"It wouldn't, necessarily, but it'd give me—or, well, the person running the scan, I don't have the training—some information about the process of doing sorcery, which then might be able to be replicated. Like, say, if it depends on certain electrical signals existing in a particular pattern, maybe they could be simulated inside something that's not a brain."

"So can machines do other things that minds can do?"

"Mmmmore or less. Yes, no, kinda. That depends on how you define 'things that minds can do.' They can play chess? But the process isn't the same."

"They do this with information learned from brain scans?"

"Nnnope. Information learned from brain scans mostly serve to diagnose diseases and disorders. But magic is as far as I know the only way brains affect the world through things that aren't their bodies, so that's different. People did learn how to, say, create mechanical arms by, amongst other things, studying biological ones."

"Huh. If you say so, then, I guess. But you'll have to haul one of those machines to Fairyland."

"Yeah, that's more of a far-future project, after humans and fairies are coexisting peacefully in a magical utopia."

"Aha."

"For now I wanna figure out whether more gates from here to HQ will take as little time as these three or whether those were just lucky, and then see if the pattern changes depending on where the gate leads to, and its size."

"Where in HQ are you putting them?"

"That empty room with all the traps. Which maybe I should disable."

"Maybe."

She tries opening a fourth small gate after gridding the area with fairylights.

Thirty seconds. Comparable patterning.

"This is suggestive! I like what this is suggesting!"

Two more gates?

Similar results.

Now to the empty trapped room in the Russian safehouse?

That one doesn't settle promptly at all.

"Okay, so it depends both on point of origin and destination, apparently... I wonder if it's a combination thing or a, an addition thing, or something."

"What do you mean by an addition versus a combination thing?"

"Like... it could be that there's an inherent difficulty in opening gates from a given point, and an inherent difficulty in opening gates to a given point, and they're added or something when determining how long the gate takes to settle; or it could be that the time it takes to settle depends on something about origin and destination in some way that can't be determined in advance by looking at them independently."

"Or it could be that in theory you could figure it out by looking at them independently but it's not as simple as adding up two difficulty scores. - Especially since that would imply that no place has a difficulty score of more than half a week and it would only take that long if you found two of those and tried to connect them, which I think doesn't match what little I know about the distribution of gate settling times."

"Yeah. And anyway, it shouldn't be too difficult to test."

"So many gates."

"Yeah, that's the deduction part."