"Yeah."

He lets go.

"—do you not want my mother knowing about the thing or was it just, uh, awkward to bring up—"

"If you want to tell her you can but she's - not entitled by virtue of being the subject and it's awkward."

"I'm probably going to tell her. It's likely to be relevant to any discussion of continued contact between our worlds and whether or not you might want to stay in this one. —You don't have to know the answer already but do you think you'll want to stay in this one?"

"Maybe?"

"Well. All right. Anyway, continuing the magic comparison - I am also a wizard, which means I can do wizardry, that's how I teleported you here. Doing wizardry consists of making power pull gestures corresponding to the magnitude of a particular spell's cost while saying the name of the spell and mentally specifying any intentional components it has, and then the spell happens. Spells are inventable, it just takes fully specifying the spell and then naming it something that doesn't already refer to another spell. And spell costs draw on a thing called channeling capacity which varies in magnitude from person to person - you probably don't have one, not being from Elcenia - and if you cast something that costs more than half your CC it hurts and if you cast something that costs your entire CC or more you die."

"Can I get one?"

"I don't know of any research into the subject. Maybe."

"I wanted to study artifacts at university but they won't let you into the department unless you agree to being periodically mindread."

"—what, why."

"Artifacts are dangerous and they want access to them controlled carefully. I didn't want to actually interact with artifacts directly, I wanted to do statistics, but I haven't gotten anywhere appealing the requirement."

"What manner of statistics?"

"Artifacts are created when someone dies and their favorite thing turns into one. This happens pretty rarely and is usually undesirable - you don't want to surprise your loved ones with an artifact - but also the artifacts are based in weird ways on traits of the person. Like, say the thing where I'm blind is paired with the replacement sense, the thing might have belonged to a blind person - or it might have belonged to someone who studied X-rays, or it might have belonged to someone who trained seeing-eye dogs, or something like that, but it's not going to have belonged to someone with nothing to do with the traits of the artifact. I wanted to see if there was anything to be learned about who leaves artifacts and how their traits are imprinted into them."

"That sounds immensely useful. I don't know of a way to give someone a CC who doesn't have one already but you could try learning witchcraft if you liked, nothing horrible happens if you fail to do witchcraft properly except that you have a bunch of haphazardly combined ingredients instead of a potion."

"What do potions do?"

"Things ranging from 'shampoo' to 'painkillers' - the reason I'm so short is because of a rare side effect of a painkiller I took when I was a kid. Applies to all my forms."

"Dragonishes are usually bigger than that?"

"Yeah, my natural form is approximately half normal size."

"There are humans that small without potion side effects but not many."

"Humans have more size variation than natural-formed dragonishes, but I probably wouldn't have been twice this tall without the potion, dragonish assumed forms don't tend toward extremes. It is occasionally inconvenient to be this short but I don't really mind it. Even comes in handy once in a while."

Nod.

"I bluffed my way into a junior scoot racing league when I was eighty-one by wearing an opaque helmet to their qualifying race and stating under lie detection that a poorly tested medical potion stunted my growth!"

"...assuming years here are about like at home and I remember the conversion factor right that's very young!"

"Equivalent of a human eight-year-old, yeah. I was an enormously precocious and consequently an enormously frustrated child - age restrictions work on an equivalency basis and I did not take well to the fact that I had been around for longer than some species' entire lifespans and still wasn't allowed to do hardly anything interesting. So I flew the qualifier for the junior league of Scoot Lively and came in third and they didn't kick me out when I took my helmet off and I've been racing ever since. —I suppose without wizardry you wouldn't have scoots; they're magical flying vehicles."

"We have airplanes."

"Can one race them?"