She is in a - flat area. It's so flat. There is dirt under her. The dirt is flat.

Loops of biting cold shift and writhe under her skin, as though she is being aggressively snuggled by a nestful of ghost snakes.

She produces a rather eloquent whimper. The places the ghost snakes are not snuggling are too hot. It's an odd sensation.

She can't see, and she's not sure how much to trust the sense advertising flatness; she crawls, a little, hands outstretched.

The ghost snakes settle down after a minute. The sense advertising flatness also advertises that she is now wrapped in artistic loops of thorny vines, with huge soft petals stretched between them to make a sort of swimsuit. Her other remaining senses corroborate. The vines are chilly, the petals pleasantly cool. There is a spiral of vine around her left wrist that ends in a single bloom, perched corsage-like just above the back of her hand.

And off in the distance, in the direction she's crawling, there is - fire?

...how does this interact with the jeans and shirt and fluff parka she was wearing before?

The petalsuit is under all that, but her clothes have sustained minor damage in a few places when they fought the vines and the vines won.

...she gets up. She walks towards the fire. It is very flat so she doesn't trip.

So flat. The flattest.

The fire is being produced by a - creature. The creature has four legs and two wings and a long neck and a long tail and in general strongly resembles the sort of thing you would think of if someone said 'dragon', even before you get to the part about the breathing of fire.

Oh no now her mind is going all kinds of fucked up places how many artifacts even was that.

"- um."

—the creature very abruptly turns into a human. The human stares at her in utter bafflement.

Oh good. - sort of. What even is her life.

"Um," she says again.

"Where did you even come from," he asks in a language she has never heard before and yet somehow understands perfectly.

"...Noregr?" she says helplessly. "I, um, a lot of artifacts landed on me, I don't even know how many. Several."

"—and by 'artifact', you mean—?"

"Magic objects? Um, where am I."

"On the bottom of the world. ...The world in question is Elcenia."

"...my world doesn't have a bottom."

"—really? How's it manage that?"

"It's spherical. - down is the middle."

"I mean, down is the middle here too, but it's a big flat square and all the - things - are on the side where we currently aren't. Plants, dwellings, weather."

"...okay." Swallow. "Um, an artifact is a magical object each of which confers when touched one benefit and one drawback. A lot of them fell on me. I'm not sure how many. Too many. At least I don't seem to be dying."

"Objects with the described properties are not a thing I've previously heard of. We have different kinds of magic than that."

"Okay. Uh, good for you. Is that how you can turn into a dragon."

"A - well, dragonish - is what I am, a human is what I turn into," he corrects.

"Oh." Sigh. "- I have touched way too many artifacts."

"It sounds like that's a concerning state to be in!"

"Yes. It is. There are - at least - five. Probably more. It'd be a coincidence if all of them had drawbacks I could notice right away."

"Is there anything I can do to help—?"

"Um."

"...um?"

"Please don't freak out."

"...okay."

"One of the artifact effects I have noticed appears to have made me fall in love with the first person I saw it's really weird I'm sorry."

"That's - concerning. I am concerned. For you."

"It's a concerning thing. Is there anything I should be concerned about besides the part where I am subject to a mind-altering effect."

"Mostly that and - its logical consequences - like, normally the first thing I'd look into if I found someone from another world stranded on the bottom of this one would be getting them home, but this seems like it might complicate that..."

"I mean it doesn't - confer an obligation or anything - is there actually a way to do that -"

"Interworld magic is a thing, it's a bit obscure and I don't personally know any of the spells but I can look them up, what do you mean by confer an obligation?"

"...you don't have to keep me around just because I landed here and became magically in love with you? If you don't want to."

"...well, yes, that's true, but even if you'd landed here and not become magically in love with me, if you'd decided that you wanted to stay in Elcenia I would've put some effort into arranging that."

"I appreciate that."

"I feel like it's the least I can do, really."

"It's not your fault I got hit by a van full of improperly stored artifacts."

"Sure, but it's not your fault either, and I have more resources to apply to the situation than you do. Speaking of which, would you perhaps like to not be on the bottom of the world anymore, I can teleport you home and you can meet my mother."

"Sure, why not. Is it just me or is it very flat and featureless here?"

"—it's not just you, no."

"- one or more of the artifacts have struck me blind and deaf, I can hear words but not anything else so I think that's whatever's giving me the ability to speak your language overriding the being deaf. Maybe if I'm lucky I can also read. I have a - replacement sense - might be from the same artifact or a different one - but I wasn't sure how accurate it was."

"The more I hear about this 'artifacts' thing, the more concerning it sounds." He holds out a hand in her direction, explaining, "Passenger-capable teleport spells almost always target by touch."

