"...hm. What do the other two do?"

"Effort makes you stubborn and Conquest makes you bossy."

"This seems asymmetrical."

"Oh?"

"Stubbornness and bossiness are more similar to each other than pliability to either."

"I...suppose I see your point..."

"Otherwise it would be more tempting to attempt to balance the three against each other, but if the system is by nature lopsided that seems less likely to naively work."

"It works a little but you're not supposed to just rely on that, it's easy to let things get more out of hand than you realize that way."

"I'd imagine. And if they fail to counter each other on - translate 'orthogonal'?"

"'Orthogonal'."

"If they fail to counter each other in some orthogonal manner then whatever that was could go totally unchecked."

"Yeah. You'd have to be--really uneducated or badly educated, to not be paying any attention at all to keeping these things in check, though."

"Oh?"

"Well--I guess I don't know much about how these things are taught outside of Genosha, but here the classes on--paying attention to how the magic's affecting you and mitigating the effects are considered really critical."

"That seems wise. We don't have this magic on Valinor or Endorë; it may be that only humans can use it. So we don't have classes on it."

"Naively I'd guess that if you haven't been able to you won't but I don't know how to check that assumption."

"Well, under what circumstances do people normally start to do it?"

"...I can't even remember a time when I couldn't do tiny pieces, maybe we had better ask someone who didn't grow up in Genosha."

"They start little children on it here? Goodness. All right."

"You're really not supposed to do anything that isn't really tiny until you're at least fourteen, but I was...always kind of precocious."

"What counts as really tiny?"

"If it hurts more than mildly stubbing your toe, is I think the cutoff."

"What can that do?"

"Uh--depends on how you apply it? A lot of the classes here are about using magic efficiently. Kids mostly use it for things like sparks of colorful light or closing a papercut."

"Oh, is that what you had in mind to convey when you -" She snaps her fingers near her ear.