"Connie" arranged to have a meeting room set aside for us to eat in. There were cubbies on one wall filled with rolled up maps and I was tempted to start pulling them out, but before I managed to decipher the labels the food was brought in by some servants and placed, platter after platter, on one of the side tables. It smelled amazing, and everything was almost - but not quite - recognizable. Connie came in behind it, dressed up in a silky blue and gold gown with her hair all done up. I'd never worn anything particularly fancy before, and was shocked to see how I could look. "Holy shit. You better not be hitting on me, because I am... surprisingly a teeny bit into it, but it also feels kinda fucked up."

"Hah! No, I just wanted to celebrate. I got this to go to a royal ball and then was uninvited because they didn't trust me to behave myself, and I can't exactly wear it on the expedition or whatever so... seemed like a good time. How much did you tell Katrin and Errod?"

I walked over and began loading my plate, starting with a mound of purplish mashed potatoes and a huge steak. "I told them it was good news but even stranger than me being from another planet, and promised to introduce them to my mysterious benefactor tomorrow. I can bring them here, or we can swap places and I can be the one locked up for the day."

"Nah, fuck it. Let's call Hammersmith's bluff and both go out. We won't go far, and they'll have eyes on us probably. I think as long as we don't leave the city she won't lose her shit. Oh, take some of that yellow glop, and take a bite with the asparagus-looking guys. I'll teach you all the names later."

"Oh shit that's good. Is this other thing just steak? Not that I'm complaining, I've only had real steak like twice I think unless you count steak burritos or whatever. But like, is it cow?"

She grinned from ear to ear and slowly shook her head.

"You're not going to tell me what it is until I eat some, are you?"

"That's correct. But what I will say is that it's not a prank. That right there? That's my favorite food."

I narrowed my eyes at her, because I didn't totally trust myself not to be an asshole, but I took a seat and cut off a slice. "Holy fuck," I mumbled around the bite of steak. It was almost like beef on the outside where it was seared, but inside it tasted like the most perfectly seasoned dark meat chicken or... well, poultry anyway, though with an extra layer of flavor I couldn't identify. It also practically melted in my mouth. "Oh sweet Jesus. What the fuck is this, and can I eat it every day?"

"It's a motherfucking dinosaur."

"Oh! Shit, I rode on a dinosaur! A, uh, a moskar!"

"Yeah, this is a lot like those. Probably related, like the difference between a horse and a zebra or something. You're welcome. Okay okay okay. So, you keep eating and I will talk your ears off. I have visual aids."

She walked over to what appeared to be a chalkboard, and turned it around to reveal little charts. "Okay class, if you recall from earlier there's six hexagons you see in the Duminere and each offers six categories of magic - three listed above and three listed below. Let's start with the first one."

1 Top Fabrication Creating matter from nothing Transmutation Changing matter into other matter, shaping it Reinforcement Strengthening, combining, and repairing matter Bottom Enchantment Attaching magical effects to things Affinity Enhances magical abilities in regards to specific materials Mana Manipulating and moving the raw energy of magic

"Keep in mind these names are arbitrary, so some people might call them something else. The first set is fabrication, transmutation, and reinforcement. Fabrication is literally creating something from nothing, though until you get good at it it's not really real; it'll evaporate back into mana after a bit. Plus it can be hard to make a material you're not familiar with unless you have a sample or something. Transmutation is partly what it sounds like, you change one thing into another thing. Doesn't work on living tissue unless you combine it with other stuff, and if I understand right even then it's hard to do. Same as fabrication, you need to be able to clearly and accurately picture the material. Also remember that at first these things do essentially nothing; you have to build them up, and people focus on different aspects of it. So in this case instead of changing one thing into another you could focus on another direction and learn how to mold stuff with your hands, like just squish solid iron between your fingers like Play-Doh. Then reinforcement is combining things, strengthening things, repairing things. Great for collapsing mineshafts I guess, making armor stronger, whatever.

"On that same hex, the bottom three are enchantment, affinity, and mana. All totally shitty unless you take them with something else. That's the thing, you can get access to cool combinations depending on what you pick. So enchantment lets you pin an effect to something or someone and just leave it, when otherwise you usually have to be there and maintain it. I don't know a lot about the other options once you develop it, presumably you can get more efficient with mana use or attach effects to larger or smaller areas or something. Affinity is where you pick some type of material and your magic is stronger when that stuff is involved, and sometimes it lets you break the rules a little for that type of material like... okay I'm going to take a detour here to talk about Hammersmith so you understand how combining stuff works.

