172, 1/2

Erick asked, “We’ll talk here?”

They were still in the First Wizard’s Library, which was almost fully trapped with paintbombs. The couches were rigged to pop and the few comfortable chairs had holes in the ceiling above, ready to open up and spill paint over whoever was bold enough to sit down.

Rozeta said, “No.”

Erick blinked. Suddenly, Rozeta, Ophiel, and Erick were in a different place, but thankfully it wasn’t a clouded land. They had only moved a floor up and over a ways, to a lounge with a sign hanging out front naming this place as ‘Koyabez’s Rest’. Pastries and drinks rested in baskets behind counters, waiting to be served to customers who would sit at nice little tables, while they sat around on nice large couches and drank various drinks from large cups.

It was a nice little room, without any traps at all.

Rozeta went behind the counter and grabbed herself a small basket to fill with an assortment of muffins. She came back around, moving to a table as she said, “Feel free to pick something. You don’t have to actually [Duplicate] what you grab since I’ll restore this place after you leave, but it’s a nice sentiment anyway.” She sat down and crossed her legs as she bit into a muffin.

… Erick had been a little bit worried about everything, but Rozeta was Rozeta; she treated fairly and with an eye toward growth. Erick didn’t have any true worries about her.

He had worries about himself.

Ah.

Yeah.

He was just hesitant about this Wizard thing.

Erick asked, “Which one of these drinks are like coffee? I feel I need some coffee.”

“The green pot on the third heater.” Rozeta gestured to a counter with heated containers full of liquid, and then she gestured again to some small jars on that same counter. “It used to be served with some sweet jelly stirrers, but sugar is a close enough approximation and that’s in the small— Yeah. You got it.”

Erick grabbed himself a large mug of green ‘tea’ and a small jar of sugar. Ophiel grabbed him a few sugar cookies from the baskets behind the counter, then flew over to the table and set them down.

Erick sat down across from Rozeta, asking, “How much of this stuff is exactly how it used to be?”

Rozeta nodded, then began, “That depends on your philosophy; your adherence to actuality, or your adherence to emotionalism.” She held up a muffin flat on her hand. It had a bite out of it. “In actuality, zero percent of what you see is how it used to be. This muffin is in zero ways exactly as it would have been back at the Conclave’s Wizards’ Tower.” She held the muffin and tilted it, looking at the bite she had taken from it, saying, “But emotionally… The taste and the feeling of consumption and the wholeness a person gets from the muffin is about 95% how it used to be.” She touched the bitten part, saying, “A part of it will always be missing. That’s translation for you.” She set down the muffin on her small plate and gestured at the jar of sugar Erick had brought over. “And some things don’t translate at all. We tried to get slime-sugar to take off; but it didn’t keep like it did back in the Old Cosmology. Bacteria and such— More than that, though, was that slime-sugar usually ended up spawning colonies of slimes in people’s houses, and half the time [Cleanse] targeted it, erasing it from existence.” She shrugged. “Cactus sugar can be dried out into solid white grains, though, and those keep indefinitely. It’s just one of the many, many ways that the Grand Translation forced us to change everything.”

Erick had sipped his tea and decided it needed more sugar. He had added some, and now it tasted passable; sort of like sweet grass water, or something like that. He sipped his sweet tea, thinking about slimes in the liquid, then asked, “What about physically? The shape of everything, I mean.”

“Shapewise we managed 99% or 100%, depending on who you ask,” Rozeta said. “If you ask a real curmudgeon who actually knows what they’re talking about? They’d say we managed to hit 25%, but there will always be dissenters.”

Erick refilled his tea and took another sip. He felt a nervous energy begin to settle into his chest, and then settle out into a normal wakefulness. Ophiels sat down around the room, watching with intent, but not saying a word. Erick had almost moved onto the next, most important subject, but he had noticed that he was apparently nervous enough to leak over into Ophiel. With a concentrated inward pull, Erick managed to calm himself down a bit more. Ophiel chirped a bit, discarding his hard edges and returning to his playful self; he was still on high alert, though, but at least it wasn’t directed at Rozeta.

Rozeta had a bite of her muffin. She noticed Ophiel, for sure, but she hadn’t let his edges bother her.

Erick had another sip of tea.

Then he dove right in, “Why are you sure I am a Wizard?”