...she takes his hand.

And he makes a gesture with his other hand and says something unintelligible and then they are in a different place. It is not nearly so flat here, and there are plants and an occasional tree within her range, and directly in front of them is a cozy little house. He lets go of her hand.

"Oh, okay, apparently my new sense works fine, assuming this is a house." She points at the house.

"Yes," he says. "That is a house. My house, even. With my mother in it, assuming she hasn't gone anywhere in the last couple of degrees."

(There is indeed a person of humanoid shape in the house.)

"I wouldn't know how to recognize your mother but there's someone, yes."

"Well, let's find out."

He opens the door and proceeds inside.

"I'm home and I brought a guest!"

The person comes into the living room to greet them.

"How did you manage to dig up one of those?" she wonders. And, turning to the guest: "Hello, I'm Koridaar."

"I'm Annie."

"Pleased to meet you."

"And I'm Mial," says Mial. "She just sort of appeared, apparently there was some kind of magical accident."

"It's complicated."

"It is that," he agrees.

"- in my world magic is based around artifacts each of which when touched confers one bad and one good effect and I have at least five maybe more I haven't noticed."

"Oh, dear. What have you noticed so far?"

"I'm counting by drawbacks - I am too hot and too cold, which is I think better than only one of those things? Those are probably separate. I'm blind and deaf which might be separate or not - I can hear you anyway but nothing that isn't talking - I showed up here, that's one. And there's a psychological effect. And I might be missing some."

"That sounds altogether unfortunate," she says. "I suppose you're lucky to have landed on a family of wizards and problem-solvers. To have landed on anyone at all, for that matter, if you landed on the bottom of the world."

"Yeah. I have some kind of healing factor which might have kept me alive but if I have a way to get off the bottom of the world I don't know about it. And it'd have to be an unusually good healing factor to handle, like, not drinking water."

"One can in theory get off the bottom of the world by walking but it takes a while, worlds being world-sized."

"Yes, that seems like it would be very time-consuming."

"So I'm glad you managed to find my son instead."

"Yeah," Mial agrees.

"Apparently interworld magic is even a thing here."

"Yeah - d'you think we've got anything in the collection on it?" he asks his mother.

"Well, I don't have an entire book about interworld magic, but there might be a reference or two. I'll take a look. And we can try a library if I don't get lucky."

"Thank you."

"I'm happy to help. Let me go see about those books."

She goes up the stairs.

"Do you want anything to eat?" wonders Mial.

"When the van hit me I was on my way to school shortly post-breakfast, so I'm not hungry yet. Thank you though."

"You're welcome. Should we, I don't know, be comparing worlds or something?"

"Maybe? Uh, mine has only humans as the sapient species, and only artifacts by way of magic... I think if you had electricity in here I would be able to notice wiring with this sense..."

"Elcenia has enough sapient species that I'm not confident I can list them all off the top of my head - humans dragons elves dwarves halflings merfolk pixies sprites - and varieties of magic likewise, although there's fewer. Wizardry and witchcraft are the most commonly practiced, and dragonishes have magic of our own, and then there are mages and lights and sorcerers which are all inborn magical gifts, and merfolk have some merfolk-only stuff. Oh, and wolfriders, those exist and arguably are or have magic."

"What kind of magic do you have besides, uh, turning into a human?" Is she pink she might be a little pink.

Mial does not indicate having noticed any pinkness.

"I can speak any language I've heard of, plus Draconic which is only available to dragonishes, it's notorious for thwarting every translation spell that's been tried. I can assume forms other than my natural one and shift into them and back at will," he turns into a little silver-accented merlin and then back into a little silver-eyed human, "and my natural form can breathe fire, and my name is a magical property I have, and I'm a blue-group so I have ten form slots instead of five and can assume hybrid forms. Black-group dragonishes have enhanced senses, red group's thing is fire, white group's thing is flying, violet group is aquatic, green group are empaths. —You basically won't find anyone outside my house using the term 'dragonish', mostly people just talk about dragons and either don't know shrens exist or wish they didn't, but shrens are by any sane standard a variety of dragon and I am one."

"...I wonder if it thwarts my translation artifact. Why is a shren different from a regular dragon?"

"Shrens are not siaddaki," he says in Draconic.

"...thwarts my translation artifact."

"Well. Shrenhood is a contagious condition which some dragons hatch with. It makes us unable to fly in our natural forms, and a lesser-known property of dragonishes is that if we spend too long of a solid interval not flying under our own power, we experience esu, which starts out as lethargy and progresses through increasing amounts of pain until we reset the timer by flying. Dragonishes age ten times slower than humans and can't shift until we're about twenty. Being a baby shren is not fun."

Small unhappy noise.

