"I have another form of magic called sorcery. It feeds on five aspects of a source called lifeforce—wakefulness, breath, stamina, health, and youth—and it is possible to transfer those to other people. Vampires don't produce any breath, wakefulness, and stamina—I don't actually need to breathe or sleep and I could stand still as a statue for hundreds of years—but we generate endless amounts of the other two. I could transfer a million years of youth to you right now and a comparable amount of health and you wouldn't age for a long, long time. You'd also be able to share this with other people, so I'd at least buy you enough time to develop a technological solution." Pause. "Also everyone in this world has been capable of using sorcery since I arrived."

" - that does sound a fair bit neater. We really can't do it without somewhere for people to go, though I can think of a good candidate for an exception."

"Who?"

"Might be worth extending the life of a specific politician who'll be notably better at achieving the things you want than her likely replacements. It's not urgent on the scale of weeks, though. And I might not have a full picture yet of what you want."

"The flourishing of all sapient beings."

"Okay. Is that all the relevant magic or is there more -"

"The last bit of relevant magic is the sorta-scarce resource—I have these crystals one can wish upon, the larger the crystal the more complex one can make the wish, and they turn to dust after being used. But if you collect this dust and expose it to sunlight for long enough it coalesces into a crystal again. It only works at conjuring things or creating physical effects—or, if it does anything more then it needs larger crystals than I can make with the dust I've collected."

"Type of sunlight matter? How long does it take to recoalesce? Have you wished for more crystal dust, have you done a chemical scan of the crystal dust -"

"No, it takes a few weeks of intermittent sunlight for it to start recoalescing into pebble-sized crystals but a pocket everything costs a fist-sized one which is about two months, I have and it doesn't work, the crystal dust and the crystals are as far as I've been able to determine literally just ordinary rose quartz that is somehow magic."

He nods. "When you say everyone in the world can now do sorcery -"

"Do you want the full explanation? Summary is that everyone now can perform certain actions to achieve certain magical effects, plus everyone who suffers trauma has a tiny chance of developing a magical ability in response, although I haven't heard of any cases so far."

"I would very much appreciate the full explanation."

"Like I said, sorcery is fueled by five things related to biology: breath, stamina, wakefulness, health, and youth. Those are literally spent when you perform magic, and youth doesn't regenerate. Sorcery is divided into gifts and rituals: the gifts are the magical abilities I mentioned which can appear either due to trauma or via meditation, and a person can have up to five, one per lifeforce aspect; rituals combine certain base actions in certain ways to achieve certain effects. With me so far?"

He combs his fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck as if this is a broadly-recognized communicative gesture. "Yes."

Sadde's been around long enough to recognise it, yes. She'll skip the green parts. "If one is not taught how to do sorcery they're very unlikely to learn on their own as even the simplest rituals don't involve common actions—they're more like chanting things, or burning herbs, or drawing circles on the floor. Someone who does know sorcery and has enough fuel can generate fairly arbitrary physical effects, create wards, become undetectable, grant boons, or even open portals to other worlds if they have something from these other worlds to use as focus. Gifts are more intuitive, and involve things like telekinesis, or enhanced senses, or antimagic fields, or the ability to create new ways to perform rituals."

"For you, health and youth can be sacrificed costlessly - how much is sacrificed to achieve an effect, for anybody else -"

"The different aspects are more suited to different types of effects—for instance, stamina tends to fuel more physical or energy-related effects, like things relating to speed or endurance, while youth is usually sacrificed for the most powerful effects, like permanent boosts. You could chill a glass of water and become a bit winded, or spend an hour at twice the speed and then need to rest for a couple of hours, or sacrifice two and a half years of youth to create an entirely new way to do sorcery."

" - and that's the one you have infinite access to -"

"Yes. And can grant arbitrarily large but finite access to to anyone else."

"Your ambitions seem reasonable to me." 

"I think so, too. But your world has the distinct problem that most straightforward ways of giving people more power end up with lots and lots of people dead."

"I think we can route around that but there are certainly ample ways to get it wrong. What were you planning to do when you got to Olvala -"

"Pretend to be an alien who was very moved by the reds' plight, with the advantage that it wouldn't be pretense at all, and try to help them not die, and listen to them and figure out what their side of it all is since most people think of them as garbage when they think of them at all. I'd definitely not implement anything involving them without at least meeting some of them."

"They'll be utterly terrified of you."

She changes her hair to red.