"Not without looking and seeing if there's a lot of water floating around the relevant place, I don't think."

"Hmm. Which you can't do because it's very dark there, right... are there scrying spells that don't rely on light?"

"There are spells that'll do sound, but I didn't hear anything either."

"I wonder if you could make one. A scrying spell that shows you what's somewhere without needing the things it shows you to be illuminated where they are."

"Maybe... I'm envisioning dizzying practical problems with what 'source' the objects are supposed to be lit from in the rendering..."

"Project an illusion lit as though the objects are in the room the illusion is projected into?" she suggests.

"What if Lialen is completely tiled with solid stuff...? I guess as long as you aim at specific objects they could be divorced from that context in the scry..."

"Yes. You could have it show you just your dragon shape, or just the lamp, or whatever. At least, if that's the sort of thing that sort of spell can do."

"Shouldn't be a problem, it's not customary because most scries are supposed to produce some information about context but - yeah, I think 'my dragon shape and objects tucked therewith' is sufficiently concrete."

"Great!" beams Blueberry. "You can do that, then. And all the things about glowing things are less urgent but still interesting."

"And I'll see about a nice crisp analysis of oomph, too."

"What does an analysis do exactly?"

"Lets you look at magic. Often other wizard magic, but not necessarily."

"How does it do that?"

"I'm not sure what kind of 'how' you mean - for devising one for oomph I'm going to design what I want oomph to look like, since it's not in discrete units like wizarding power I'm probably going to go with a metaphorical substance in a metaphorical graduated cylinder, and then while I have that spell on, if I look at a unicorn I will be able to literally see this cylinder however full it is. I'm probably going to use you as a baseline because I've met you, with enough leeway that if you suddenly doubled in oomph the spell would handle it - I'd make a new version if I needed to handle ranges bigger than that."

"Yes, that's what I wanted to know - how it presents the information. If it matters to your spell, unicorn magic comes in colours - every unicorn has a specific colour that their horn glows when they're doing magic. My horn doesn't usually glow, but when it does it looks like this." She concentrates for a moment and a pale blue glowing aura appears around her horn; it doesn't quite just emit light, because if that was all, the colour wouldn't be so clear. "So if you made your substance look like the glow, you'd get a little bit of extra information about what the unicorn's magic looked like. The colour doesn't make any practical difference, but it seems tidy to show it anyway."

"Why is it that your horn doesn't usually glow?" Kaylo wonders. "But yes, that's good to know, it can look like a cylinder full of glow."

"It's just a trick I can do. I think it's probably related to my special talent, because I haven't heard of anypony else being able to do it, but I don't have my cutie mark yet so I don't know for sure."

"Huh. When-ish do ponies usually get those?"

"When they're older than me but not a lot older. I'm six; ponies usually get their cutie marks between eight and ten."

"But you still have functional talents before then?"

"Well, it's usually hard to tell. Most ponies get their cutie mark the first time they realize what their talent is, and especially if it's a magic talent and not something like being good at chess, there's no good way to tell the difference between not being able to do it beforehand and just not having done it yet. Maybe if I was an ordinary pony I wouldn't have found out I could make my horn not glow until I was eight, but here I am doing lots of magic before then."

"Huh. Are there any cases of somepony as young as you getting a cutie mark?"

"Not that I know of. But it could've happened a few times and just not been noticed by anypony who would've written it down."

"It's almost like people don't care about researchers having access to statistics. Well, I suppose it'll be informative if you wake up with one on the morning of your birthday."