"Felix never actually tried, but he should stay about ten seconds and then pass out from sheer exhaustion."

"That's ten thousand seconds subjective, which is a bit less than three hours, possibly not enough for me to figure anything out—at five hundred how long would he be able to stay?"

"About twenty one seconds. Lasting more than twice the time when he goes at five hundred at least. Before you ask: going at two hundred lasts a minute; one hundred lasts two and a half minutes; fifty lasts nearly six minutes and a half. And Felix can keep up at ten for one and a half hours." He clearly memorized these numbers.

She does some quick arithmetic and—" I'm torn between going at ten or fifty. If I stay like half an hour at ten that's five hours subjective."

"Your total stamina should be about a third of his," Fernando says because he didn't make that clear earlier, "but we can lend you some of ours."

"So half an hour at ten would drain me completely, but five hours should be way more than enough for me to figure out whether I can convert..."

"There is also the time learning the gift itself, but figuring out youth conversion is about the most important thing we can achieve short of maybe stoping the dead city infection."

"Dead city infection?"

"Oh? I think I completely forgot to explain that. Or Elsewhere in general, I will start with that. Elsewhere isn't a regular world... it isn't a planet, a large spherical rock; instead it is a a floating plane of rock a few miles thick. The atmosphere, light and gravity are all handled by magic. The dead city infection was the result of a serious magical mistake; it corrupts the ambient magic and passively drains life, replacing any terrain with a city made of stone that can't sustain life."

"The current best method of containment is literally cutting off the infected parts by digging all the way through to the underside."

"—yikes. And yet another thing I bet I can help with."

"I should've mentioned earlier, but got side-tracked. I didn't even get around explaing the memory crystals."

Fernando hugs Katur.

"Awwww!" She wants to pet him, but he is way too tall to be petted. "It's okay, time's stopped over there."

"And bringing us here to figure out how to exploit both systems was a necessary step anyway," Fernando says, floating up to kiss Katur's forehead.

"Yeah. Okay, so I think next thing we ought to do is—well, I ought to try and borrow Felix's superspeed and see if that one works?"

"Reasonable. Will you need anything while you do that? Our plan is going to be spending the time reading or buying stuff from Bar; we can be quiet even if we discover something interestingly exploitable."

"When he's supersped does he need more food or water or whatever?"

"Yes, but it doesn't scale that directly with the speed and it shouldn't be a concern."

"I mean, I'm planning on spending five subjective hours under, that should make me hungry if it were objective hours."

"Yeah, what I'm trying to say is you won't get five hours of hunger, that is harder to measure, but I don't think Felix has ever complained of more than the equivalent of being hungrier an hour earlier after an intensive afternoon of testing."

"Gotcha. Okay, then. Felix?"

Felix is here and ready to be squinted at!

Squint!

Felix's magic remains squintable. Meanwhile, the four of them are sharing lunch and the task to read books. They make some interesting discoveries. Felix pushes a piece of sandwich Kaedewards in case she wants some.

"Can you speed up a bit so I can get a better sense of how it works?"