"Snap! That's correct. Come in if you want." She puts her book on a worktable and pulls out a notebook instead. "Champion... Of... Air... Still... Exists... In... Some... Way..... Aspect... Of... Ganon... Protecting... Controls. Good to see our research turned out reasonably accurate. Helping Link save Hyrule is very important, you know."

He follows her in to the building. "Agreed, it would be a shame to have to evacuate this world."

"Hey! Stop shattering my worldview. I need to know more about this option to evacuate the world. In case it turns out we really do need it. It doesn't sound very plausible."

"I'm from a long way away. I'm an explorer and a scout for the Starlight Institute for Advancing Studies. My working group would be capable of evacuating this world by teleporting people to one of our bases several light weeks away."

"Oh, you're a fellow academic after all! ...There's a lot of people. Getting everyone would be a challenge."

"It would be, still my estimate is that you have a few hundred thousand people in the area you call Hyrule and maybe a couple hundred regions of similar size. Our evacuation protocols are designed for cities with millions of people. The main issue is that your population is really spread out."

"Most of the world's land is not super populated. Hyrule probably beats them, even after the Calamity. Plus, a lot of people won't want to go. But anyway! I don't have so much as a census, let alone regulatory powers. So we should talk about academics. What do you want to know about Sheikah technology?"

"I want to learn everything but a good starting point would be the way it stores items. That's the most unlike anything I've encountered before."

"Ah! That is a bit mysterious even to us. We know a fair bit of the theory but can't make new devices... I'd be happy to explain what we know about it if you donate some money or tell us some interesting tech from your Institute of Studies."

Pause.

"...Not that I'm trying to be academically uncooperative! It's just that we haven't gotten any funding but what we can scrounge up for over fifty years."

"Well we're rather short on local currency so an exchange of knowledge it will have to be. To start with do you know about electricity?"

"Maybe I should go wake up Symin first. Two brains are better than one. Wait here, please?"

"Sure."

Off she goes to fetch her assistant.

She comes back with a middle aged man who looks much more academic than a small girl. Presumably Purah's form is not quite natural...?

"Ah, nice to meet you, I'm Symin. My specialty is sensors."

"As for electricity, there are some magical effects that can produce large bursts of it, like lightning does. There are effects than can provide resistance to electricity, as well. Sheikah texts refer to carefully controlled flows of electricity doing things in some places. It really likes metal and water. Some monsters use electrical attacks. It's related to magnetic fields... I could continue?"

"That sounds like a pretty good basis to work from. You can generate sustained flow of electricity around a closed conductive loop by spinning a permanent magnet inside a coil of wire. The basic uses for electricity are mostly heating and lighting. As for the complex use cases, the possibilities are nearly endless. The main step between the two categories is in using electricity to do math, with enough creativity and time almost anything we've encountered can be described by math and then we can use the results of that math to do things like make pictures, move objects and make sound."

"Funny you should mention that! Sheikah technology does math using mana flows."

"I'm not surprised. Given that it might make sense to continue using mana based systems instead of electrical ones, though I'm not familiar with the limitations of such mana based systems. Clearly they're rather powerful though. I'm happy to talk more about this or I could try to list other categories of expertise that the Institute has to offer."

Symin speaks up. "Mana-based computing operates using discrete packets of mana. Each packet can hold a lot of information when created by processes with a high complexity... It's either negative, zero, or positive for each level of complexity it has. But the packet only ever loses information when handled by something with a lower complexity. If you feed it back into something with a higher complexity, it reads the lost data as all zeros. I've been experimenting with these processes, but they're very hard to build..."

"That's a very different dynamic than electrically based computing. In electrically based computing everything is a stream of binary values represented in various ways, most commonly by high and low voltages."

"Cool! That sounds snappy! It's a great opportunity for some more discussion later. But I wanna know about other stuff you can do. You can cross large distances very fast, if your comment about 'light minutes' was not exaggerating, yeah?"

"Oh you're familiar with the speed of light. There are structures we call luminal threads that underlie reality with the right technology you can send things along those threads at the speed of light including people and vessels. Now, with technology alone you can't go anywhere you don't already have a receiver setup but we also have access to magic of our own which can obviate that requirement, though only for relatively small masses and volumes."

"Cool! You wanted to know about the Inventory system... There are physical spaces that are not quite adjacent to this 'world', with its three dimensions of space and the passing of time. Since time doesn't pass there it's kind of hard to make any more detailed observations of it... Actually, we only know about it because there were ancient journals about it. It's probably one of the fields of Sheikah technology we understand the least. But, snap! We can use the theory, kinda! The Sheikah Slate's inventory seems to work by surrounding an object with mana and then moving the mana into this other dimension. It also stores a high-complexity mana packet which I believe is a metaphorical 'address' for where the Slate should reach when asked to retrieve the item."

"Fascinating, I wonder whether our magic uses that capability under the covers. We're still figuring out what its limits are."

"We should..." She strikes a pose. "Experiment!"

"Do you have a proposed experiment?"

"First of all, we should see whether your methods of detecting luminal threads can see inventories, and vice versa."