"Hi."

Getting up there shouldn't take long at all. Oh, and if you have anything on you that shouldn't get wet, my backpack's waterproof.

I didn't bring anything that'd be harmed by water. 

All right.

A nearby lump of water flows toward them, and encases her up to neck height. The bubble normally isn't anywhere near big enough for two, but they don't the most possible speed and can afford the extra mass. Just step in and we can take off. This might be a bit disorienting the first time.

He grins and steps in.

The water is a human-comfortable temperature, making it easily the warmest place in the area. Once he's inside there's a feeling of weightlessness as his legs are no longer what's holding him up, and then it starts rising. They're accelerating as they go, so it almost feels more like they're diving upward. Once the vertical acceleration tapers off until they're flying only horizontally, the oblong mass of water belatedly bulges in front of them and grows a windshield.

"Didn't think of that earlier. Normally I'm completely inside."

"This is a tremendous bit of work. I am very impressed with the idea and execution."

"Thanks! Most of it was just finding the right elementals; flying practitioners usually use air but you can't really get as much force from that. And they're more often about wind than the motion of air, so kind of bound to places with atmospheres. Which the destination and most of the journey didn't have."

"Ah, yes, you can now tell me why you were going to a moon."

"So, there's a lot I don't like about how magic works. Notably the fact that it incentivizes Others to become monsters. The spirits approve when everything fits into a nice traditional role, and if you're a new Other without one of those then one of the easier narratives to join is "monster preys on humans, humans fight back." A very successful practitioner a long time ago managed to protect the people who don't know about any of this, made it so the universe goes out of its way to protect them from, well, itself. Not perfect protection, but it's good. But that just means the monsters are very frustrated by a lack of acceptable targets. They're still there, and they're still rewarded. If the problem had been completely fixed, my family would still be–

Anyway. I took all that personally.
I was trying to get to the moon because if there are spirits and Others there, it wouldn't be anything more complicated than nature spirits. The first sentient Others didn't appear until after humans, we think, but no one knows for sure. And the moon has been isolated since long before that. If I could claim a demesne there, start bringing visitors only if they object to the same parts of the magic system that I do, well, the spirits and their opinion of tradition aren't completely immutable. And I thought the spirits there might be out of communication enough that we could convince them valuing people over narrative or "fairness" is normal. Build up a separate normal and hope it spreads. We meaning me and whoever my successors end up being. It'd be a long-term project."

He's grinning widely by the time she finishes. "Wow. That's brilliant. Do you think you can build a new normal here? We're farther from your home than your moon would have been, the spirits here can't be out of communication with your world..."

"I thought they couldn't be. But I didn't know that for sure. Now I'm thinking I was wrong. If the spirits aren't communicating with my world, then the rules I've been so worried about most likely don't even apply. I could be completely open about all this, stop worrying about the spirits objecting to me helping Fëanáro's people fight, and I could maybe even lie.

I think it might follow the same rules. The diagrams I used for binding the ice elemental were the same, and those were developed on my world. We'll know for sure once we try the awakening ritual; that's a tradition only a few thousand years old. If it works the way it normally would then the spirits are communicating more than I thought."

"Which is bad news, since it means they still abide, even here, by the rules you despise?"

"Despise is a bit of a strong word; only a few of the rules would be terrible ones in a vacuum. But for a lot of practitioners and nearly all Others, karma replaces ethics. I despise that part. Otherwise yes.

This is fixable, and if you have thousands of years and a monopoly on who awakens maybe you'll be able to fix it. At least locally. But apparently there'd be resistance from Earth right from the start."

"We do have thousands of years and, it seems, a monopoly on who awakens; if needed we can ask them to commit themselves not to awaken others except in dire need."

"Keep in mind that if we do manage to have that much influence on the spirits over time, whatever policy you use is itself likely to end up being enforced by the universe. That one is almost exactly how the secrecy thing got started."

"Oh. Hmm. Then - full openness, the only request that you don't use it to harm others save the Enemy?  I'm sure that could be a problem but how does it go wrong? What rules were you going to have?"

"It might not fail at all, but if it does then the first thing to come to mind is that "Enemy" softens to mean any enemy. Definitions are very blurry; there are very few cases with fixed sets of exceptions. Individuals could promise that just fine. Promises are dangerous, though, they get enforced enough that we round off to saying unbreakable.

I never planned to restrict who can awaken. There's no chance of a monopoly on Earth, and there weren't going to be native human non-practitioners on the Moon for a very long time.
It would have to be vague and probably subjective. Otherwise it risks the same thing that happened with the lying, where if a practitioner wants to be misleading the fact that they can't lie is barely a bar. Whoever started the ball rolling on that one failed.

If I were designing a set of awakening conditions from scratch, there's something I read once that might work. It's definitely subjective enough, at least.
“In Life’s name and for Life’s sake, I will use my Art for nothing but the service of that Life. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature except for growth and life." I definitely haven't checked that for holes, but it's the kind of thing I'd want the universe to think of as the status quo."

When she says it, the talisman around her neck reflects a small spot of light from nowhere in particular, then fades back down until the glint is barely perceptible to a human.

"That sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe with enough time we can nudge it along."

"Maybe. It can't hurt.

Am I flying at the right height, by the way? I can't make out anything down below."

"I can see fine, thank you. If your first practitioners here are committed to a war, is that going to make a mess of your plans?"

"Can't really say I have many plans here.
If you mean reforming the karma system, probably not. It usually takes hundreds or thousands of years for much change to happen, and if the spirits here and on Earth are sharing traditions it won't be much faster here."

"Well, if we can defeat the Enemy in five hundred years and then devote the next two thousand toward shaping the tradition better, it'd be quite nice before the Age is out."

"Right. Immortality.

Winning on a human time scale would be pretty much instantaneous by standards here, wouldn't it."

"My uncle seemed determined to do it in one battle, but he's a bit of an idiot. A brilliant idiot, but no less of an idiot for it."

"And he doesn't seem to have been relevantly brilliant, since he wasn't in the process of a decisive victory when I was there. Do you expect your side to make much difference? He thought you wouldn't, and I'm really not well placed to have an informed opinion."