"Peryton," he agrees. "It - I'm using a tremendously complicated magical artifact, if it's safely on my person and not stolen, I can be treated as essentially human with the delightfully useful ability to shapeshift into my natural form and back. Food and lodgings are essentially the same. I carry the tools I need to do my magic with me, I - basically just need paper and maybe a pen, later, if mine dies on me. What I can do is - more complicated. Healing, shielding, invisibility, and some more offensive stuff involving fire and lightning, but those I'm less interested in distributing, because they're - if you copy the runes I write down, and someone knows the chant, anyone can activate the spell."

"You don't need to know any more details of the craft?" says the Sister.

"You do if you want to make new spells, but - to use them? No. But it does have to be exact. Both the chant and the copying."

"How exact?" asks Kaja. "Can ten-year-old novices do it...?"

"Yes. I'd want to check over their work, after, and possibly offer corrections during, but - yes."

"It went fine," Kaja assures him. "I need to make a detour here to get out of all this mail, and then I'll show you the dorm - it's not luxurious but it's serviceable."

"Sure, serviceable is fine." Pause. "Wait. Wait. Do you have indoor plumbing?"

"...meaning what?"

"Er. Showers, sinks, toilets. I'm - getting the feeling the answer is no. Well. That'll be fun."

"There's a little aqueduct that leads from the water reservoir on the top of the retirement dormitory and when it's been rainy you can reach out some of the windows to fill a bucket from it," she suggests. "But otherwise no. There's a bathhouse and outhouses and wells and rain barrels." She gets to what appears to be her own little booth in a row of them that have their own building and peels off her surcoat, revealing wavy brown hair under the hood, and starts disassembling and wiping off and putting away various pieces of armor. It appears it's been designed to be donned and doffed solo without needing a squire.

"Yeah," sighs Darren. "No indoor plumbing." Pause. "... But also no electricity. I could show you electricity. If - I actually knew anything about how it worked. Crap, I need Wikipedia!"

"...My understanding gift doesn't work quite as well as you're trying to force it."

"Sorry. Electricity is a useful thing that powers lots and lots of other useful things. Wikipedia is one of those useful things, and it's - basically a very large library. That you can get at from anywhere that has electricity and inter- uh. A connection to the library."

"I'm still not sure why you want it so badly," she says, unbuckling her boots, "but all right." With her boots off she is now unarmored and looks much smaller, to the point where it's not visually obvious that she could stand up under all that metal, let alone wield a swordstaff with it. She pulls a new outerwear-thing that is smaller and less hooded than her previous surcoat, pulls it on over her uninteresting sub-armor outfit, and leads him on towards the dorm.

He fails to explain as he follows, "It would tell me how to distribute electricity, which - does so many things that I don't know where to begin. Large-scale life improvement, for one."

"What, you - touch it and you are cured of your hangover or you find that you suddenly have a lovely singing voice?"

"Nnnno, more like - you set up a machine that's powered by electricity, leave it alone for a while, and then come back later and retrieve useful items made by the machine. Sounds pretty mundane, but when it's making medicines or - or something, that can be really useful. Or, you have something powered by electricity that helps build things faster, and you have homes or shelters or boats or something built faster and better and you have more time for other things."

"So all of your things are made by machines like that? And you don't have dark things - do people even have to work?"

"A lot of things are made like that, yes. The machines need the be maintained, though, and they can't make literally anything, and for very complicated things a person will need to - direct or move the machine to do the job properly. But it opens up a lot of avenues when you're not as constrained by human labor, like - oh, do you have the printing press, yet?"

"No?"

"Okay. Uh - it's something that can make lots of copies of a book, very fast. It takes time to set up each page, but once you've done so, you can print as many pages as you like. Thus, books, and that helps with literacy and knowledge distribution and the like. I think I can actually manage the printing press, I should do that."

"Sounds good to me. I'm not a huge books person but some people really like them." She lets them into the dorm. The dorm has mostly younger people in it, ranging from as young as eight to as old as eighteen, and the older ones seem to be on the topmost floor judging by the way she heads for the stairs and takes him up three flights.

"So I'm going to do that, along with the magic scroll distribution thing. And - other things, too, when I can think of them. I - am tempted to try to figure out how to distribute good medical practices and germ theory, but since I'm also going to throw healing scrolls at people like they're candy that might not actually help much..."