"Is it teachable, if we find someone with sufficient cunning to learn it?"

"...I'm not competent to teach it but I do have the spellbook page and someone of exceptional brilliance might be able to get somewhere with that and watching me prepare it, I'm not sure."

"Something to think about but not a high priority, then."

Nod.

Yawning aunt trudging down the stairs.

Cheerful greeting, and a few followup remarks.

Intrigued reply; increased pace toward breakfast.

"I told her you have the ability to share your language and some books that could be copied and translated. She's going to invite her boyfriend over to see the books."

"If you have blank paper I can run them off with the orison Scrivener's Chant, if we want more copies."

"How fast does that work? Using book-copying widgets might be faster, depending."

"About a page a minute."

"Hmm, the widget probably outperforms that but only probably, for a single copy of each book. For multiple copies there's economies of scale, I don't know if Scrivener's Chant has those. And I don't recall you having Scrivener's Chant on the menu today so that's an advantage in the widget column."

"Yes, scrivening would need to wait. Widgets are plausibly the superior solution if you have them for this as for so many other things."

"It is a very widget-heavy society I live in."

Speaking of which, Chris seems to be having a one-sided conversation with a very widget-looking object over there.

Maybe it is a Widget of Sending. "Is that a Widget of Sending?"

"I don't know precisely how Sending works but it sounds like approximately yes."

"Sending delivers a twenty five word message to an arbitrary target. Important for coordinating, say, military response at teleport distance."

"Widgets of that kind - it's called a 'phone' - establish a two-way connection that transmits sound across long distances between two such widgets in an appropriately coordinated network. So, same broad logistical purpose, different exact mechanics."

"More useful within the network but lacks the - complete independence - of a Sending," concludes Blai. "Sending can reach across planes and such."

"Yeah, phones can't do that. They need a lot of widgety infrastructure to do their thing. It used to be impossible to carry one out of your house and have it still work, because they had to be linked to the infrastructure physically; we've solved that one but we haven't solved the interplanar case because the existence of other planes falls under the same curse preventing magic from going public."

Chris puts down her phone and, presumably, reports on the outcome of the conversation.

"She says he'll be here soon."

"How soon is soon, given that there are transit widgets? - are the other planes you can reach from here under the same curse?"

"They are not! By and large they have other problems, but not that one. Hmm, I'm second-guessing my instinct to say 'a few minutes' because I'm not sure this language counts time in the same ways I'm used to - we divide days into twenty-four hours and hours into sixty minutes, does that track?"