This corner of her domain is much like the rest of it: damp, chill, and dark. No one's in the area and there's nothing being grown, so she indulges herself with a shower of the sort of piercing rain that drives straight through clothing to soak a person to their bones. No lightning, though. She doesn't approve of storms.
"We don't know. Magic might have learned to extend the definition of person itself from context or maybe someone else who understands magic better than we do extended the definition of person to include uploads. These sort of uncertainties are why my people try to avoid depending on magic."
"Oh sure, we've run a variety of tests with magic's ability to learn. We've also studied the definitions of terms defined a long time ago, like what counts as a boat or a book. Boats apparently counts submarines but not airplanes. Books seem to refuse to count computers."
"That depends on how long you want to spend teaching it, and how many motes you have available. At its most basic, magic can apply forces to objects, create light, create matter, gather information about the world, learn from patterns, do computation, move things into sublayers, pull things out of sublayers, bobble things, interfere with bobble creation, push things into or pull things out of threads and send messages. There were also a lot of less basic compound operations that were taught to magic a very very long time ago, one of those is to recognize people, another is to create illusions that only one or a small group of people can see. It's nearly impossible to use complex magic without that illusion capability providing debug output so I'm not sure how the system was used before that capability existed."
"I got forknapped by Wanderdeep about five years ago now. I discovered the Institute about two years after that."
"The magic of Wanderdeep decided I was a good candidate to wield magic so it made a copy of me and placed it in Wanderdeep."
"As far as I can tell, it won't pick someone else that way until all the current wielders are dead. And in the three years since I've found the Institute, Wanderdeep has picked another four people from the various researchers that have been stationed there."
"We're really not sure where Wanderdeep comes from so we're planning to just cooperate with it and ensure there are always active magecrafters instead of trying to destroy its core structures. It's too useful to risk destroying it entirely."
"It's hard to say for sure. We know there's at least two other continents but there's not much travel between them. If I had to guess, I'd say... four hundred. Maybe more."
"That sounds really small at first but then I remember the whole god thing, actually how big is Ellayania's territory?"
"So your world is smaller than mine or has more ocean or there's a lot of area that's not claimed by any god."
"Oh, that would be another possibility wouldn't it. How do gods differ? What leads some gods to be larger than others?"
"There's a lot of factors, but one big one is positioning. Gods need worshippers to grow. If they're in an area with fewer mortals, they won't be able to grow as big."
"Huh, I guess that's one way to design a system that will hopefully put good people in power. Well, depending on how easy it is to coerce worship."