They appear in midair, visible out of a few thirtieth-floor apartments.
One starts to fall. The other catches her by the arm, flings out - wing-shapes of light - and slows her, spiraling down until they're at street level.
"Yeah, they have a significantly lower crime rate than us or you despite, uh, incompetent instruction on how to stay out of trouble."
"Such sweeties. I hope I am not making a horrible mistake teaching a bunch of kids how to be mages."
"Eventually, they could figure it out just by experimenting on their own, sure. It'd slow them down and it'd be more likely that several of them would have to agree in order to amulet an elemental."
"Yeah. Even if they don't have an artifact base affinity on their own they could just surprise an elemental who did -"
"And some countries will not be great about enforcing the law when that requires killing them."
"It's worse than that, if I died all the elementals I'm holding would still have amulets. You basically have to find a suicidal volunteer, or I guess give the amulet to someone trusted."
"Pretty well. I'm less equipped to teach the elements I don't have but there's only two of those and some elementals can fill in bits."
"If your magic is contagious that's a constraint on hopping worlds looking for things that can solve our problems - you may be springing elementals and mages everywhere - and it seems likely aliens in our universe also got elementals and mages recently..."
"Crossed my mind. I think it only happened once there were a lot of elementals here but it's hard to be certain."
"Timing matches the second batch of rescuees, yeah. But it could be that elemental-time-in-universe builds up some magic effect or something. Once the colony planets have more people we can find out if it's per-planet or per-universe, at least."
Nod. "I mean, there aren't any coalescing on the inhabited moons at all, yet."
"The appearances have seemed to be pretty randomly distributed across the planet's surface."