"You can do that? How? Could you use that to simulate anything aging? Could you use that to predict stuff?"

"Can't predict things, no, but I can pull anything that existed out of any time period."

"Oh, so you mean like, something a tinker has already made in the past, not like what my batteries would be if I spent a month without doing maintenance."

"Yeah - well, we could play around with relativity, but that's not looking into the future -"

"Yeah, I was actually wondering about that, like, technically we're in the Earth's past right now, and vice-versa—and how did your magic even pick up a given time to arrive here?—but anyway, you could see if you can find anything by conjuring stuff that aged without maintenance. Might not work anyway, though, tinker tech is notoriously difficult to reverse-engineer and pretty much impossible to understand unless you're the one who made it originally."

"I have no idea how the magic handles time, except that demons sort of even things out, since we can conjure from anywhere instantaneously - you could say we have a frame of reference outside the dimension? I'm not really sure - anyway, if you name some tinker tech that ages I can see if we can get anywhere."

So he suggests this one stun gun he made like two years ago and hasn't touched in about that long.

Here it is! And here is it-when-he-made-it and here is it-a-year-ago.

They don't look different at all, modulo regular wear and tear.

Do they all work?

They seem to turn on and all but figuring out whether they work as intended would require stunning someone.

"I'm curious if local stunners work on me anyway."

"Should I try the brand-new one?"

"Sure."

He does!

Stun weapons work fine on indestructible people, though they wake up a little faster than usual.

Hero blinks and reports this.

"How about the year-old one?"

Hero picks it up gingerly and looks at it. "I've literally not touched it—I'm not indestructible if it explodes but you have healing so maybe that's not much of a problem..." And in the manner of tinkers all over the world, he shoots.

It does, in fact, explode. Not a huge explosion, just enough for it to get reduced to its component parts and to give Hero some third degree burns.

Tap-heal.

"Huh. Okay, so there's something different about it but we don't know what it is -"

"Yeah. If I look at it I know what to do to fix it, but I can't really explain it afterwards in a way that makes sense to anyone but me and I couldn't have predicted it in advance anyway."

"That's annoying. Sort of - hostile -"

"Hostile?"

"Like, some kinds of magic are user-friendly, and some are neutral, like the laws of physics, and some are user-unfriendly - yours seems user-unfriendly -"

"...huh. I never thought of it that way but I guess it makes sense? You've seen lots of supernatural things, is most of it friendly?"