"Your country not nice to meet?"

"It's complicated."

"Countries are complicated. Are you -" he gestures at one of the other people in the car and says an Anitami word.

She looks at the other person in the car.

They have blue hair and are sitting there smiling and trying to follow along.

"Am I what?"

"Countries have people who tell people what to do. In Anitam that's -" unfamiliar word again. 

"I don't tell a country what to do."

"I also don't tell a country what to do! They tell the country what to do."

"My country is called Rixo and it has an Appointee."

"Do they tell people good things to do?"

"Some things."

" - I should let our people-who-tell-what-to-do talk with you about ways we can give pens and cars and get magic and worlds. I don't know the things they would say and they will be not-nice if I say a thing that makes it not work out."

"...it's. Complicated."

"That is why I should not say things about it, yes. We can talk about other things."

"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?"