"Sorry. I'm fine, honestly, I cope unusually well for a shren. Anyway, the other thing is that Draconic is a magical language and for the most part it is very convenient about providing words with the exact connotations the speaker wants to use, but on the subject of shrens in particular it is emphatically opinionated, specifically to the tune that we definitely aren't dragons, cannot reasonably be categorized alongside dragons in any sense more narrow than 'they are both kinds of sapient being' and sort of dubiously even then, and are inherently horrible and disgusting and shouldn't exist." Pause. "I cope better than average with that too."

"...can I hug you anyway?"

...he smiles. "Sure."

Hug.

Hug. "Thanks."

"Of course."

"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?"

"I suppose one could but it's not customary."

"One is missing out, then, racing scoots is amazing. Well, it's not for everyone. It's amazing for me, anyway."

"It sounds fun."

"It is! What's the approximate range on your weird sense, I wonder if it's safe to teach you how to fly a scoot..."

"Couple hundred feet sharpish and blurrier for another couple hundred feet."

"Hmm. Well, maybe."

"- I'd like to check if I can read."

"—that's a good idea. Uh—"

He makes a gesture and says a thing and a readout of the current time appears in the air in Leraal numerals, ticking along every few seconds.

She breathes a sigh of relief. "Good translation artifact."

"Oh good."

"Yeah that would have been bad. I write a lot."

"I wouldn't like to be blind and deaf but I would really really not like to be blind, deaf, and consequently illiterate," Mial agrees.

"Yeah this could have been way worse. There's pairs of artifacts that just straight up kill you - I guess some of those I might not have noticed yet - a single artifact won't do that at least."

"...there's pairs of artifacts that not only straight-up kill you but also wait a while before doing that so you can't be confident they aren't going to??"

"It'd be like, there's one that makes you need to sleep for twenty hours a day, it'd combine badly with one that gave you insomnia."

"Well that's terrible."

"Yeah. I don't think any of the drawbacks I've noticed have obvious collisions though."

"It doesn't sound like it. And you've even got at least one mitigation, with the language thing versus the eliminated senses."

"Yep. Depending on which drawback it goes with the translation artifact could be really popular."

"Around here there's translation spells, but if I remember right, wizardry plain doesn't work outside of Elcenia."

"Do you have contact with a lot of worlds here?"

"Not habitually! Interworld magic is more of a theoretical discipline than anything, I only know anything about it because I'm insatiably curious."

"Is it going to be intractably expensive to ever see my parents again?"

"Shouldn't be. My mother's a retired research wizard and her area of focus was teleport spells; even if there doesn't currently exist a way to contact them, with a little reading we can come up with one."

"It's just I can't think of a reason to have inexpensively accessible access to other worlds with different magic and technology and not be finding lots of them to interact with."

"It's been decades since I picked up a book on this but to my recollection one of the major hurdles is specifying a world - like, it's possible to do 'random' but that's hardly a guarantee of good results - and spell invention is a decidedly nontrivial effort and interworld stuff tends to be high-cost, which means most people either can't safely cast it or don't really want to. I think I entertained an idle thought of establishing interworld contact but the only relevant spell I could get my hands on at the time was 'summon a random person from a random world with no warning', which has, uh, obvious ethical issues."

"Yes, a bit. Well. Maybe my getting hit with a van will turn out to be a marvelous opportunity."

"Maybe so."

"Even if wizardry doesn't work in my world it can probably be used to do stuff here that my world would pay for and gains from trade and all that. Woo." She sits in a chair without turning to pretend to look at it.

"Yeah. And hey, nobody here will want to read your mind before allowing you to study magical theory. Or at least if there are any such people they will not represent the sole available road to doing so. And to my knowledge there's only one person in the world who can read minds."

"That's a weird number of people who can do that for there to be."

"So dragonish group-specific magic comes in amounts. There's the normal tier, and then a more powerful tier called 'unusuals' because they're unusual, and a yet more powerful tier called 'uniques' because there is approximately one of them at a time and sometimes not even that. Unique green-groups, of which there is currently one, have nearly arbitrary mind magic."

"Well that's terrifying."

"Little bit. By all accounts she's as nice a wielder of terrifyingly powerful mind magic as you could ask for. Although if I'd been consulted I think I would've preferred that she not be a dragon since dragons can get really unreasonable about shrens. Still, I can just keep out of her way, she's demonstrably not going around wiping us from existence."

"I suppose."

He shrugs.

"...so what do you do besides race scoots? Why were you on the bottom of the world?"

"I'm a wizard but not employed as such; scoot racing brings in some respectable prize money when you're as good at it as I am. I was on the bottom of the world incinerating newspapers because I do that sometimes when they contain letters to the editor from unreasonable dragons complaining that they published an article about me."