Rozeta paused. Then she set down her muffin, and said, “I imagined we would begin the other way, but this is a good start, too, for reasons that will rapidly become apparent once explained.

“You exude Chaos, Erick, and just now you altered how I saw this conversation going. That Chaos is a big clue to you being a Wizard, but some people have a fair amount of natural Chaos without being Wizards. This is a degree of deniability you have benefited from for a while, mostly since you didn’t truly know about this aspect of yourself, so you never even thought to deny this small truth. For anyone looking closely, all they saw was you being you, and missing certain proper ways an actual Wizard would deny being a Wizard.

“You’ve never even directly wielded this Chaos to your benefit. It was just a thing that happened.

“Your Chaos energy is merely a clue, though.

“Another clue is that the mana loves you. But the mana loves everyone who tries to listen to it and is actually capable of understanding it, so this isn’t that special either. Some Wizards can’t hear the mana. Some barely passable magelings can hear the mana perfectly. In the end, this is just another clue.

“And so, we come to the largest of clues, which is not actually proof of Wizardry: your creation of Particle Magic. But then again, the Script is designed to be filled with all possible iterations of magic, to categorize and constrain as well as uplift everyone in ways you probably don’t even realize it does. One of the major ways it does this is that it allows people to make new magic, and then it gives that magic to everyone, as long as that magic is sufficiently different from what already exists and it’s not too powerful.” Rozeta said, “Though, in the end, this is just another clue toward your Wizardry.

“You’ve had it almost right all along.

“A Wizard is known by three things. The first two are the creation of a lot of extra mana that is perfectly aligned with themselves, and the possession of a core which does a lot of things with that mana. That’s complicated, though. The third thing a Wizard possesses is a Truth that lets them override all other influences.” Rozeta said, “This Truth enables a Wizard to overwrite their Reality onto reality.

“Before the Script, in the Old Cosmology, all Archmages would have had two of the three, with Truths and cores being rather universal.

“But they wouldn’t have the third thing. They wouldn’t create extra mana.” Rozeta looked at Erick, with eyes as white as the rest of her wrought-human body, saying, “You know that the Script is a manaminer. You know the basic functionality of a manaminer. The primary function, from which all others derive.”

She stopped talking.

Erick realized that Rozeta was letting him acclimate.

It wasn’t going very well.

His tongue felt heavy and his throat didn’t feel like vibrating to make noise, to counter her argument that he made extra mana, for how could he do that? He could barely breathe. Sweat poured out of him. Rozeta was perfectly calm and relaxed, nonjudgmental and patient. She picked up her muffin and took a bite.

Eventually, Erick sipped his tea again, and his mouth seemed to start working.

Erick said, “The Script… The manaminer takes the mana generation of every single living thing and has individual mana production manifest inside the Core, under control of the Script, instead of pouring out of the true origin point… Out of the living things that make that mana.”

“90% correct. A more true thing to say is that mana is generated by every living thing and also by everything that causes living things to do something, or to be a different way. A great artwork can often cause a great outpouring of new mana into Veird, both because it elicits a creative response in many different viewers, but also, because it elicits a response, the artwork itself also becomes a mana producer in its own right. Singular items of cultural significance are much more able to achieve this level of mana creation than mass produced items… Eh. It’s complicated, and we can leave that for another day.” Rozeta said, “I’m only telling you this to distract you from your obvious discomfort.”

Erick gave a nervous chuckle. “Yeah! There’s a fair bit of nervousness here!”

Rozeta casually ripped Erick’s life to shreds, saying, “I see how much mana certain people produce because I have access to that information. When you fell to Veird you produced 500 times as much mana as a normal person does in a single day. Now, that multiplier is up to 100,000. Sometimes twice or three times that, like when you were ending Terror Peaks.

“You’re a Wizard and you always have been.”

Ophiel twittered in the background.

Everything and nothing happened all at once.

And then Erick came back to himself.

“Ahhh…” Erick sat back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, letting his mind drift. He whispered, “Shit.”

Graciously, Rozeta said nothing for a while.

But she had places to be, so Rozeta started answering some of Erick’s questions, since he couldn’t ask them at the moment. “Mana production is unaffected by Stats or spells or fame or infamy, but it is affected by how well a person knows magic, how much magic they do, and the mana itself. You’ve both learned and done a lot. You might not have been much of an archmage when people first started calling you that, but you’re certainly an archmage now. As of right now, you’ve actually become the single largest contributor of new mana to the Script. You contribute as much as a city of people, and all by yourself.

