"I guess effortful's not the thing either. Restful. I assume you're pretty quiet and still when you're sleeping, however little you do it, and the closer you're behaving to as-though-you're-sleeping the better."

"Can I discover a way to do magic without running out of energy like that?"

"Well, if you found one it would definitely be a discovery because I've never heard of anyone who didn't need to rest or wait at all."

He sets his jaw stubbornly. "That's how I'll be epic, then."

"It would be very epic. Although even without figuring out a special recharging trick you can get to the point where you can pretty much use magic all day - lots of practice to build up your reserves and making magic items to do it with when you do run low. And there's magic to make it so you need less rest, though not none."

"I don't need rest anyway! Except to do magic. And I like the idea of being epic by inventing something instead of fighting things."

"There's epic artificers but they still only technically count as epic if they can use their gear in a fight. You can be awesome without fighting things, don't get hung up on 'epic'."

"I'm going to fight all the bad gods," he says, "I just want to mostly invent things not fight them."

"Makes sense."

"We sing epics about things other than fighting, here."

"Our epics have other parts... but always some fighting."

"Even in your science fantasy stories?"

"Not usually told in the form of an epic. Novels, TV shows, comic books."

He shakes his head. "I can't wait until we have those things."

"Well, you're writing a novel. Unless it's going to be a lot shorter than it sounds and just be a short story. Comic books don't take magic either, just drawings and speech bubbles -" She osanwës the vague concept, hasn't read enough comics to use a specific example.

He nods. "I'll write a novel, then the other things. I need more people, or to finish the thing that lets me write faster."

"How's that going? It sounded complicated."

"It's going to take a while to get it to work. It's hard to have a thing that moves the paper the right amount without taking extra work."

"I wonder if you'll have that working before I have crystal balls."

He sets his jaw again. "Definitely."

"Probably," she admits. "Crystal balls are great, though, you can network them so you can talk to people who aren't anywhere nearby. And writing on them is faster than writing by hand even if you're quick at writing by hand."

"How'd'you write on a crystal ball?"

She sends it: a ballroom full of 'em, students frowning at their papers as they think them into existence in the images in the spheres. A scriber in the corner spitting out paper a page at a time.

"Cool. I'll be done faster but I don't know if mine will be quite as fast."

"Yeah, scribers are very quick. They only work on ether files though."