"Okay... um, now I can't think of anything."

"Magic!!"

Giggle. "Okay. There are twelve kinds! Um, zero, one two, three -" She counts on her fingers, goes as far as twelve. "- twelve kinds. Glass, lightning, water, shine, wood, adamant, earth, fire, stone, air, ice, shadow. Elementals can do one or two kinds, very well. Penumbra is two kinds - shadow and shine -" Penumbra dims and brightens her halo when Maurabel says that. "- and humans can do more kinds, always weaker than elementals but different amounts of weaker per element."

He taps his glass eagerly and listens. "Stronger means stronger effects or more effects or faster or..."

"Not faster to perform the magic, but they don't have to learn how to do most things to do them, so they can do more things that way, and stronger effects by a lot, which means they can do some things humans can't do at all."

"What things can be done with magic -"

"We don't know all of them yet. There didn't use to be a lot of mages and now there are huge numbers and we're finding out."

"Ooooohh. What changed?"

"Uh -" Sigh. "There's a thing people who are going to have babies can eat and that makes it more likely, we learned that."

"Oooooohh. Is the use of magic to get to other worlds recently discovered?"

"Yes."

"We don't have a way to get to other worlds and would give very much for one."

"How many people do magic?"

"All the elementals, but we don't know how many there are. Most humans my age or younger."

"What is your age?"

"I'm seventeen. ...twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Eighteen nineteen twenty."

"I'm eighteen."

"...okay..."

"Do humans and elementals age the same -"

"Elementals don't age."

" - how do new elementals start?"

"They - coalesce - they don't have parents."

"How interesting. Humans have parents?"

"Yeah, we do."