"That's terrible."

"Isn't it just? —And I needed to be on the bottom of the world to do that because the vector of shren contagion is 'a dragon and a shren being within two hundred feet of each other while both in natural form', so it's kind of unconscionable to assume my natural form anywhere that might conceivably put me within two hundred feet of an unwarned dragon."

"- yes, I suppose. Even if they're unreasonable."

"The more unreasonable about shrens they are, the more they would be harmed by it. It's not unheard-of for shrens to kill themselves even when it didn't happen to them suddenly and traumatically out of the blue one day."

"Oh."

"So I'm really not risking it. I have extra safety spells on my scoot and everything. —when a dragonish is injured to the point of death in an assumed form, we involuntarily revert to our natural forms on the spot."

"I guess that's better than dying. - and I still think that if I speculate it about someone who is not you, yay."

"...um?"

"Sorry, the, uh, artifact is kind of hard to think around, I'm compensating with bad humor."

"Oh. Uh."

...he hesitates.

"...if you, uh, preferred not to be encumbered by those side effects, it's possible the unique green-group could help, although I don't know how open she is to doing favours for strangers and I'd want to know more about her before I'd be fully comfortable recommending that anyone ask her for that kind of help."

"It'd - depend."

"On?"

"I don't want to solve mindfuckery with more mindfuckery unless keeping this mindfuckery is going to be - unpleasant."

"- if you want me to ask her I will."

"I'm - I don't know. I know you said that you showing up out of nowhere with a pile of magical problems does not confer any obligations on me, but - what I want is... for all this to turn out well for you. And I don't know how to accomplish that but leveraging your rearranged priorities to get you to go re-rearrange your priorities doesn't seem like the right response."

"I'm - in general very averse to mind-reading or mind-alteration. I would have been scared to pieces of whatever artifact did this. But I don't think reversal is straightforward, I think I might wind up with memories I couldn't make sense of or - rebuilt instead of reverted priorities - and that's only better if there's an approximately practical advantage associated."

"Yeah. And, well. I hardly know where to start on evaluating - possible practical advantages."

"Yeah it's not really the best vantage point."

"I'm also not—entirely sure what factors go into that—"

"Factors?"

"Like - what circumstances would affect how desirable it would be to revise away the artifact effect."

"Um, tell me now if you have a fatal illness or are gay or find me really aversive company."

"I will probably outlive you by a factor of twenty, I don't especially play favourites gender-wise, and you seem all right so far."

"Okay good."

"I'm, uh, not in a position to make guarantees, it's kind of a high-pressure situation and I have not had the time to get to know you all that well - but I definitely haven't seen anything disqualifying. And I'm a hundred seventy, it wouldn't be insane to date a human at this age. A few decades ago would've been a problem."

"I'm sorry to be putting you on the spot like this. I'm like - managing, it's not direly urgent."

"All right."

"- somebody's coming. A bird just turned into a human outside."

"That'll be Finnah or my dad. Probably Finnah."

It's Finnah! "Hi Mial who's this?"

"Hi Finnah! This is Annie, I found her on the bottom of the world."

"What were you doing on the bottom of the world?"

"Appearing involuntarily," says Annie.

"Somebody get pissed off and push you there?"

"No, it was an accident."

"She's from another world," Mial contributes, "they have different magic there - the bite-sized summary is 'she fell in a pile of random magical effects and one of them was one-time interworld travel'."

"Wow, sucks to be you," Finnah says.

"It hasn't been the most fun day," Annie agrees.

"Mom's in her office checking the books for any spells applicable to the situation, unless she's already finished looking and gone out to raid a library."

"Well, I'm useless in this situation unless she wants candy. Do you want candy?"

"Maybe later."

"'Kay." She trots upstairs.

"Finnah makes some pretty excellent candy."

"After lunch I will totally have some."

He smiles at her.

Aww.

"—it occurs to me to ask if there's a painkiller artifact—"

"...I don't have one, or if I do it's doing heroic amounts of work and isn't very good anyway, but there must exist one. For little shrens?"

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking. A lot of them end up pretty thoroughly addicted to their pain potions by the time they learn to shift, and this is considered a good trade, I can imagine drawbacks that I'd hesitate to inflict on a kid even under the circumstances but anything that's just inconvenient as opposed to debilitating..."

"I don't know of one, so the university doesn't have one and there isn't one that people routinely get on a plane and pay a year's income to touch, but yeah, if we can contact my world I can look that up."

"And, uh—should I be getting you a painkiller potion—"

"It's not that bad, but if there's non-addictive kinds I'd try it. The cold thing is trying to be hurty and I think it's only not succeeding better because of the warm thing."

