"Hm."

"Hmm?"

"Trying to get it to sort of - snap together. Uh, my magic system trains me to think in terms of the aesthetics of things - for anything more complicated than 'set it on fire' we have to funnel the destruction through a sort of painting of the aesthetic properties of what we want done - and this world is not snapping together for me aesthetically yet."

"Well, I'm not the artist I once was, but perhaps I can help."

"You - were - an artist?"

"Out of all the things I do with my time it seems to have been the only one that needed my heart to work properly."

"I'm sorry," he murmurs.

And he flips the book open in his lap and puts his hand to the page. A fiery shimmer of light peeks out around him before he closes the book.

"Did you just book him?"

"I - updated his page. He said that it's important to have as accurate a picture of all the spirits as possible and I should update his page whenever I think I understand him better."

"What happens to you if you're inaccurately rendered? You seem to have continuity of memory..." Cor says to the spirits.

"We come through just the same regardless of what the creator envisions. But... while it's possible to build a world without consulting us, having good representations of all the spirits in the book makes working with everything else that much easier."

"How so?"

"Similarly to how representing an object perfectly in the book will let you work with details of it other than what you personally observe, representing a spirit well in the book - no one has ever done it perfectly - will let you work with details of that element other than what you personally observe, and that can be very valuable."

"Huh."

"I'm not sure it's possible to represent us perfectly," Telarin muses. "With all our missing pieces. But then, maybe a perfect representation of me as I am now would be accurate enough."

"Your picture filled in a little when I updated it after I learned you used to be an artist," Riale reminds him. "Who you were is part of who you are."

...he can't seem to decide what to say to that.

Ravkesial pats Telarin's arm. "I'll be glad for you, since you can't."

"If it's possible to represent a spirit perfectly, I think Riale might be able to do it," says Telarin. "And I very much wonder what uses that will have. What would a world look like, created with a full understanding of the elements?"

"Maybe I can upgrade this one when I save it and you'll get to find out."

"What kinds of deficiencies are associated with inadequate spirit representations?"

"There was a creator once who had a lot of trouble understanding Camalirea, the spirit of air, and the world he ended up writing had no wind. It didn't last very long. Wind turns out to be important for a lot of things. But usually the effects aren't that obvious or dramatic."

"...I can see wind being important for a lot of things but world duration isn't intuitively one of them."

"The duration of each world seems to be set by the system at the time of its creation, based on factors including how - basically functional - the world is going to end up being. That world was not very functional."

"That seems like a... partially subjective... criterion."