Telarin shrugs.

"Are there terrible side effects? I don't think we have any magic that directly addresses that sort of thing here. It'd be sort of hard to make an artifact for; artifacts don't really do magic to things very much."

"It's safe enough for most values of 'troubling body part' if somebody who knows the established spells does it, yeah. We can't add anything though."

"There's artifacts for healing but they're not nearly good enough to add body parts. Though they can make subtracting them considerably safer."

Nod. "It's not always a gender thing, I had a person come in and demand the removal of his arm."

"Huh. That one I haven't heard of."

"Yeah I told him to come back in a few months. He did. I made him sign an assertion and I took the arm off and he was so happy."

"Notes for future magic system construction: make everybody able to shapeshift," he says. "Maybe not ridiculously cheaply, because it's useful to be generally able to recognize people by their static physical form and it seems plausible that a lot of the structure of society is partly built on that, but if somebody doesn't want their arm or does want a pair of wings or wants to switch sex every day or turn into a rainbow-striped snake on weekends I don't see why I shouldn't accomodate them."

...Cor giggles.

Riale glances back at him and grins.

"What else are you planning to incorporate? - The thing I always wish my magic had was an undo feature."

"...for if you did something you didn't want to do? I'm not sure how that'd work - I can imagine it with destroying things, less so with making artifacts, which is what I'm more familiar with. I do think things should be reversible, generally. There will be no 'everybody can shapeshift but you'd better remember your original body really well or else' nonsense on my watch."

"Oh good."

"If I get the chance to change how magic works when I save the world I do want to keep the one we've already got, it's maybe not what I would've given us but it's good and we've got a lot of stuff built on it and I don't wanna take it away. But I want to add at least a few more things. Personal convenience stuff like shapeshifting... what else do you think is important to include?"

"I'm fond of gates. Although presumably you'd want to do them without the world-eating part. They allow a lot of qualitative improvements in trade and communication - there are so many more things it's worth it to walk a block for than to send a caravan or a ship on a yearlong trip -"

"A year? Wow. Flight times are measured in days on a swoop, weeks on a soar - I'm not sure I can think of a trip that'd take as long as a month. Bright Isles to the bottom of the world, maybe. You know, I wonder if it's possible to develop an artifact that'd do the gate thing. That would take a year, though, I bet. A year to manufacture, possibly several to invent."

"Our planet is a very big sphere and we don't have flying things. The important thing isn't really how hard gates are to invent but how accessible they are to random people."

"If - well. A week ago I'd say 'if I suggested it to Kanero', I guess now it's 'if I did it all myself'... if I'd suggested it to Kanero a week ago it'd end up being an imperial project, public gatepairs between every major city, probably set up so each one went the whole width of a street, and then if stitching all the cities together into one big city like that turned out to be a bad idea we'd adjust. Maybe start with just one and then add another one a while later. If they took ages to manufacture that'd be a good way to get them introduced slowly. I'd probably still do it about like that."

"Gatesnest had big ones for ships, medium ones for carriages, little door-sized pedestrian ones... it was a city with dozens of neighborhoods thousands of miles apart, it was always daytime somewhere and summer right next to winter. - on a sphere half of the planet is having day at a time, it turns to face the sun, and there are two hemispheres out of step on seasons. Do you even have seasons."

"Uh? Yeah, three of them. Chaos, Balance, and Void. Chaos is warm and Balance is middling and Void is cold. I think the agricultural industry divides up the year into a different number of pieces but I couldn't tell you what they're called and it might vary by region."

"...well. Some places have climates where the seasons are more sensibly described as 'rainy' and 'not', and on the middle band there's no real seasons at all, but on most places the days get longer and shorter depending on angle to the sun and this has weather consequences."

"Days are always the same length but the temperature and brightness change depending on the month. Fire starts out warm and gets warmer, then Light is less warm but really bright, Air cools off a little more and gets windy, then you're out of Chaos and into Balance and Wood is good for growing things, Twilight is just really mild on all counts, Water is rainy and is when things definitely start getting cold, then you head into Void and Ice is snowy, Shadow is less snowy but dark, and Earth is when it starts warming back up a little before the next year starts and you come back around to Fire."

"Huh. I guess that's sensible given the givens."

"If we lived on a sphere it would probably make perfect sense for the angle of the sun to change! ...that would be so weird though. ...I'm having all sorts of crazy ideas about how to build a world that had a shell with a circling sun like this one but tilty seasons like yours, I hope I get to build a bunch of worlds so I can test them."

"If you build more worlds they might need elemental spirits to form their shells," says Ravkesial. "So be sure that your first attempt is as stable you can make it."