"I know I've mentioned enhancement magic earlier when we were talking about my fucked up super-aged face. They're like plastic surgeons, and can do other stuff too. I'll get to them more in a minute. Well, Hammersmith is one of the lucky few that got three powers and she took enhancement and reinforcement which is already an unusual combo for a fighter, but then she also snagged affinity which very few people ever bother with. She got an affinity for some kind of metal, it's an alchemical alloy so picture like... adamantium or whatever. And enhancement can normally only work on living things, and reinforcement normally can't combine living things with non-living things, but because she had an affinity with this metal she reinforced her skin with adamantium. She's basically indestructible, and even if you capture her I'm pretty sure she can sweat out metal and make it into knives or some shit. Combining stuff in clever ways can be super cool.

"Okay so. Where were we? Uh... next is mana. Lets you move mana around, shape it, condense it into crystals, stuff like that. Niche stuff but can be really handy. Good for support too, lets you funnel ambient mana into your friends so they can keep kicking ass. Can be a bit of a bomb disposal ability sometimes too."

2 Top Vibration Includes sound, earthquakes, etc. Heat Creating and moving heat Electricity Creating and moving electricity, also magnetism Bottom Light Creating and bending light ??? REQUIRES: Light, Heat, Fabrication Entropy Reducing / muting energy

"Then we move to the next hexagon, and for the top of that one we get vibration, heat, and electricity. Vibration is sound waves, earthquakes, all kinds of good shit. Heat is heat, though if you want actual fire you need something to burn which is why I know some people take it with fabrication. Seems like a weak reason, but it does look cool and you can basically make napalm at that point. And I mean, you can't level all your areas of magic all the way up; some of them are going to be just to make another one cooler anyway so... fine. Then electricity is also pretty self-explanatory, though I think it also covers magnetism? I don't think people take that route normally, if that's what they want they'd usually be better off with gravity which we'll get to soon.

"Bottom of that hex is light, something else, then entropy. Light is fun because you can bend it to go invisible. In theory you could make illusions but it's super complicated and actually would require multiple magics. Probably light and artisan at a minimum. Artisan is strange, we'll get to the skill magics last. Then the middle one on the bottom of this hex is inaccessible. Supposedly it lights up when you have light, heat, and fabrication but nobody has ever been able to pick four abilities so it's impossible to say what this one would be. You can't select it unless all three of those are picked, and then you still can't because you're out of slots. Then entropy is just reducing energy, I don't know if that's a scientifically accurate name but it's good enough. There's these guys, the Uldrati, and they look like a garden gnome fucked a naked mole rat. They've got some sort of entropy effect going all the time, and theirs also works on mana so it's hard to use magic around them. The normal version you can get doesn't do mana, just the other stuff on that hex - light, electricity, heat, and vibration. But if you take other stuff it can start to work with those too. So you want to be like a Uldrati you take mana, or if you want to degrade matter you take fabrication so you can destroy instead of create. Not sure what else it might work with."

3 Top Temporal Increase or decrease the flow of time Spatial Folding space, teleporting Dimensional Crossing onto other planes, manipulating plane-specific effects Bottom Force Various force effects including telekinesis, shields, assisted leaps or punches Density Temporarily increase or decrease the apparent density of materials Gravity Increase, decrease, or redirect gravity in an area

"Top of the next is temporal magic, I've got that one. Slow down time, speed it up, whatever. All I can do is an emergency rewind because I had to hyperfocus on developing that. I think I could have learned to go forward in time instead, but I'm not totally certain how that would work. I guess I would just vanish for a minute and then appear again? Being able to go back in time is like... it's a really rare thing and I should feel excited about it, but I'm tempted to burn out the stored mana in my Dumine so I can start over and diversify more this time. It would be a lot of work down the drain though. Anyway. Spatial is next, you can bend and fold space or even teleport if you're good at it. Telen is a fucking master at it which makes him a nightmare to pin down. Dimensional is for getting into and out of other planes, and messing with some of the altered properties of them. Like, there are planes where magic doesn't work right unless you have this type but also there are some with odd properties and you can pull those properties to here. So there's one where nothing burns, okay, and if you'd been there in person and were good at this kind of dimensional magic you could make it so nothing burns here either.