“I’m sure you’ve heard of how Wizards used to make magic, and then they gain students and they give those students their mana, thus giving them their magic? You’ve already been giving your mana to everyone on Veird.” Rozeta said, “It’s been great for the spread of Particle Magic. The Script evens a lot of things out for a lot of people, but you made a huge splash when you released Particle Magic to the world, and a lot of people started accepting your mana into them over all others, allowing them to make more of the same mana; the same magic. And thus the cycle grows.

“[Renew] is going to be even bigger.” She added, “And with that particular spell, more than all the others, people in the know will recognize you for the Wizard you are.”

Erick’s eyes were involuntarily locked on the ceiling, as he asked, “There’s not some fame-backlash thing, making me only appear to gain mana production because people are treating me as an idea instead of as a person? Or… Or…” His voice trailed off. He wasn’t sure where he was going with his words.

“Your question is like trying to cut a loaf of bread with a tub of water.” Rozeta said, “You think your question has merit, but there’s a fundamental misunderstanding. Short explanation: No; your fame does not make you a Wizard. If you would have become a hermit instead of what you did… If you had released your Particle Magic anonymously, and if you still kept up with your magical learning and experimentation —by some sheer stroke of pure luck since you would not have encountered the same resources as you did— you would still be at the same level of mana production as you are now.

“You make extra mana. You are a Wizard. There is no other explanation.” Rozeta added, “Believe me; I looked.”

Erick was starting to come down from his nervousness. Rozeta’s calming voice helped. He turned his head back toward the white goddess. He asked, “You said earlier— Why is [Renew] a problem? More than the other circumstantial evidence?”

Rozeta said, “Everyone makes mana, but everyone’s mana is different. This is why Wizards could create schools under them, because they were able to gift their mana and thus their magic to their students, in a self perpetuating cycle that would eventually ‘lock’ into place, and the school would expand since everyone was making the same sort of mana and magic. The mana produced by the people of Veird is no different.” Rozeta said, “But the mana of people isn’t mana that is good for the spellwork supplied by the Script… I’m going to skip over several years of learning here, and say that, broadly, this is how it goes: mana is created in the Core, then it’s ‘scrubbed’ of individual meaning, and then it’s given back to people to use for the spellwork installed by the Script.

“But it’s still their mana which is given back to them first, which still has some of their own minor truths. It’s near impossible to fully scrub mana of meaning, but the Script does manage to scrub out most individuality from the mana.

“Anyway.

“Because it’s not a perfect system, people cannot directly boost the magics of others without being very in-tune with the targeted magic, because it’s the ‘cutting a loaf of bread with a tub of water’ problem, again. There are only a few things that can get past this problem.

“Strings of runes can translate ideas, though there is a lot of loss through that translation, as any immortal who lived through the Grand Translation could attest.

“Gods can bridge gaps between people rather easily because people wish for us to be able to do that, so we can.

“And Wizards can do the same thing without a god’s help.

“And that’s what you did. But you did it for everyone.” Rozeta said, “You made a spell that directly contradicts all known ways magic should work, and you made it so that it works well with the Script. Which I appreciate, by the way.” She added, “What happened when you made that magic was this: your mana inside the Core flashed into strange, Wizardly shapes, and now we’ve got a brand new rune to work with.” She held up her hand, spilling golden fire into the air to form a solid image. “This is the rune for [Renew], by the way.”

It was an arrow twisted into a circle, with the arrowhead and tail at the top, nearly touching and going in a clockwise direction. It was almost like the ‘on’ symbol for something electronic, but doubled at the top and bent toward the left.

“Ah.” Erick said, “That works.”

“It does.” Rozeta closed her hands and the rune vanished. “All the other spells you made were well within the workings of the Ancient Script we already had, but [Renew] required something more. It required Wizardry.”

After a moment, Erick asked, “What kind of Wizard am I?”

