"If it were the same, it might be easier to oppose. At least easier to spot. What does he do?"

"He can bring people under his control. We don't know how, and it takes a long time, and he has to have them as his prisoner."

"I don't know if enchanters doing that have the same constraints. I hope so.

Maybe learning to break connections permanently could free those people, if we're lucky enough for his magic to depend on the kind of thing ours can detect."

"That would be really useful for a lot of awful situations that arose last war and could arise in this one if it goes badly."

"I don't know much enchantment beyond the unnoticeability, but if we end up trying to redevelop things that one could be worth aiming for."

"There are different areas of magical study and specialization?"

"Lots. Some more complicated than others."

"Yours is nature?"

"Elementalism. Spirits simple enough that they're there even with no intervention from people."

"And the others?"

"There are a lot. My city has the High Priest of a god of wine, a practitioner who works with ghosts, an Other who focuses on karma and occasionally takes human apprentices, an astrologer, a combination enchanter and illusionist... this isn't most of the possible specialties. One practitioner serves a spirit of patriotism.

There's time magic, some people work on capturing and summoning bogeymen or other monsters, there are demons, some people can predict the future."

"Wow. Okay. Do people specialize by aptitude, or need, or interest?"

"It can be any reason. Often there'll be a collective specialty, in a family or an order or a tradition.
Knowledge is a currency, even if it shouldn't be, so people usually end up with the same specialty as whatever faction awakened them. Case in point, I can teach you elementalism but most anything else past the basics would be a research project."

"Elementalism sounds very useful in any event. Since it's the elements we're facing."

"I was expecting a different uninhabitable wasteland.

Want to start now?"

"Yes."

"The most important thing is the symbolic opposites; charging a circle with that is the basic principle behind most bindings including elemental ones. It gets more complicated if you want to do more than just hold the spirit in or out, but this is almost always a component. For very weak Others you can use similarity instead of opposition, but anything that works on is usually not very important anyway. For more bindings more specific than stopping something in place...."

There follows a crash course in binding lesser and intermediate elementals and running away from greater ones. Mostly practical information: what diagrams to use when, how a nonsentient spirit communicates that it agrees it's caught, what kinds of things elementals are in general capable of, rules of thumb for guessing whether you've got a water spirit with a movement focus or a motion spirit that happens to be surrounding itself with water at the moment.

They take notes. "I'm astonished that all of this was present in our world in a capacity that didn't let anyone notice," he says.

"Barely anyone in mine knows either, proportionately. The universe goes out of its way to keep it that way. A lot of elementalism looks like weird weather conditions or something from the outside, and people are more willing to buy flimsy excuses like the religion thing."

"Why would a universe - want itself not known? Keep most of its activity unnoticeable?"

"I don't know how it started, if it started. At this point the fact that it has always been this way would be enough of a reason by itself. There's a status quo, people who know go along with it and expect it to continue and don't want to take the risk of going against it. I'm anthropomorphizing the universe a bit, but to the extent it can be described as having preferences it wants things to stay normal."

"Even here, where none of this is known to anyone, it's somehow bleeding over..."

"I'm more surprised at the same rituals and diagrams working. Secrecy I could imagine happening independently."

"Is it possible they work because you expect them to? The universe behaving by public opinion again?"

"I'd say it isn't that malleable, but I've never previously seen a universe with exactly one practitioner. Probably still no. There are almost definitely Others smart enough to have expectations, even if they're off somewhere inhabited, so I wouldn't be public opinion by myself anyway.
And the secrecy definitely wasn't because I expected it."