"That's, uh, sort of convenient, I guess. I'm sure we've got some hofis in the house, neither of my parents is a shren so when they get headaches they notice... let's see if I can dig it up."

He proceeds into the kitchen and tries two cupboards before locating a neatly labelled vial.

"You don't notice headaches?" She reads the instructions.

"Pain in general is - just sort of not attention-getting the way it is for most people. I have good enough body awareness that I don't have to go to the light every week in case I broke a bone without noticing, but I still try to go once a month if I remember, just in case I missed something. —Lights are one of those inborn magic types, they're healers, they make a little glowy ball of, uh, light, and if you touch it you are healed."

"Those sound useful. I do have a healing factor, I don't at all seem obviously to have been hit by a van half an hour ago, but it probably goes with something awful like being deaf or whatever, so."

"You don't at all seem obviously to have been hit by an insufficiently safety-spelled vehicle," he agrees. "I suppose in your world all vehicles are insufficiently safety-spelled."

"Artifacts only work on people."

"That sort of makes sense with how artifacts work!"

"Plenty of them could work on animals and just don't."

"Hmm, yeah, I was just thinking of people as contrasted with scoots and similar. I wonder why. Why artifacts work that way, I mean. I have also wondered this about most of the other magic I've encountered in my life, but yours is new."

"Is there a lot of local magic that only works on people?"

"Mm, no, I meant more generally - like, why do lights not work on lights, why do mages need to almost die of their associated element before their magic activates, why is the power cost of wizardry structured the way it is..."

"Lights don't work on lights? That's stupid. The other things also sound potentially but less obviously stupid."

"Lights don't work on lights! It's kind of stupid! Mage activation - could be worse, I think if mages were born with their powers the world would look a lot different in that more of it would have been destroyed by baby mages, but yeah, it's not great. The power costs of wizardry aren't too bad except for the part where overreaching kills you - the actual relationship of power cost to spell effect seems mostly reasonable, although that might just be because I grew up with it."

"Destroyed by baby mages -?"

"Mages are really powerful. Small child mages are rare because small children are not often in a position to die in fire-, water-, earth-, or air-related accidents, but when they happen they tend to be kind of destructive and I'm sure some of that is a reaction to the trauma of activation but also I would not want to live near a baby who was capable of causing localized earthquakes and hadn't yet learned why that's a bad idea."

"...makes sense."

"Yeah."

"What's the power cost of wizardry like? I can see if it makes sense not having grown up with it."

"It's been a while but I think I actually made a chart for exactly that purpose, partway through getting my wizard certification, I might be able to retrieve it from among my old notes..."

"Ooh."

"Let's find out! My room's this way."

She follows him.

He drags out his old boxes of notes and meticulously reads through the indexes on the lids until he comes up with the chart, which spans several pages and neatly lays out the names, costs, and effects of a wide range of wizard spells, grouped into categories by the type of effect and with symbols marking each spell as belonging to one or more technical categories she won't have heard of.

"...I don't know what half of this means but I'm getting the gist, seems mostly sensible."

"Oh good! I am bizarrely proud of the sensibleness of a magic system I had absolutely no part in designing!"

Giggle.

He laughs. "I assure you I would be much prouder if I had. But if I'd designed this system I think it would work very differently."

"Oh, how would you do it?"

"I like how spell design works, but I'd make it a lot harder to accidentally harm yourself casting them - if you try one that's too big you die, I think I mentioned that, and if you mess up the casting process by gesturing imprecisely or slurring an incantation or breaking off in the middle the spell backfires and you end up with a faceful of soot - I really don't see the point in that and would not at all have included those features in a system I was designing from scratch. I'd probably make it more modular and extensible, too, let people install a spell somewhere and then change its parameters or add or remove pieces without having to redo the whole thing, let people build things collaboratively more than wizardry allows for. The thing where one caster can only have one instance of any given static spell active at a time is tidy but it's not very convenient, I'd probably have done something different there too, change the casting process around so casting-reversal pairs can be disambiguated some other way. I do like how you can draw out spell diagrams to keep track of more options than you can fit in your head at once, if anything I think I would've made that a more central part of spellcasting. And this is all assuming I was inventing wizardry, I really don't know what I'd do if I was designing an entire world's magic system from scratch but it might not end up looking very much like Elcenia at all..."

"At what point does it stop being wizardry and start being something else?"

"I think I'd say it stops being wizardry when the thing you're doing when you do magic is no longer 'casting discrete spells using a clearly defined set of actions'. But somebody else might generalize the idea differently. And now of course I'm thinking about how I'd design an entire world's magic system, especially now that I have another world to compare. Are there particular advantages to spherical planets that I'm not thinking of? I'd be inclined to polygons by default, but if spheres work out better somehow..."