“I’m guessing Paradox, with a leaning toward Creation.” Rozeta said, “The trinity of Creation, Destruction, and Paradox is more of a convention than reality, for every individual Wizard’s Reality is their own, but in some ways there are Truths even Wizards can’t escape. Think of it like this: some parts of Creation are simply antithetical to Destruction, like white and black don’t mix without producing grey. But then, of course, you could go Paradox, which does both, but by going that way, you will likely never fully understand the white and the black.” She added, “But let’s stick to the surface level questions before we dive too deep into those depths. I had thought to lay everything out there and then talk of tangents, but I can see that your questions come first, so ask them.”

Erick asked, “Can I be a Wizard and still be connected to the Script?”

“You already are, but if you go down this path much further, then the answer is ‘no’, but also ‘yes’; this is my hope for you, actually, though it might not work out that way. We’ll see.”

After a moment of silence, Erick asked, “Can you… explain more?”

“Here’s what will happen: As soon as you choose to go down this route of Wizardry and you achieve the end-state of ‘being a full Wizard’, I cannot have any part of you directly interacting with the Script any longer. You will be removed from the Script. It’s a security issue. But, it’s more complicated than that… Which we will get into.

“Either way, Erick, you don’t have to go down this route unless you want to. [Renew] is Wizardry, yes, but it’s a small Wizardry. It’s forgivable. When you did that, it was very Paradoxical because it’s like the rune for [Renew] has always existed; none of the systems that should have been harmed by the inclusion of a new rune have been harmed by the inclusion of a new rune. The only actual problem is going to come about when the people of this world recognize that you’re a nascent Wizard, and they capture or coerce you into taking hold of your Wizardly power, and then they take advantage of your temporarily weakened state to force you to do what they want.” Rozeta said, “This is the usual end for Wizards.”

“And by ‘people’, you specifically mean dragons.”

“Dragons are the largest perpetrators of this offense; yes.” Rozeta said, “That Curse is a large bottleneck to their power and Wizardry can remove that curse, so they pursue Wizardry to unlock that bottleneck. Imagine living a life constantly under a yoke, and you will know what it means to be a dragon, and what it means to see a Wizard walking around like a key to your cage. Aside from physical and mental damage, the magical problem with that is the dragon will almost always ride a Wizard hard, shaping their Truth until it becomes the exact thing the dragon needs it to be, in order for the Wizard’s power to unlock the dragon’s shackles. Eventually, such harsh use breaks the Truth of the Wizard, and even if they get their mind and their body back, they remain magically broken forever.”

“Can you teach me to remove the Curse? Without breaking my Truth?”

Rozeta instantly said, “No. The Dragon Essence Curse is terrible in its effect, but overall, it is good for this world that the number of dragons who live here are not able to live openly. Veird cannot handle a true flight of true dragons. It would destroy this world.”

“… Ah.” Erick said, “That’s why you haven’t tried to remove the Curse already. Why no one has.”

“Mostly correct.” Rozeta said, “Kirginatharp hunts down all Wizards who look like they could possibly remove that yoke from dragon society.”

Erick corrected himself, “Why no one has been allowed to remove the Curse.”

“This is the more correct wording, yes.”

“… What if I Bless them first?”

Rozeta said, “I will make no decisions for you, Erick.”

“Okay. Then…” Erick asked, “What do you hope to get out of this conversation? You’re talking rather openly about a lot of stuff that you’ve never spoken about before. You’ve directly told me a bit about how the Script works, and at its Core, too. It’s all very… strange, compared to how you normally speak.”

Rozeta nodded. “This is strange. I am talking to you about secrets that should not be spoken aloud, or put out there in any way, shape, or form. But you are here in the Core, fully under my authority, and that allows me the ability to speak more openly. This will probably never happen again.”

Erick sipped his tea. He listened.

“This is also a test, of sorts.” Rozeta said, “I won’t do anything to you no matter your choices following this conversation, but I will enact safeguards which will likely have adverse effects on you if you break or look to break anything truly important.” She said, “The only thing I allow myself to care about is that this world remains stable, and steadily growing, which brings us to perhaps the most important tangent of this conversation.

“Currently, you are on a Path to bring about new worlds, exactly like the Old Wizards used to do. Most everyone of power on Veird is terrified of this for multiple, good reasons, almost all of which are due to the fear that Melemizargo will destroy everything left behind when he finally escapes this world.

“It’s a valid fear. But also, maybe not.

