it?"

"Not really a lake, it's very salty. There are a lot of mangroves in Remii, and people catch fish in it all the time, that's where a good portion of our food comes from even. Looking for places to settle, are we?"

They're emerging from the guest house now. "So the garden wraps around the whole place. We have it arranged by aesthetic more than type. Off that way is the gazebo, and past that a nice lookout point. It's designed to remain in full bloom more or less constantly, for the splendorous pleasure of being able to just-" She picks a cherry-like fruit and pops it into her mouth, stem sticking out. "Mm! Commercial forest-gardens are different."

"Nah, I can't bring anyone here to settle with me. It's just - you have so much space here, and it's so nice! On my planet, Ansaf, everywhere is either packed with people, or barren rock."

"Gorgeous!" She does not join in the snacking.

She zigzags around Katherine to cover more area, ducking under bushes and behind trees where possible without damaging the plants.

"So, how does a dragon... happen? It's just magic not connected to a person at all?"

"You can make a little dragon if you know what you're doing. It's very, very dangerous, because they can escape and become big dragons. I don't know how, probably only a hundred people anywhere know how to do it in detail, but everyone is pretty sure that's where they came from. Someone tried to make a dragon that would do useful magic for them and stay under control, like animals in pens- But they escaped, and bred, or more like copied and mutated, and got bigger and bigger. We're just lucky they can't survive indefinitely over land for some reason."

"Gosh. I wonder if it would be safe to try that on Ansaf, since we don't have any oceans. Are there any public guesses about what useful magic they were supposed to do?"

The gazebo is such a delightful building. A roof that is doing nothing! Currently!

"Actually I'm not sure if any of our specializations even could make a dragon. We can do some things with objects - shaping, freezing, moving - but it's more like putting a piece of ourselves into them, not creating separate magic like a dragon or a language disk."

"Many guesses, none much better than random. I favor either something benign and everyday like food or heating, or they were supposed to be weapons. As for experiments I would advice against. Apparently you grow up hearing all sorts of horror stories if you do arcana track... I have no idea what's at the root of your magic, but admittedly we don't have much more than theories about ours. Everyone starts off generalized, then specializes themselves. Being very smart, and being very determined, both help quite a lot. Perhaps we'll try some experiments, depending on how your magic works?"

The gazebo, made of colorfully painted boards, seems to have a faint breeze around it keeping any falling leaves and petals from settling onto the shiny black roof. Katherine vaults the railing rather than walk around to the stairs.

Nefanie vaults the railing too! "Neat, another object with its own magic." She walks in a circle, then down the stairs and around the outside to check for accessible spaces underneath.

"Oh, wow, that's different. We have a specialization that can create other specializations, but then we can't change a specialization, either our own or someone else's. What's it like, getting to decide?"

There's space under the gazebo, but it's not designed to be accessed.

"A surprising amount of pressure and guesswork." She grimaces. "You have to study very hard and try a lot of different things when you're young if you want to make the most of yourself. Small children, they learn everything much faster, yes? And yet they haven't earned much magic of their own yet, so they have limited chances to practice, and they're not the most diligent and forethoughtful creatures, heh. And that kind of pressure isn't necessarily good for you."

Can she reach a hand through a gap into a space that she could fit in?

"Oh. That makes sense. I guess some of our specializations have to practice their skills, but at least they have their full power from the start. Sorry. I was thinking it sounded fun to grow and explore, but it's just another thing to worry about.

What kind of experiments do you want to try? What additional information do you need about my magic? Which, I'm getting the sense, is really quite different from yours... I wonder if there are other planets with yet different magic!"

She can reach a hand through the slats to a three-foot or so gap underneath the gazebo.

"No, my apologies for bringing down the mood. I'm a bit of a worrier." She shrugs. "I think every known persistent magical effect relies on having a stock of black... The most obvious thing I'm thinking of is giving you an artificing primer. There are mental exercises. Or having you teleport near a speckle sheet or under the gaze of an inkscope, those are both used to record and forensically analyze magic devices when our own sense for magic isn't enough. The very most basic shape in black magic can grab and hold on to other magics... A general anti-magic ward stops our teleporting, but does it stop yours? And does a simple hexagrammic circle do the same?"

Katherine peers down as Nefanie circles the gazebo.

"I'm sure a doctor would be keen to examine you, and I don't know what kinds of tools they use. After that I don't really have things I would describe as 'specific ideas'."

She pulls her hand back - she can return to explore the inside later.

"I don't know what any of that is but it sounds fascinating! I'd love to learn artificing if I can. Even if all I can make is an object that teleports, someone would probably have a use for that.

I don't think I can teleport under an inkscope if that's a tool you look through? I can't if someone is watching. A speckle sheet sounds like it has a better chance of working. Like, if I go into a small cold room, stay a while, and leave, you'll be able to tell that I was there because it's warmer now. That's okay, it doesn't block me.

Oh, the colors are kinds of magic? Blue, red, black... red blue green white black? I thought that was a philosophy thing!

What do doctors do? We have specializations for identifying sickness, making medicine, moving things in and out of people, cutting and seeing inside people, and doing small delicate tasks. Can you fix cancer of the blood?"