"Bottom three on that one would be force, density, and gravity. All good choices, a lot of overlap in the application but they do it in different ways. Force is the most flexible I think, if you want to do the jack of all trades thing. Density is better than force for hitting hard in melee combat, and can make you almost impossible to hurt with blunt weapons, and someone swore they could use it to walk through walls but I think that's bullshit and anyway even if they could it would be easier to do that by transmuting it or blowing it up. Gravity is best for flying, and for area of effect shit. So if you want to throw one guy, use force. If you want to chuck a whole room, use gravity."

4 Top Growth Increase growth of living things, includes rapid natural healing Life Manipulate life energy, magical healing, animating objects Enhancement Alteration of living things Bottom Thought Detection and manipulation of thoughts and memories Spirit Mental healing, manipulation of spirit beings Emotion Enhancing, suppressing, or changing emotions

"Next hex has a ton of synergy for all six things. They play really well together. Top is growth, life, and enhancement. Growth can be specialized towards plants or animals - you can always try and do both, of course, but most people pick one so they can get really good at it. You can have giant crops, or speed up healing really fast, or whatever. Life can do some healing too, but it's more about this stuff like a specialized form of mana that's... it's just the energy of life. You can use it to animate stuff, even rocks or something, though it's easiest to do with dead bodies. And yes, I know, it's funny that the necromancy ability is referred to as life magic. Oh, and it can interfere with other magic sometimes, but that's kinda fiddly and hard to do right from what I was told. Then enhancement lets you change living things, that's what they would use to permanently get rid of your allergies which we should do at some point in case you lose the bracelet. Rich people also sometimes get tails or blue skin or whatever is in fashion. If you combine either life or enhancement with growth you get really badass at healing in different ways. They've also used it to basically genetically engineer plants, which is why you don't see as many farms as you should for the population. Some sadistic fucks use it to make monsters too, which is... I mean I couldn't mutate a dog on a high empathy day but it does sound neat.

"Bottom of that one is thought, spirit, and emotion. Thought magic lets you read minds if you're really good at it, and it's also for seeing and manipulating memories. Oh, and if you want to focus on animating things with life magic it's probably a good idea to combine with thought or spirit although there are some horror stories about, like, basically rogue AI stuff. Speaking of spirit, it lets you fuck with ghosts and spirits - which are different things - and it can help with certain mental illness stuff especially if you combine it with thought. Spirits are a whole category of thing, they're usually pretty weak on thier own but you can like... bind them to things in a way, like if you don't have heat magic you could still call a fire spirit and bind it to a frying pan or something. Oh, or get them to spy for you. But runic stuff does exactly what you tell it to, whereas spirits might misunderstand you or get distracted or disobey so it's risky. Then there's emotion - make people angry, calm them down, if you're a sleazebag you can make people horny. Likewise potentially useful for mental illness stuff if combined with enhancement. But like I said, any two of these six probably beef each other up somehow."

5 Top Divination Object reading, remote viewing, etc. REQUIRES: Either Temporal or Spatial, and either Probability or Thought Probability Influence randomness to achieve preferred outcomes ??? REQUIRED: Probability, Temporal, Enchantment Bottom Alchemy Create magical materials including potions. REQUIRES: Either Transmutation or Reinforcement, and either Mana or Enchantment Runic Writing in a magical programming language to create spell effects Casting Casting predefined magical spells, allows altering spells somewhat

"Last normal one... top is divination, probability, and another bullshit one. Divination is strange; it requires either probability or thought, and then either temporal or spacial which means there are four different combinations that let you pick it. The soul trackers that came after us? I know by the name you'd think they had spirit magic, but they're actually diviners. And since that requires three areas of magic they're rare, so it's gotta be pissing off Halenvar that they lost two of them - although the Duminere they have gets charges for divination and related types faster than some of the others so they can crank a lot of people through with orders to either get divination or decline everything and take a dud.

"That's the thing, the Dumineres don't have all of the things available all the time. It seems like they all can potentially have any ability, but each charges at a different rate and - as they theory goes - has a different priority in power use which means... Okay, take the one here in Theramas which seems to prioritize alchemy, runic, and casting. Those ones charge faster so they hardly ever run out, but also the group with force, density, and gravity charge slower and gravity in particular has been seen going black after someone took casting. That implies the higher priority ones can steal power from the low priority ones, meaning they'll be out way more often. But it's super complicated, and since nobody can crack one open to see how they work it's a bit of a mystery and they might have it all wrong.

