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In Paraasilan, Esmaar, a pair of roommates are about to break a rule that, compared to the one about running in the corridors or even the one about unlicensed teleportation, is there for a good reason.
In unison, they complete their shared spell.
Hall in Elcenia
or-the-broken
"I could try to explain, but I don't know how much background knowledge you're missing."
or-the-broken
"All right... start from paper, I've seen that here. From paper you get to books, right? Okay, now say there's an artifact that's like a library in book form - it contains the information of hundreds or thousands or millions of books, and you can cue it to show you the ones you want, one page's worth of display at a time. And you can write on it, record new books into the library. And any two of these things can talk to each other, swap books back and forth. And there's a semi-centralized network so you don't have to physically find the exact one that has the information you want, you can just go on the network and find it from wherever you are. There's a lot more to it, but that's the basics."
"Yeah, you buy pads of it in pairs, and you keep one and give one to another person, and when either of you writes on it what you're writing appears on the corresponding spot on the other."
or-the-broken
"The ways it's better are harder to explain. But one example is it doesn't just do visuals, it does audio. Whatever music or sound you want that somebody's put on the network, you can get."
Korulen conducts him around the store, makes general remarks about what sorts of things people wear with what sorts of other things, and otherwise hangs back and lets him make selections.
or-the-broken
He goes for things that are simple, minimally flashy, and afford reasonable freedom of movement.
Korulen has no complaints about his fashion sense. She pays for a few outfits in electrum coins and they move on. "The witch is this way."
or-the-broken
"Interesting. Do they tend to specialize in one or the other or whatever comes under 'and so on', or not?"
"Some of them specialize but witchcraft is all one skill as far as I know, so that's just a matter of using different recipes, I think. The one I'm thinking of has everything - well, everything you get for consumer use, anyway."
"Industry or whatever. Concentrated plant food and desalination potions and really heavily controlled painkillers."
or-the-broken
"Heh. Yeah, we've got heavily controlled painkillers too, just not usually made by the same people who make hair dye."
or-the-broken
"Very different skill set. No magic involved, I think that's what makes the difference."