"I have a high pain tolerance from the magic and unless it squished my skull I could heal myself. And my skull is reinforced. Actually I should probably do that for everyone here who wants it, it takes a little while but I don't need touch range or anything."

"...yes, I expect that'd be useful."

"I keep forgetting things people take for granted back home," she admits ruefully. "Oh, you probably don't have vaccines here, that should cut down on the amount of people who need to spend some time sick before getting healed at the very least and persists even if you leave and never see a mage again. Vaccines are...sort of like diseases only inert, basically, they teach your body to fight them off. Who wants their head messed with first?"

To everyone's mild surprise Lady Hareth volunteers.

And Illia carefully rearranges the composition of her skull to be sturdier. This takes about half an hour.

After this has no catastrophic consequences there are more volunteers.

Excellent. People being harder to kill is such a good thing.

"I don't suppose you can duplicate armor? It has the advantage the skull takes no damage at all."

"I can make armor, given metal. ...And an example to work from, ideally, I suppose, but I could probably figure it out on my own."

"Convenient. We can do the intermediate stages but they take time, and we have plenty of examples, though the Dwarves would object if we duplicated their craft with magic."

"The Dwarves?"

"Uh, yes?" See, in some ways we're more cosmopolitan than you are. "So called because they are very short. They live in underground cities."

"So they're another species, then?" she clarifies.

"No one's attempted interbreeding. Probably, though."

"Well, you do have a lot of sapient species here. Elves and humans and spiders and maybe dwarves."

"Is that unusually many?"

"There's only humans where I come from. So Dwarves would object to me creating armor directly from miscellaneous pieces of metal?"

"Dwarven armor. It's like - do you have seamstresses who'd be distressed if everyone copied their patterns?"

"Oh. Sure. How does armor work, specifically? I mean, I know the point is to put hard metal between your squishy bits and the other guy's weapons, and I could probably do a decent set of chain mail off the top of my head, but I assume with plate mail you've got to think about things like angles of deflection and making sure that if you get hit hard enough to dent it that it crumples in a way that doesn't kill you..."

"We have lots of good sets you can copy, and I'll talk you as you go through how and why they're designed, maybe look at some different designs so you can get a sense of the tradeoffs that are made. The problem we have is that armor takes a long time to make and most Elves own a set but most Men don't and we can't produce enough for all of them."

"Copying should be all but trivial."

"Great. Ranged weapons for attacking fortresses? That a thing you can do?"

"Do you have catapults? Trebuchets? Ballista?"

"Yes, yes, no, I think."

"Ballista are fucking enormous crossbows."