Elf ears on a human face and body is pretty amusing. She looks at the artifact again; they've found that a little wooden piece on top is detachable and are messing with that now.

Cayra keeps the pointy ears for now; they amuse her. She supervises the artifact tinkering.

The little wooden piece turns out to be separately chargeable! 

"Hey, Cayra, would you mind holding this and letting it drink your mana for a bit? It won't hurt you, and you can't do anything with your mana anyway since you aren't a caster." 

"Hm. If I find a way to stop it working can you tell so I know it worked?"

"Yeah, I'll be able to tell whether mana is flowing out of you or not. We can stop it just by focusing on wanting it to stop, try that first."

"Okay." She picks up the artifact, lets it do its thing to start to see if that feels like anything.

"Okay, looks like you can prevent it, I'm not seeing anything happening."

"I was trying to let it."

"That's odd. Maybe only casters can charge artifacts after all? It didn't feel like I was casting anything, though. When we get back to Pinehedge we should have a bunch of noncasters try it, you could easily be a weird case for a number of reasons."

"That makes sense."

"Anyway, we're trying to figure out what rules this thing is following. So far we've got that it accelerates the same amount regardless of where the blade starts or what's under there, so we think the vertical parts are applying the same force every time. And the force is on this wooden frame, not on the blade."

"If the force is not on the blade why does the blade move?"

"Because the blade is attached to the thing the force is on, or at least it was before we took it out." He points at the place on the sliding bit where the blade used to be attached.

"And it's a good thing we had the option, because I've checked and this thing treats fingers exactly like every other material."

"You checked?"

"After taking the blade out, obviously! I like my fingers, I grew them myself!"

"Just wondering. It behaves just the same with no blade in?"

"Yup!"

"Is the blade sharp by magic? I'm surprised it's still sharp enough to cut."

"It is a non-zero amount of rusty, and we found it wrapped up; I think it's just a really well-made piece of metal."

"Okay. So how sharp it is isn't magically interesting."

"Probably not, no. What I'd really like is to take it apart and see if there's some kind of internal mechanism, but of course we daren't do that until we're sure we've learned all we can with what we've got, and ideally found a few more artifacts so this isn't the only one. And brought it back to Pinehedge so other researchers can look at it intact."

"How long a trip is it?"

"A couple weeks on a boat."

"Well, I guess that's not too bad."