"A direct hit to the head or body causes them to fall unconscious; anywhere else, and the affected area may become temporarily numb and unresponsive."

"Unconscious for how long?"

"Depends on the strength of the stun bolt. Anywhere from a few minutes to several days, more normally an hour or two."

"All right, can I get a few-minutes version for a baseline test before I start prototyping shields? Please do not draw on me while I am asleep."

Faidre obliges him. The bolt makes a tiny 'fwm' sound.

"A few seconds," says Inlaith.

"Okay. I might just be condensing the allotted time or a few seconds might be my maximum stunned duration, hit me with a bigger one?"

Fwm.

Faidre chuckles.

"You were out for a minute that time. How long should it have been?" says Inlaith, glancing at his grandfather.

"An hour."

"Okay, so maybe I just cut it down by a factor of sixty but I could still be severely inconvenienced by heavy-duty stun bolts flying around. Silver for the shields? Should they have little designs on them?"

"Ideally, yes. Do you need more information than 'normal stun shield engravings' to generate those designs?"

"If there's a normal I should be able to use that, I didn't know how standardized it was. Are they usually defined with math that'll scale really nicely or just sort of drawn on?"

"They scale perfectly well."

"Lovely." Cam makes one, peers at it, says, "Unfortunately it's really hard to get any sort of outfit that interacts well with wings which are, in fact, persistently attached to one's body," and then makes more of them, all attached, in two layers to cover one another's gaps and plated in clear diamondlike carbon substance. He drapes it over his shoulders, wings folded. "Give it a spin."

"Would it go around and hit me in the head or would it go through, and if the latter would it wreck my shield cloak?"

"Through, and no."

"Huh. I mean, I could make it more layers but that would make it really bulky and I was imagining the end version would have all of the kinds of shields there are... Maybe I could keep it to two layers, or three or four, and have them be really really thin and in stacks a few molecules thick? Anything the matter with having a fire shield directly on top of a stun shield et cetera?"

"The thinner the shield, the less effective it is," says Inlaith. "A strong enough stun bolt will pass through your cloak not because there are gaps but because it won't care about shields that small."

"Interesting. Even if the surface is wholly tiled with them? Why is that?"

"It's one of the most basic principles of magical weapon and shield design. Strength is proportional to size. It's possible that with your ability to completely ignore the practical necessities of manufacturing and materials costs, you could help us develop a shield cloak that matches your ideals, but no one has tried to layer together hundreds of tiny shield-circles coated in diamond before so no one currently knows how to do that effectively."