“The oldest of us who still retain a bit of their own rationality hold onto hope that Melemizargo can retake his old mantle of the God of Magic, in the way it is meant to be donned; that he can guide people further into the Welcoming Dark. But…

“This universe is not the Old Cosmology. There is no Welcoming Dark. It’s all endless void and scattered stars and dead planets and— Not even ‘dead’ planets, though. They’re planets Without Possibility. Worse than dead, because even in traditional death there is possibility for more to come.

“But there is no traditional death out there.

“Right now— If you were to have everything lined up perfectly, and the entire world behind you, and everything was set to open up a [Gate] to one of the other planets of this system, to establish a foothold and a nascent Script…

“This would be a monumentally bad idea. My father wants this to happen as soon as possible, but we cannot allow this, for multiple reasons. Let me lay some numbers on you to help you understand, at least the numerical problem.

“The Script requires… Let’s call it 100 units of mana to remain stable. These days, Veird produces 110 units of energy on a good year, and we do what we must to ensure that happens. This world used to produce ten thousand units a year, back at the beginning of the Script, back before Melemizargo went mad.” Rozeta wiped a momentarily sad look away, as she said, “Perhaps, if we had expanded into the rest of this New Cosmology faster… Perhaps if the few remaining Wizards who fell to Veird hadn’t have been murdered by well-meaning people, or driven into hiding only to be hunted down for answers by even more zealots… Perhaps if Melemizargo hadn’t gone almost instantly crazy. Perhaps if we had more time. Perhaps if the Original Script hadn’t been so damned difficult to—” She sighed. “Perhaps we could have expanded to new worlds in the beginning, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But that didn’t happen, and so we are here at this crossroads where the first to blink will likely die.”

Erick focused on a solution, asking, “What if a Wizard went back in time and prevented those issues?”

Rozeta waved a hand, saying, “Already been tried. Only the smallest Time Magics remain open to us, and only in the current day. Traveling back to the beginning is not something we can do, for not even Phagar can get through that broken tapestry anymore. We very much tried that, Erick. Too many times to count.”

Erick sat back in his seat, thinking.

Rozeta said, “Anyway. Mana production has gone down a lot since the Sundering, and mostly because of the problems my father has caused. This year, we might make 109 units of energy because of the various destabilizing forces you have created. We expect a large upswing in the following decades, though, if everything remains as it is. I have no idea what [Renew] will do, but I’m expecting… I don’t know what I’m expecting—

“And there’s another problem, before we even get to the problem of opening new worlds!

“If Melemizargo wanted to destroy this world he could do that in a single moment. He only doesn’t because —and I assume— that some part of him has always remained sane, and destroying magic is already antithetical to him, for he is a Wizard of Creation. He has always sought to force this world to think that it was a prison, and that the people here must ‘break free of their chains’. A lot of the people of this world don’t understand that about Melemizargo, but since his actions often bring ruin, they are not necessarily wrong that he ‘wants to destroy the world’.

“But if he could go to a new world, he might do the antithetical thing, just out of spite. He’s still a dragon, Erick. And, he’s a Wizard.

“Anyway. We’re not opening new worlds with the amount of mana generation we have, and we’re not allowing Melemizargo to do any Creation Wizardry to solve any mana problems. We don’t accept his mana here in the Core, or anywhere else.

“And so, to bring it all together:

“The initial cost of creating a second Script around another world would be at least 100,000 units of energy, but Veird only produces 109, and 100 of those are used for maintenance.

“If you opened a Gate to a new world without proper protocols Veird would destroy itself in a flashing instant; all of our mana would flush out into space. Rocks fall. Everyone dies. And with everyone dead, recovering from that disaster is that much tougher. We’d have to sunder the souls of everyone who died and rebuild from there, letting the monsters take over everything and regenerating this world from slimes, because monsters also produce mana, Erick.”

Rozeta sat back and had another bite of her muffin while Erick thought. As his brain swirled and his mind hammered into itself looking for solutions to everything, all he could really think about was that all his problems were compounding to an insane degree—

“How about…” Erick said, “A small Script that grows over time. It doesn’t immediately take over a world, but it will, eventually. It’ll have to be a lot simpler than it is now. Don’t cover the whole planet at once.”

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“It takes a hundred thousand units of power to make a Script.” Rozeta said, “I’m already taking into account the ‘growing’ aspect of a new one.”

