"Are you Riale Kazegann?" he asks the teenage boy.

"...Yep! Why do you ask?"

"I went to the palace and asked who to go to with a bizarre emergency."

"And then flew to Dawnbrook looking for me? You must've been chasing me all day."

"No, I'm, uh, fast."

"...all right. So what's your emergency?"

"My world is, uh, also ending, it's going around. I came here via magic from there to see if I'd land on a place to evacuate or shunt world-ending magical byproduct. Wound up at the pointy bottom bit of this one and was mysteriously conferred additional magic powers including being fast."

"...huh," he says. "Have to admit I wasn't expecting that one. Uh - let's go up to my room and talk about it there."

The floating man takes the floating woman by the arm and up they go through the ceiling. No one in the room reacts to this at all.

"Who are your intangible friends? I found the woman sleeping in the park earlier."

"—they're the elemental spirits and nobody else can see them and now I'm even more intrigued about what you picked up at the bottom of the world. Let's go upstairs."

"Okay." Up the stairs. He doesn't even need the banister it's great.

Up the stairs and down the hall and here's a fancy hotel room and there are his intangible friends.

"So this guy can see you," he says to them, and "—oh, what's your name," to this guy.

"Corbelan. Cor for short."

"Nice to meet you. I'm Riale but you already know that."

"Telarin, spirit of fire."

"Ravkesial, spirit of light. I think you have the Blade of the Void."

"Great that's just what I needed in my life more void. It's a blade? How is it a blade as opposed to a - suite of superpowers?"

"I don't know. We know it exists but we don't know much else. Its place in the cycle is as the force that destroys the world, but it's also supposed to be somehow crucial to saving it, only we don't know how."

"When it... attached to me... it told me to find the creator, I don't know what the fuck that means."

"Oh, that's me." He hefts his enormous book. "The Book of Creation. It's for creating things. I'm supposed to spend this year running around examining things closely so I can create the next world as well as possible, but that seems obviously inferior to saving this one so it's strictly my second-choice plan, first choice being 'figure out how to end the cycle of destruction and do that instead'."

"Okay. Well. I found you. The mysterious voice said I'm your only chance. At what was unspecified. I was advised to try not to destroy the world. Which is admittedly a thing I might normally have to try to not do but it would take me more than a year."

"Well. That's an interesting wrinkle. My current plan involves touring the continent finding all the elemental spirits and waking them up early, then wandering around recording stuff in the book and seeing what I can figure out about how to save the world. Want to tag along while we figure out how to solve each other's problems?"

"...sure. Uh, I might be able to find them for you, I didn't just run across Ravkesial."

"Yeah, that was going to be my next question - you said you found her sleeping in the park; even I can't see them before they're awake, we had to guess and then Telarin had to stand near where we thought she was and make a moving speech and then she appeared."