Divine magic users still cast spells. If I got gnawed on by something but managed to make it to the campus healing center they'd cast on me and I'd be good as new. They could fix your eyes, even, without having to give you a whole new body.

Ah. Then, no, that's not comparable to what we're doing.

Yeah, I don't think we have... a thing I'd describe the way you described your thing.

Mahtan's the perfect person to observe, if you're intrigued by it. He tries everything and then builds up guesses about how rock and metal really work, what's going on to make the things he tries possible. Aulë's besotted. The Valar approach things from a different perspective, questions and experiments occur to us that wouldn't even make sense to them.

...like, you wonder whether the hardness of glass changes at higher melting temperatures, so you try a dozen melting temperatures and then you scratch the glass resulting from each, and determine how hard it is. And if it does change, then you can make guesses - ah, if I could get something with an even higher melt point, it'd be even harder - and you go try new things from those. Aulë knows the melting point and hardness of everything one could conceivably make with rock, but it wouldn't occur to him to try to find the underlying patterns like that.

We. Don't do that. We can't. It's dangerous and it doesn't work even if it doesn't kill you, my world doesn't - like being poked at like that, the best case scenario if you do that is that glass starts working differently to spite you and more likely you wind up dying in a horrible glass related accident or getting hit by a rock from the sky or something -

What? How would you ever develop new materials or weapons, then? Your knife was very high-quality; how could that be made without experimentation?

People can - try things. Like, once or twice. If they work they can keep doing the thing. They just can't be systematic about it or try lots of little variations. Not on physical things like that, or on magic... People can practice, once they have something that works at all, and practice lets you get better even if you're only trying to do one thing over and over. Also the knife is magic. This is a science world, are you sure? It doesn't - mind? Or is it just the Valar are shielding you somehow or you just haven't been systematic enough because you can just go ask and don't have to do it all by experimentation alone so there's enough breaks in the process that it doesn't seem intrusive to the universe...?

No, we were the same by Cuivienen, it always works to try variations on things. You develop a better bow by making ten and firing them and seeing which wood bends best, you try a dozen baits for fish to see what's most reliable - how could you not do that? You're not bothering the universe, you're checking how it works!

Our universe gets bothered! It doesn't want to be looked at that way and it's mean when people try! We have - we have stories, science fantasy stories, about people who can do ridiculously amazing things because they can just try anything that comes to mind in a thousand variations and everything they learn will stay put, but it's only stories, everything else is guesswork and practice and talent and divine intervention and epic successes and swapping nice non-threatening ideas with other people -

Ah. Well, bad things have happened to us, but not because we try lots of different ways of making tinted lenses or metals or houses or fountains or anything else.

How sure are you of that?

The way your world works would...never have occurred to me as an explanation. How did your people realize that it worked that way, what's something it definitely would not be safe to do?

Oh, I had a book about this when I was little, my mother caught me trying to take apart the television and she was so frightened and she made me read this entire book about "those who sought science" - there was someone trying to invent a way to non-magically give things motive force, he thought he'd be able to underbid the enchanted carriage people, he's dead. Somebody in some part of the Shift was trying to figure out how fast things fall and what makes them fall various speeds and now I think down is in a different direction or something for miles around where she worked.

Hmm. If I ask Lórien how fast things fall, that wouldn't be a problem even on your world, yes? I can ask him if it's safe for me to check how fast things fall.

Asking is fine, although it can make people nervous if you do too much. Gods and stuff like that can get away with things other people can't, too... the things going on when Mahtan was trying to make me lenses seemed weird but it also seemed like he was going to go talk to Aulë about it before anything got out of hand and that seemed like a reasonable safety precaution.

Aulë likes hearing and advising, but I've never heard it suggested as a safety precaution.

Yeah, I get that this is either not a thing here or not a thing you've run into, but that was why I didn't say anything at that time.

We're called the Noldor because we like inventing and refining. It's practically our identity. I don't think we'd do well on your world.

Honestly, I didn't do that well in my world either. If I'd known that magic thing led to a science fantasy world with harmless kings and friendly gods I might well have jumped.

Science fantasy, hmm? Remember any specific creations from your stories that wouldn't be possible in your world?

Oh, they do all kinds of things in science fantasy. Fly to the moon in capsules full of recycled air. The engine idea, that gets used, all kinds of vehicles. Medicine as good as divine magic or better and easier to use. Archers who can hit their targets every time by knowing just exactly how to calculate where everything's going to be. Cheap mass resurrection. Machines that handle information like crystal balls and communication like magic mirrors only better.

Amusement, delight. We don't have a moon. Everything else we could perhaps try, eventually. We have all the Ages of the world ahead of us.