"I don't think the gloves are intelligent, it just jumped out at me as a category difference."

"I wonder how the gloves are usually made." Look look.

Alchemist's leather is usually manufactured via essence diagram (here's a recipe), but there's a paragraph somewhere about the history of the stuff and people did a lot of alchemical experiments before they figured out a treatment that successfully gave the leather an alchemically nonreactive surface.

"Huh," says Tiro. "I guess they're magic?"

"Guess so. And the steel -" He looks that up.

Airsteel was invented using primarily non-alchemical processes!

"Huh," Tiro repeats.

"This stuff is fascinating. I wonder what happened here."

What are the chronologically last things written?

A whole lot of really foreboding diary entries and only marginally less foreboding research notes. The diary entries are a bit all over the place in the way of diary entries, but the research notes are fairly neatly divided into 'what is happening to the global climate and how can we fix it?' and 'what are we going to do about all these ravening fiends?'.

"I guess they never found a solution to the ravening fiends," says Tiro. "And then I guess the ravening fiends all starved to death."

"Seems likely."

"Did anyone ever find out where the ravening fiends came from? Or the climate problems?"

They did not. It was widely speculated, but never confirmed, that the fiends were someone's failed workaround for the climate problem; the fiends never seemed to get thirsty that anyone could tell, and everyone's normal essence plants were being badly affected by the water shortage, so if someone invented the fiends as a water-free essence reclamation/generation mechanism and got a few too many things wrong in their prototype... well. And the study of the climate problem was severely hampered by everyone's inability to go outside without being eaten by fiends.

"And the current climate problem is that there is no climate," Cam remarks. "Although not all of the water is gone, just most of it..."

"I wonder what actually happened."

"I could do progressive scale models of the planet but all the water will fall off pretty promptly, not sure if that gets us anywhere."

"What if you, like, replaced the water with glass...?"

"I guess if I also left out all the vapor that could work."

"Would you have to leave out all the alchemical essences too? I guess there probably won't be any in big enough concentrations to see on a very small scale model..."

"Yeah, those wouldn't come along."

"Well, okay, let's see what a bunch of scale models of the planet look like."

So Cam makes one of the date when the last thing was written...

Tiro peers at it.

It's a planet. It has several continents. One of the continents has an enormous crater in the middle, surrounded by absurd amounts of flooding that are visible even on this tiny scale.

"That looks like a problem," comments Tiro.

"Yyyyes it does. I didn't go high enough to have an idea which continent we're on."

"I'm going to guess it's not that one."

"It could be but yeah my bet is it's not." Skip ahead, say, a month?

A month later, the crater is noticeably bigger, the flooding is noticeably worse, and the amount of water elsewhere in the world - already low - is noticeably less.

"Poor Problem Continent," says Tiro. "Poor everybody, really."

"Indeed." Cam keeps skipping by months until and unless there's a discontinuity.

In only a couple more month-intervals, there is indeed such a discontinuity! The crater has finally reached all the way through the planet's crust, and there is magma visible at the bottom, and it's twice as big as it would be if it had been keeping to the consistent schedule of the last few intervals, and the rest of the world is nearly dry and the flooded continent's water supply is noticeably diminished.

"Whoa," says Tiro.