"Uh, at least with my world's laws of physics spheres are what happens all by itself, I don't know what's going on with your flat planet at all."

"It's flat, down points inward perpendicular to whatever face you're on, it's kind of unsettling to go over the edge because suddenly you're on a different down... as far as I know, planets are naturally occurring here, but I'm not sure how I'd find out if they weren't..."

"But... how do they naturally occur? In my world all stuff is inclined to go towards other stuff, more so if it's big or nearby, and so planets are stuff that got near other stuff in a ball shape because this is all taking place in a vacuum."

"...Your world is in a vacuum? That sounds uncomfortable."

Giggle. "Air is stuff, it goes toward the planet. It's not very dense stuff, so it's on top of the rocks, mostly. We don't go in the part with vacuum."

"That makes rather more sense. Yeah, okay, I don't know of a meta-rule like that governing the origin and placement of planets. And there aren't parts with vacuum, there's just more air. So your way seems tidier but not necessarily more convenient for the residents, at least not if the residents can fly. I imagine it would be an unpleasant surprise to be on your way up and then suddenly whoops no more breathing for you."

"The air gets thinner as you go up, you can notice that climbing mountains. And it's cold. You'd notice."

"Well, fair enough, but still - as long as I'm designing a hypothetical world, might as well make it so people can breathe most everywhere, right?"

"How does your sun work, in - air?"

"It's a large ball of fire, what about yours?"

"It's basically a ball of fire but I'd expect it to burn any air near it."

"Maybe it burns the air that's near it but the air near that burns somewhat less of its neighbouring air and so forth and then eventually the outlying bits aren't on fire anymore and you have the edge of the sun. I have no idea if that's what's happening, it just seemed vaguely plausible."

"That sounds wrong but I don't know that much about my physics to tell you why."

"Well - you have fire that's not the sun, presumably, and it doesn't burn everything in its path, so there's got to be some limitations to 'fire sets neighbouring air on fire'..."

"The sun is many times bigger than the planet and hotter than any fire you could make on Earth, I think."

"Maybe ours isn't as hot and that's the trick, or maybe fire works differently here the same way down does."

"Yeah, could be either or both."

Shrug. "I wonder what else is like that - differences between our worlds that aren't obvious until you run into them..."

"I mean, the physics thing will have all kinds of implications."

"Like what?"

"Maybe electricity wouldn't work here, or airplanes wouldn't. Mountain climbing must be easier if the air doesn't get thinner - maybe mountains don't usually have snow on top -"

"Many of them do!"

"Even in places that aren't cold?"

"I don't remember offhand, but we could probably manage to look it up..."

"It's not terribly important. I think at home it has to do with the thinner air though."

"Huh. I'm now tremendously curious what all the other worlds are like..."

"You can see why I wondered why there wasn't more contact with them!"

"The practical and ethical difficulties remain but maybe I'll sink the time into inventing a random transworld scry with some reasonably sensible targeting constraint - 'wide-angle view of a population center' or something. There's probably a good reason why those aren't already in widespread use but I bet it is a circumventable reason."

Giggle.

"I find that with effort and ingenuity most things are circumventable!"

"What have you circumvented so far - the age limit on the scoot racing -"

"I wasn't technically circumventing anything by getting my wizard certification in my early sixties, but they really don't expect kids at that equivalency to go to the first wizardry school that will take them and then spend the next several years doing almost nothing but study magic and pass tier tests. I haven't looked up if I was the youngest person in history to get the credential, but I might've been."

"Ooh. You'd think that would be the sort of thing someone would tell you, but maybe not."

"It's also possible that I found it out at the time and then forgot, it having been over a century since then, but I feel like that's the sort of thing I'd remember knowing, you know?"

"Yep."

"How would you design a world, if you had the opportunity?"

"Ooh, good question. I'd start with my normal physics, I think, they're a nice baseline - maybe I only think that because I haven't studied the advanced stuff, perhaps they get horrible, but I like the gravitational constant being a thing."

"It is tidy. And I get the sense it's better-understood than the Elcenian scheme, which seems like it'd be important once you start tweaking things from the extant version. I'd hate to say 'planets should be arranged in a predictable grid relative to one another' and then find out that that's the condition under which the fire of the suns consumes all the air in the universe. And designing your own functionality-of-a-world from scratch would involve making a lot of explicit decisions about edge cases. For example, if I went that route, I would be sure to note that there are no conditions under which the fire of the suns consumes all the air in the universe."

She giggles. "And then where would you be? Holding your breath and much too warm, I guess is where."

He cracks up.

