"I hope so too! I wish I could tell you what to... mine. I think silicon's involved and have no idea where, I would have read up and packed differently if I'd known this was going to happen."

"We can run lots of experiments if it doesn't turn out that someone is like "oh, obviously I see what you'd use the silicon for, it could hardly be anything else", which someone might."

"That'd be convenient."

"I guess it's also possible that our world doesn't work like yours in a way that'd be relevant for making computers."

"I guess that's possible but it would seem weird in a way that magic being different wouldn't."

"Well, there's also gravity being different, though that one feels like a result of the creators of our world trying for something and missing."

"The place is just generally pretty recognizable? It's not like I got squashed into two dimensions."

"I'd find that fairly convincing if some random process was at work, but the Valar were badly trying to imitate a vision of how the world should be, and that might be correct with respect to the things that make people live and wrong in other surprising places. I hope not, though."

"Hm... how do magnets work? Those aren't important for how people live and are important for electricity and stuff."

"- good point, they're not. Uh, some metals are magnetic, meaning that there's a magnetic field around them all the time, and most metals interact with magnetic fields even ones that aren't themselves magnets. Some things that aren't magnets can be made into them through repeated exposure to a strong magnet. Magnetic fields are much stronger right near the source. There's math for all this, should I try to share it -"

"I don't know the math myself so I couldn't confirm it matched. Does uh, this vague mental image of iron filings around a magnet look about right -"

" - yes, it does. Oh good."

"It's not proof but it's suggestive."

"And it's interesting -" he catches himself. "There'll be lots of qualified people in the audience for the talk."

...she doesn't really know how to address how depressing it is that he thinks it's dangerous to be interested in things so she doesn't. "I bet!"

"If you'd like you could get a tour of Khazad-dum while they're getting all the details straightened out. It's a beautiful city, stretches all the way under the mountains."

"Wish I'd landed with my wheelchair, but yeah, sounds worth doing."

"I suspect we can get something similar. This is to sit in so you don't have to walk?"

"Yeah. I'm bad at walking. Usually a fall won't hurt me but if I'm going to do a lot of walking it starts seeming smart to turn it into not-walking."

"I'm sure we can put something together."

"That'd be convenient."