Shrinking, actually, metals are dense. He has a handful of truly useless attempts, all short, mostly lumpy and uneven. He has a couple very short lengths that are nice and neat. He has one three-foot length of wire that's almost perfect, just a little too wide in a couple of places, but the biggest flawless stretch is almost one and a half feet.

"I'll be able to speed up eventually, when I've done it a few times."

Investigating the neater ones, he says, "These are pretty good. Miscellaneous short bits are useful, too, but the longer the better. Maybe I can whip up a ducting tool to make it longer and thinner? But that might have to wait until we find a good town. I can probably make a tiny demo generator with these. Not something actually useful, but good practice. Want to help?"

"Yes!"

His workshop has a wide variety of hand tools, and a couple of big powered ones (though it's unclear where the force that drives them comes from if they don't have force mages), and neat cabinets with many little drawers.

He turns the wire into a coil and finds a magnet and attaches it all to some other things and puts the whole thing into an assemblage of wood and glass with a crank handle. He gets Valanda to help and explains what he's doing as best he can, too.

Eventually, it's done "...Okay, so. It should make a spark when you turn the crank. Or maybe just heat up this little bit at the end here. But sparks are dangerous, of course, so maybe let's try it in the kitchen."

He watches everything and does his best not to damage anything.

"I could make some inert gas or something if there's a fire but I don't think you should count on my reaction time."

"Yeah, let's not. Fire extinguishers are something else we can try to make."

"Probably safer that way."

Kitchenward?

Kitchenward!

He tests the thing, spinning his arm around and around to turn the crank - and it produces tiny sparks arcing between two tiny prongs at the top with soft fzzzt sounds.

"...Heady. Such a tiny, but amazing thing, isn't it? A tiny piece of lightning in my hands."

"Wow. What can we run with that much electricity?"

"Maybe a light. Some of the electronics I could make probably can run on this little but I won't be making anything that efficient for a while. We'll be making bigger ones. Maybe photovoltaics too - glassy panels that turn sunlight into electricity without all this finicky spinning."

"Would having lights make night flying safe?"

"If they're bright enough to see islands far enough away, which might be a bit iffy. RADAR is more promising on that front. Towns could run lighthouses and get ships to come to them from further away, maybe. Electrical lights for inside structures would be safer than lanterns, too."

"I bet they would! And maybe you could use lights for a signal from farther away than you can make out a flag. Or in different weather."

"The flags are pretty easy to understand. Pictures aren't that hard. Lights would be new and maybe tricky to get people to agree on complicated codes. Probably worth trying, it'd be very convenient."

"I guess lights don't get you much. What if we tried storing power till we had enough to do something else?"

"That's called a battery. It's an option, yeah. Honestly if we also had a heat mage and a defense mage and a structure mage this would be a hundred times easier. Lights will do good things when there's more than this tiny bit of electricity to run them. Radios, maybe calculators, maybe RADAR, maybe refrigerators and heaters, electric engines, elevators, power tools... Lots of possibilities. Just takes a little patience. This proof of concept will help us get people excited about it."

"Are we going to look for investors or try selling lights?"

"Depends. Investors are both good and bad. More talent, more money to throw at the project without destabilizing everything quite as much by pulling gold out of thin air. Possibly less control over it all. Investors are probably a good idea, honestly."

"It'd be nice if I made food or something instead, nobody ever stops wanting to buy food. ...I guess maybe that's less true with less preservation." Sigh. "I don't know how to evaluate investors, otherwise I'd offer to do that."

"I want to prioritize people you like and can work well with. Maybe not as investors, but as hirelings or co-tinkers, definitely. That makes many things so much easier. Though if you want to be a silent source of materials and not as involved, that can be arranged too."

"I don't want to just be someone else's resource ever again but I don't know enough to be anything else."

"You'd be rich before long of course. Free to take time off and free to quit if you felt like it. Free to buy whatever you'd like. But I can see that. We'll have you involved in the design and manufacture then, that's settled. I think I should clean up and get to sleep soon."

"Thanks. I'll try not to just slow you down."

"Two minds are better than one a lot of the time. Catch each other's mistakes. Good night, then."

He sleeps.

He gets up early. If Nick's not up yet he'll go watch the sky until he is.