something she can use

[alicornucopia]

Ehail blinks, when she finds the bar instead of her room.

She goes in.

She looks out the window, at the exploding things.

"I don't think this is my planet," she observes to herself, tucking silver hair behind her ear.

~~~

with Elysse

with Lazarus

Comments

[prima_sequentem]

"Aha," she says. "Yes, that seems like a good plan."

[alicornucopia]

"Yes. Of course, some shrens make themselves rather thoroughly scarce. If there are stragglers on record in a month I'll start coordinating miracle green-groups who've encountered the missing before, I suppose."

[prima_sequentem]

"My friend who sees magic could potentially help with that," she says. "So could wishcoins, for that matter. A model of the planet that shows little flags wherever there's a shren would only take a five."

[alicornucopia]

"That would do it too; it's unclear to what extent we're being invited to impose on you."

[prima_sequentem]

"I'm inclined to be very helpful," she says. "So is Lazarus. Lazarus is motivated by general altruism and a fascination with new and interesting kinds of magic; I am motivated by general altruism and the potential to obtain a lot of coins from someone who won't mind producing them. If I'm magnificently lucky, somewhere in this world there could be a former or soon-to-be-former shren who'd like the idea of moving to my world to mint for me, but even the number of sevens you or Ehail could produce in five minutes would be a help."

[alicornucopia]

"What do you do with them besides miracles for shrens?" inquires Jensal.

[prima_sequentem]

"Previously, not very much," she says. "Mostly I paid attention to see if any new mints were popping up so I could find them and make sure they were responsible people. Occasionally I gave a little bit of magic to someone who seemed like they'd use it well. But now that I've seen firsthand how much magic it's possible for one person to produce, I'm thinking of changing my approach. I don't have anything I'd describe as a plan yet, but broadly speaking, what I do is help people find things they're good at and enjoy doing and then arrange for them to do those things. I don't strictly speaking need large amounts of magic to do that, but it would still be something of a game-changer."

[alicornucopia]

"Some people aren't good at good things," observes Jensal.

[prima_sequentem]

"On the whole, I prefer to make those kinds of arrangements for people who are. I like solving problems; I don't like creating them."

[alicornucopia]

Jensal nods once. "Well, the shren houses are going to evaporate, more or less overnight, so there'll be plenty of unemployed miracles to sift through soon."

[prima_sequentem]

"Yes," she says. "I'm looking forward to it. Plenty of opportunity for my favourite pastime. It's just a pity I don't know more about this world; there's a limit to how helpful I can be without good background knowledge."

[alicornucopia]

"I can tell you some things. I've been around a while, which means I've accumulated a lot, though it's neither guaranteed to be perfectly within date nor particularly well-traveled."

[prima_sequentem]

"Well, it'll be a start."

[alicornucopia]

"Seen anything that's confused you yet? I don't know where you're from, but you look human, so it can't be that far a leap."

[prima_sequentem]

"I think the most obvious difference is that you seem to use magic for things that are done by mass-produced non-magical gadgetry in my world," she says. "Like lighting, and whatever you called the dragon council with. Is - I'm going to guess wizardry, based on what I've heard - is wizardry that commonplace here?"

[alicornucopia]

"Anyone can learn it, and it's steady money - you have to invest in the schooling to be a full wizard, but enough people do. And it's not hard to learn just one spell or a small handful if that's all you want, so there's assembly lines of people who know - say - how to enchant communication crystals but nothing else, who do that after a two-week training course all day long. People learn perhaps ten household-use spells so they don't have to hire people to dust. People with teleportation licenses. That sort of thing. There's a few countries that don't use magic and a couple of species that can't use wizardry, but it's common most everywhere else."

[prima_sequentem]

"Hmm," says Libby. "Do you have interworld transportation? With local magic, I mean, not relying on anything from outside the world?"

[alicornucopia]

"It exists. I'm not personally a wizard; you'd have to talk to Ehail. Or some other wizard. There's a school of them in this town, but I haven't interacted with it in the last few decades because the headmaster married a dragon."

[prima_sequentem]

"Noted. But the fact that it exists is heartening," she says. "The kind of interworld transportation that got me here works on its own unpredictable schedule; it's nice to have other options."

[alicornucopia]

"It's not commonplace, but why that might be I'm unsure."

[prima_sequentem]

"I'll see if I can find out."

[alicornucopia]

Jensal nods. "What else do you want to know?"

[prima_sequentem]

"Hmmm. How about an extremely basic geography lesson?" she suggests. "Most of what I know about your world is its shape. I haven't so much as seen a map yet."

[alicornucopia]

"Extremely basic, all right." Jensal pulls out a sheet of square paper and loosely outlines three continents and some major islands. She draws a little cross in one of them. "We are here. Continent's called Espaal, country's called Esmaar. This continent is Nanela, this one's Anaist, the giant island is Mekand, these islands are various other countries - Petar Erubia Egeria - Ehail's house is here, the Corenta house is here, the iceberg one is here." She draws in a little island in the place where Mekand, Nanela, and Anaiast nearly touch: "That's Dragon Island, the council bases its operations there, you're not allowed on it unless you're a dragon or a thudia. Nanela's got three big countries -" sketch, sketch, "and a lot of informal sparsely inhabited wildnerness. Espaal's got six big countries. Anaist has got lots of little countries I'm not going to draw. Most of this north coast is part of Ertydo though. Mekand's it's own country. There's six nations of merfolk at least according to the recognition of abovewater governments; it might be more complicated down there, Quaro -" she taps the mark of the location of the iceberg house - "would know better than me."

[prima_sequentem]

Libby nods, examining the map. "It's a little weird that the edges of the map correspond to actual edges," she comments. "I'm used to spherical planets; if you want to map those on flat paper you have to pull weird geometric tricks and wraparound is unavoidable. But here, you conveniently produce paper the same shape as your planet."