"So, physics as of your world, but what about the goodies? I assume you wouldn't want an unmodified version of your magic system, but does it have advantages you'd like to keep?"

"It does pretty good variety and it's not use-limited, as many people can touch an artifact as the owner cares to allow and it'll still work. You can change artifacts, too, weaken the drawback or improve the advantage, it just takes a long time and you have to be touching it to do it, I'd want to soup that up if I went with artifacts at all. I'd want it reversible."

"Do you suppose there'd be a reason to keep the drawbacks?"

"There's occasionally some disagreement about how drawbacky they are, in some cases, but maybe they could be optional or something."

"And reversible, reversible seems very important. I still think, hmm... to my eye, a world is missing something if it doesn't have a magic system that - takes design input from the user? In a way that I think even mitigated artifacts don't sound like they would."

"That's what I mean by souped up adjustments. Also, artifacts are currently made when people die based on traits of the person, perhaps instead they could be made by live people on purpose!"

"Yeah, 'made by live people on purpose' sounds more the thing - what I like about wizardry is that I can think to myself 'I want a spell that achieves this end', and then poke around and see if somebody's already done the work for me and if they haven't I can do it myself, and the end result is a spell that does the thing I wanted unless the thing I wanted was impossible. Or just impossible to fit in my CC. Altering existing artifacts doesn't sound like it has this property, or at least not very conveniently, but creating new ones does."

"I mean, we don't know how far altering artifacts can go because it's so slow."

"But even if it could go arbitrarily far, you'd still - no longer have the artifact you started with, afterward, that's what I meant by 'not very conveniently'."

"Yes, that's true. Also, I might want artifacts to have to be activated on purpose instead of whenever anybody touches them."

"Yes, that's an excellent idea."

"Although I suppose if it worked like that being hit by a vanful might have just killed me instead of this thing, I'm not sure if my injuries would have been fatal sans healing factor."

"Yeah, that's - a concerning sort of edge case. You might want to add in some things like lights - I think every world could stand to have a better version of lights, possibly applied to the entire population."

"Lights sound great. If with a stupid limitation. That I could excise on account of designing the universe."

"Side effects of this conversation that I should have predicted but didn't: now I really want to have the opportunity to design a universe."

"I will keep an eye out for opportunities!"

"If I find one I will definitely invite you to collaborate."

"Thanks!"

"In the meantime, hmm - are there any artifacts whose drawback takes the form of a physical injury that could be subsequently trivially healed by a light - or pain, that could be totally ignored by a shren - I'm trying to figure out where the low-hanging fruit are on the interaction between these worlds. Hmm, if I get a transworld scry with the right kind of targeting parameters or an analysis attached or both, that could be helpful in finding or identifying artifacts, but there's kind of too much dev time involved to call that a low-hanging fruit. That fruit is upwards of the middle of the tree."

"There's one that makes touching water agonizing and one that dissolves all the bones in your feet."

"What are their positive contributions?"

"Teleporting and super speed. Respectively. So the first one's not especially useful to you."

"Depending on how the teleportation works exactly, I might still want it! Super speed sounds interesting. —Are there any artifacts that directly grant flight—"

"Yes, although the university doesn't have one. There's a wheelchair in a country overseas from mine that does flight and - maybe that's the one where you can't heal from injuries but I might be mixing it up with another one, it could also be the one where you can't eat plants."

"I bet someone would be willing to test how 'can't heal from injuries' stacks up against lights if it meant saving the babies."

Nod.

"And there might be spells or potions that could help with some things but I don't know offhand if potions work outside Elcenia, and my recollection of interworld theory is that wizardry definitely doesn't, you have to cast everything here and if spells leave they break. Not sure what would happen if the spell was designed to be cast in Elcenia to affect things in other worlds, without being strictly a summon or a send, but that's definitely a top-of-the-tree problem, I'd have to inhale all the literature on interworld theory before I even started thinking about designing something. Who am I kidding, I'm going to inhale all the literature on interworld theory anyway."

He grins at her.

"And we've got decent leverage on this end because my father works for the government of Esmaar, he's a - what's the phrase again - he solves miscellaneous problems that no one else can get a grip on - National Applied Policy Authority, that's it. Sort of the perfect thing for this occasion. Is there an equivalent on your end?"

"Maybe, but I don't know, I've never really interacted with my government."

"Well that's markedly less convenient than 'yes and I have one in my immediate family', but I bet we can figure something out."

"I'm sure they'd find somebody upon being presented with - magic aliens."

"I'd sure hope so. Imagine if magic aliens showed up and the government just sort of threw up its hands and refused to deal with them."

"I would be ashamed of my representatives!"

Giggle.

That is a good smile that she has.

It is the smile of being adorably mindcontrolled!