"Fascinating... What counts as watching? What counts as 'someone'? If you teleporting would cause a bell to fall that I would hear? The kind of inkscope that can record things for later is one we don't have. Speckle sheets it is. They are philosophy, and ways of life- Embodying a color is how you best get more of it! We have specializations for identifying sickness and injury, making medicine, for changing the shape and traits of a body both for cutting-open and moving-in-and-out reasons and cosmetic or functional ones, for dealing with poison and non-contagious diseases like cancer - it probably depends on some factors I don't know about, I think they can tell your body that the blood cancer is a disease it should fight? -I know there's a lot of small cumulative tricks to fix things people tend to get when they grow older, the heart, the blood vessels, the bones..."

"If teleporting caused the bell to fall, yeah, that would block me. If my presence caused the bell to fall, I'm not sure. My home has unsteady tiles in the floor that make noise, pretty similar, and that blocks people. But if someone tried to come in balanced on one toe on a quiet spot on the floor, they could do that even if they immediately fell over.

Animals don't count, unless they're trained to report to a person. Hm, if you can read memories from animals, they would block me...

A wobbly tile that leaves a mark to be checked later generally doesn't block us, but a friend of mine got it to work with a floor twenty feet wide covered with small levers, each of which made a separate mark. His theory was that the evidence left on that floor was more 'conclusive' of teleporting, but he died in a bizarre mountaineering accident before he could prove it.

You might have to make the speckle sheets worse before they'll work, then? Or have someone else teleport around too so it's not 'conclusive' that it was me."

"Oh my stars, dad is going to be obsessive about designing tests. And probably pay you to play along with them."

"Great, I hope I can make this whole thing worthwhile for you.

...I don't normally behave so irresponsibly, you know. I only do that much drugs a few times a year, and I wasn't expecting to end up in a stranger's very expensive garden. Only when a liefling is visiting - that's the specialization that makes medicine. Oh, I wonder if they could make something to tell a body that cancer is a disease! That's kind of obvious now that you mentioned it, though, so maybe there's a reason it's harder than it sounds. Or maybe not!

But anyway, yeah, just wanted to make that clear."

She comes down from the gazebo and heads towards the edge of the garden, where the wooden walkway is.

"I'm not judging. Well, I'm judging a little bit, you know, in the bigger temples the students are high basically all the time to specialize faster, it is not healthy. But occasionally, why not? I'm curious what sort of drugs now, and if they'd be fun~ We thought you were shipwrecked somehow at first- Mitra took a look at you with green magic and decided that you're undernourished by our standards. I think a trip to the healers' commune is much more important than the sawmill, there's probably a lot you can learn."

"I don't know, I just ate the leaves he gave me! ...and lay around feeling cozy and hallucinating, with a slow heartbeat and a tingling in my feet and ears.

There's so much to eat here! At home, my food is spread across the mountainside. I have to teleport between each bite, pretty much; no other specialization that needs to eat normal food could survive there."

"Wow, is that the ocean? It's huge! Only fish live there, no people? You don't have any specializations to live there? I guess you have plenty of space, it just seems like a waste."

"That's the ocean, yep! The vast deep. That does sound nice. Most of ours are stimulants, not relaxants... Sometimes you just want to space out, no? There's no one really living in it, just a few on it... Not just fish though, there's amazing creatures like squid and barnacles and anemones. Whales are the elephants of the sea, they're mammals like you and I!"

They can have a pleasant chat heading down into town. There is a brief patchwork of single-story sheds and houses, then a few blocks of tall stone buildings, many shining with artificial light. It's a little crowded. Signs proclaim craftsmen and stores of various sorts, a bank, a courier office.

The streets are not that crowded, they see a few dozen strangers. Most people wear clothes, at least pants, or are pretty heavily furred if they don't. Maybe a quarter of them have an obvious nonhuman feature, and they only see two people as nonhuman as Nefanie- a hulking bull-like horned man doing masonry to a damaged wall, and a woman with weird lanky multi-jointed arms and legs, with suction cups on them, clambering up and down the side of the cliffs and the drainage tunnels along them. She gets some appreciative looks and a couple of wolf-whistles, but people on the street here are either in a hurry or keeping to themselves for the most part. One man tries to chat to Katherine about 'business opportunities' but she deflects him with the obligation of seeing to a guest, with a faint look of annoyance.

"Behold, Storm Ward! The part of town that almost never gets flooded between elevation and good foundations. If you can't carry coins, perhaps we'll get you some sort of debit arrangement at the bank. Maybe a removable tattoo to show people?"

"Oh, cool! I wish I could bring someone here to try making people from those kinds of animals!"

(Nefanie diverts into every alley they pass.)

"We can't make light like that, but we can build with stone much more easily..."

She nods solemnly to the people giving her appreciative looks.

"How much is specialization related to appearance? You mentioned changing bodies for cosmetic or functional reasons, and I think we've passed some of each - how often are either done?"

"A tattoo saying that people can trust my word about how much money I'm giving them?" She mimes holding up her palm, one of the few parts of her body that's not covered in fur. "And then they can go to the bank, who I will have told that I transferred the money? Seems complicated, but okay. What if someone steals the tattoo?"