“… Ah.” Erick said, “So I need to become a Creation Wizard, then.”

“Not necessarily.” Rozeta said, “The only option that doesn’t work is Destruction, and it’s probably better if you pick Paradox anyway, so that we can make this plan take a bit longer, to ensure that Melemizargo isn’t plotting to kill us all, and so that the population of Veird can climb higher.” She purposefully nodded to Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye on Erick’s shoulder, speaking to both of them now, “Yggdrasil should be able to gradually soak in excess units of energy and create Seeds of Life, which is what World Trees usually end up doing, anyway. As a Paradox Wizard, you can bless such seeds with the ability to hold a nascent-Script, and also to be able to [Gate] into lands without mana, which is what they would need to do to be able to survive on other, barren worlds. It would take many years for such seeds to mature, but it can be done.

“As a Creation Wizard, you would be able to make Yggdrasil instantly spawn Seeds of Life, but you’d have less ability to control the Script they carried; someone else would have to imbue that into them, and someone else would need to grant those seeds the ability to [Gate] to worlds without mana.” Rozeta said, “But you wouldn’t lack for offers. I would be first in line to do such imbuing, though that is another conversation entirely. Before all of that, you’d have to change how the world thinks of Wizards, or you’d have to hide, really, really well, which, for you, might be impossible due to the amount of extra mana you actually produce.”

“… Unless I go far into Paradox, and make it so that my excess mana remains invisible.”

Rozeta nodded, confirming Erick’s assumption, but then wrecking it a moment later, saying, “In that end-stage of Wizardry I wouldn’t allow you to remain a part of the Script. So if anyone asked to see any blue boxes then you couldn’t show any. You would need to reveal yourself long before then, or suffer all this backlash at that point in time.”

Erick’s brief moment of possible joy was crushed under brutal reality. “And there’s no way I could remain in the Script and be a full Wizard at the same time?”

“Absolutely not. It’s security, pure and simple. Every end-point of you becoming a full Wizard means you lose access to the Script.”

“What would happen to the magic I already have, without the Script to help me cast it?”

“It’s there, inside your soul. You might be able to use it like normal, too. It would require a whole new way of magic, though.”

“… Can you run through everything that will happen to me in choosing to become a Wizard?”

“Yes.” Rozeta began, “First, all of your magic breaks. But you’ve got your aura and your mana sense and you are a Wizard, so you can get back most of your smaller magics rather quickly. But the Script prevents higher tier magic from functioning, so the most mana you could ever spend on a spell is 500. All normal restrictions of the Script remain in place; Infinitesimal Ban, Propagation Ban, Dimensional Ban, Atomic Ban, and a few others you don’t know about and I hope no one ever gets close to ever knowing ever again. I thought Particle Magic was going to need to be Banned like Atomic was Banned, but I feel it’s been well integrated, so it will remain.

“Anyway.

“You lose your Health.

“Your Mana becomes the mana you produce, which hinges on the Wizardly Discipline you manifest. Pick Destruction or Paradox, and you’ll remain at 100,000 to 200,000 mana per day. Pick Creation and you could end up with endless mana. In such a case you might become too valuable to ever kill, so you would likely be hunted down and contained.

“You can only use your mana; you no longer have access to the mana of others, which is what the Script does for most people.

“Stat increases no longer work, so your rings are now useless. This is how it is for most monsters, anyway.

“Your Stats will drop precipitously until you can learn to fortify yourself in the ways that the Script now does.

“Abilities like Mana Altering no longer function for you; you have to do that on your own.

“Aurify, which allows two auras at once, is now removed. You get one aura, your base aura, which you can barely handle.

“[Greater Lightwalk] is both removed and also fully taints your aura, so you might not ever learn Mana Altering for anything other than light.

“[Lodestar] still works, and you might be able to use that in your aura work, but [Domain of Light] costs 5000 mana and you can only use 500, so you’re restricted to [Lodestar] aura, only.

“Intelligence, Clarity, all of the abilities that reduce mana costs are defunct. You now pay full costs for all spellwork until you can learn how to properly cast all of your spells.

“And you have to manually cast every single spell. Some spells with larger mana costs will take longer to cast, upwards of minutes, and must be done in ritual for the 500 mana cap still applies.”

Erick felt physically ill. He almost puked up his tea, but instead he sipped carefully while he listened.