The mind control is a problem but the smile is still very cute!

Yes. "What's the Esmaarlan government like?"

"Eh, I don't know, governmental. I'm pretty sure I don't still have a civics textbook lying around or I'd point you at it. There are appointed representatives who can be got rid of via referendum and you need to have some form of magic to be one and the country's demilitarized because what with the emphasis on magic our wards are sufficient to put a stop to any attempted invasion."

"Huh, the magic requirement is interesting. There's a little country on my planet where all the politicians have to touch an artifact that makes them incapable of lying. And lets them see in the dark, but that's not why they have to touch it."

"Oh, I like that one. That is a good country."

"It's not actually a very good country but it hasn't collapsed yet."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Well, most people don't want to be literally incapable of lying even in their personal lives so the selection isn't great, and they can't keep state secrets effectively in the hands of the politicians - if one of those politicians even just refuses to answer a question you know something's up - so they have some appointed positions for people to know secrets in but then those people can just tell the politicians 'it's important, I can't tell you why, do this', pretty much on their own recognizance... and the reason they do this is they had a lot of preexisting problems with corruption and it turns out some people are good at being corrupt even without telling any lies..."

"Aha. I was imagining something more - voluntary, approached from the direction of 'let's see if this has interestingly positive effects', not 'maybe if they literally can't lie they will stop fucking everything up'."

"Nope."

"Well that's much less delightful."

"Alas. Maybe you could borrow the artifact if there's somewhere riper for a positive social experiment about."

"I'll keep it in mind in case I run across an opportunity."

"Are there a lot of different countries on this planet?"

"I don't know how many is 'a lot' - let's see, there's the six merfolk nations, six countries on Espaal, Mryne and Pleia and Nirlan and I guess wolfrider territory on Nanela, Mekand being its own thing, Dragon Island sort of arguably a polity, eight nations of the tropics, and then, uh, some number of countries on Anaist - something in the vicinity of twenty? I think it's nineteen. Which adds up to - forty-five or so?"

"Sort of arguably?"

"It's where the Dragon Council meets, and they're... a governing body in a sense, but they concern themselves with all the dragons on the planet, Dragon Island doesn't have citizens so much as some residents and a lot of visitors."

"Huh."

"Yeah. So it's not exactly a country but it's not exactly not a country."

"I think we have more countries than that."

"Could be. I wonder how the planets compare in surface area..."

"I don't know off the top of my head. We're mostly ocean, too."

"And uninhabited ocean at that!"

"Oh, yeah, I guess people live in your oceans!"

Giggle.

"Does that make boating awkward?"

"Not especially, I don't think, but maybe it would if you weren't used to it."

"I think in my world different countries own different bits of ocean and there are rules about what boats can be there."

"Oh, my impression is that the merfolk nations aren't especially concerned with the surfaces of their oceans - I think there are rules about what exactly you're allowed to do but, not being the boating sort myself, I don't know them offhand."

"I suppose that makes sense, it'd be sort of like airspace but even less so."

Giggle. "Now, airspace, that's something of a concern now that scoots have really started catching on..."

"It wasn't before with flying people?"

"Oh, it was, but flying people are a little better at keeping out of each other's way. Generally aren't going as fast, for one thing."

"I think airspace at home is more of a territory thing than a preventing crashes thing, the crashes they handle with like... flight plans."

"Ah. Flight plans seem like they'd be a bit much for every little jaunt, and maintaining strict territorial boundaries in the air seems like it'd be a hassle, but there are rules about which altitude bands a particular vehicle belongs in and if you get in any trouble short of a catastrophic crash you can always land. And it's increasingly hard to crash catastrophically these days, the safety features keep improving."

"Oh - you probably have more altitude options with the air being all the way up thing -"

"Altitude options: so numerous!"

"Why doesn't the moon fall? Or the sun?"

"The planet's down magic doesn't reach them, I believe. Although the answer I was first tempted to give was 'it's not their job', which I suspect you would find unsatisfying."

"Little bit."

"And that just wouldn't do."

Heh.

"I wonder if wizardry can mitigate some of those drawbacks," he muses. "So many avenues of spell development calling my name. I'm going to have to pass some of them along to Mother."

"They're mostly not that resistant to being compensated for and vary in how they're affected when they compete directly with each other."

"Do you have expectations about what sorts of things would and would not work in an attempt to restore your senses, for example?"

"It's honestly not impossible that if you have a generic blindness cure it would work. But there's nothing physically wrong with my eyes or ears."

"Hmm, so - if there was a spell that, I don't know, replaced the function of eyes and ears, sort of like a somewhat abstracted scry..."

"That'd maybe work."

"After we've got the interworld thing sorted we can look into it."

"Thank you."