"Oh, my pleasure!" the mannequin chirps, dormant and waiting for input again.

"Huh. Well, we don't call it or think of it as magic, but all the people from my world have this connection going on, even if we're not aware of it. I'm just someone who was made aware of it, and one thing led to another, and now I'm a bird." It's all more complicated than that. Julien's not at all sure if there's a hivemind entity on every world, how would anyone know if it didn't do anything, or that's unique to his.

"Say, am I doing magic now?" He hadn't known until Heartstone Manor that if his bodies were cut off from each other this one would go inert. This brain has got to be processing on its own, he can multitask pretty well now, but there's still some kind of connection.