Valanda says nothing at all to that.

Nick collects his crate from the storage tent and says hi to Mahan and tries to find the heat mage.

The heat mage is a tired hundred-forty-year-old caralendar woman sitting on a rock outside. Her breath doesn't start clouding till it's a couple inches away from her face.

An elf, huh. (She's not an elf, don't let that bias you, they probably have few if any elf-like qualities that will translate from your cultural zeitgeist.)

"Hi. How much to make a metal disk permanently as hot as a fire and another one permanently almost as cold as ice?"

"Twenty-four rings each. What kind of fire? How close to ice cold?"

He names some measurements for temperature. Stove fire, not firestorm, and less than a degree above freezing. And counts out rings and presents his disks and puts on gloves. (What a bargain for infinite free energy!)

"I take it your gloves are warded, last chance to change your mind about holding something as hot as a fire in your hand."

And if he doesn't object he can have his burning and almost-freezing whatever-they're-for.

"Not exactly, but it'll be fine."

Off he goes, carrying them away from camp along with his big crate of other tinker's toys, humming cheerfully.

He comes back into camp to ask a structure mage to do something random and strange that evening, and the next day he goes shopping for a little blood and chats with Mahan, trying to see how much exactly he knows about medicine already.

"Do I get to see the textbook now?"

"Ah, sorry, I totally forgot - it's in my language, English. I'll probably get around to translating... Soonish. Maybe when I finish my calculator. And Valanda is thinking of hiring a knowledge and illusion mage to take copies of my books, though knowledge mage translation is probably going to be iffy."

"I hear writing's tricky to translate. Well, how long will I be waiting if I have to wait for you to finish your calculator? Maybe you could translate the medical textbook first?" Mahan fingers his rings.

"I'm a few days away still, but I feel bad about this." Strange, but true. Mahan doesn't deserve to be jerked around too much.

"Tell you what, I'll translate the first couple of chapters before getting back to work on the calculator and you can read those while I finish. Textbooks can be kind of dense but I can try to translate around that, I have a little magic helping with that but it's not so good at being direct. I was going to let you read it off my tablet for fifteen, maybe twenty, rings an hour, but since I have to actually translate it... Hmm."

"Ninety-six rings for an hour of it?"

"Sure! And vampire brains run hot, I'll get a lot more translating done per hour than a human would. You have to buy the paper and ink though."

Mahan snorts. "Fine, fine, you can use some of mine." He packed a lot of it, mostly for spell planning.

He finds a corner and pulls up An Introduction To Medical Science on his trusty solar powered tablet and gets to work, short pauses as he thinks, then bursts of speed, his hands moving so quickly they're blurry. He leaves blank spots for the diagrams - an illusion mage can fill them in later.

Mahan spends the whole time thinking about uses for that kind of speed. Ground transport? Polishing metal? Friction heating?

"What was your job before you came here?" he asks when Nikolas is done.

"I've had many jobs in my many years. I have had recently good work as a... Researcher and courier, I suppose one could say." This is code for stealing and fencing while looking for magical items. Not that Mahan needs to know that, law-abiding as he is.

"If you run as fast as you write you could be really useful. Especially if you can carry a passenger. Getting people in small towns to doctors is hard, what we have for that on the mainland isn't good enough."

"I can carry someone but it might be a bumpy ride. Not ideal if you're already sick or injured. A worthy cause, but I think I'd rather solve that by inventing something. Have you tried bringing the doctors to the people?"

"Yeah, we have, we do that, the imperial government pays for it. It's not enough, it still takes them time to get anywhere, and we're not sure what they'll decide to do about us down here. The force mages could fly me but they have jobs and we're expecting we'll end up with fewer of all the useful kinds of mage, including force mages."

"Well. I may have something for that in the works... A way of getting around quickly without a force mage. But it's a secret for now." He must think he's terribly clever to smile like that, though.

Mahan also smiles. "Let me know if you need investors."

"I certainly will. I need to make tools and use those tools to make more tools and then I can use those tools to get to work properly."

"When do you expect to see some return on your investment?"