"Alright, back to the board. Probability is another one I got, though I haven't developed it much. Some people have trouble with it but I think it's pretty intuitive. It's like luck magic, basically. You influence random events. Monsters or whatever that have natural probability magic are bad news, you try to kill them and instead you trip and break your neck. Or they have some enchantment talent too and they put a fucking curse on you, like the Sahrger. Though natural wild magic is different, it's not really that they have probability or enchantment magic so much as they have some specific ability that just happens to be one you could replicate with those skills. Anyway, last one on the top of that hex is one that requires probability, temporal, and enchantment. So again, you can't ever actually select it. My pet theory is it's some sort of souped up version of curses, like fate magic or something, but who knows.

"Bottom is alchemy, runic, and casting. All of these can be done without a Dumine, but this makes it easier and safer. Alchemy is like divination where it has variable requirements, it's either transmutation or reinforcement and then also either mana or enchantment. It lets you make magical materials, potions, cool stuff like that. Pretty handy, and then those materials can in turn be used for better magic items than you could make with regular stuff. Since it's a hard one to get a lot of people just do it without a Dumine, but it's harder than casting and you can't always even tell you fucked up. It's in high demand because they can make healing potions and shit. Runic is like a magical programming language, it's the enchantment version of casting if that makes sense? Like, casting means you have to be there, runic you can scribble on a wall and blow up the next guy that walks past. If you can get the syntax right, I mean. I've got it, so that I could decipher the doomsday thingy. I had this dream of making, like, a magic computer or something but honestly there's no way I have the skill or patience for that. I did make some magic items, but it's hard and I ended up buying better ones.

"Then casting is spellcasting. You know Katrin, so I'm guessing you know a little about that? Good. So yeah, it makes you better at that stuff. Spells are all pre-written programs, basically, though nobody knows where they're written. You can fiddle with them some if you have this ability, tweak the variables a bit or whatever, but there are limits to how much you can change them. That means any given spell will never be as versatile as the other abilities, but you can know a big variety of spells. Of course that also means you have to remember them and decide which one you want, though again this ability makes that easier."

6 Top Artisan Increases artistic skill, perception, control of other effects Crafter Grants skill at engineering, crafting, survival skills ??? REQUIRES: ??? Bottom Scholar Increases memory and learning agility, language skills, possibly intelligence Fighter Grants skill at fighting, increases general fitness and awareness Leader Grants general leadership skills as well as tactical, economic, or city planning knowledge. Allows for abilities including voice of command and the creation of magically binding contracts

"Last one, and this is the strange one. This is the one with skills or jobs or whatever, so they work differently. Top is artisan and crafter and then a mystery slot. Artisan makes you a better artist. It can also soup up your perception and stuff, and you can use it to mess with your other abilities. I've heard of it being combined with fabrication, vibration, enhancement, thought. Anything where you could argue there's some artistic aspect. Crafter is the same idea, but it focuses on more utilitarian stuff. Seems like an arbitrary distinction to me. Like, cooking is for whatever reason covered by artisan? Seems like a crafting thing but whatever. Crafter also covers some general survival skills. It's an odd one. It's handy if you want to be using transmutation to dig through stuff because I guess you just automatically know if it's structurally sound, and I've been told it's good to get with reinforcement though I don't know details. The real draw is that you can combine it with enchantment to make magic items, though you need help from someone that has whatever ability you're trying to get the thing to mimic. Last on that section is a mystery ability, probably another with impossible prerequisites but we don't even know which ones.

"Then more job skills, scholar and fighter and leader. Scholar makes you learn faster, supposedly also makes you smarter although it's usually smart people that want this in the first place. Can pair well with thought or runic or casting. Fighter makes you better at fighting, obviously. Lots of people are forced to take that one as part of the agreement they make to enter the Duminere. It makes you physically better too, so like - you know how Hugh doesn't look like much and he's a little on the older side? He'll be strong and healthy until he's a hundred. So that's cool, though frankly most people with the fighting ability just get killed in wars while they're young and healthy anyway so whatever. Leader is the last one, and it's all over the place. It can make you more tactically minded I guess, or apparently it can make you better at ruling a city or understanding economics which... read a book and take a different ability. But then it also can give you this creepy voice of command thing, and there's some branch of it that can make it so you can do magically binding contracts. You can imagine that's important for some people.

"So there you go, that's them. Depending on which ones you get and which ones you develop, there are a zillion combinations, and there's a lot that I don't know or that nobody knows since there are just too many variables." She carved off a big hunk of dinosaur steak and rolled her eyes back in ecstacy as she chewed. Mouth still full, she pointed her fork at me. "So. I know you have questions, but what are you thinking so far? What do you want?"

I wanted it all.