"Yeah. Ridiculous amounts, especially if we get clever with it."

"Universe we got dropped on has some serious warfare going on - we've been looking at importing some of their defenses for planets, actually, in case we ever get in a fight with anyone on our scale - those mostly aren't based in magic, but we don't have the material, technological, skills, or political infrastructure yet, and acquiring the artificial intelligences you apparently need for a proper planetary defense grid is also really hard, even if you had the hardware to run them..."

"Artificial intelligence is a solved problem where I'm from. Droids make up a significant fraction of the labor force."

"Yeah, we might try to import some of you guys' stuff so we're playing less catch up... Though droids plural being a fraction of the labor force seems like a different thing? Like, the thing that universe has is a single centralized set of intelligences controlling all manufacturing on and around a planet and the vast majority of space ships and especially military things, because they can react significantly faster and more consideredly than even magical people, and if you're running cheap you gotta have multiple processing centers because of lightspeed delay, but if you've got ansibles you don't even need to worry about that, though the amount you need to dedicate to processors gets prohibitive if you're centralizing more than a very active solar system's activities... And as far as I can tell you keep magicals away from your planet by constantly monitoring... Basically everything in your solar system, subject to lightspeed delay... And having networks of robots spread out in defensive shells - magicals suck at point defense, usually, so you can overwhelm them if you fill a large enough volume of space with weapons discharge for a long enough time, as long as you can keep tracking them because well trained magicals can jump to faster than light pretty quickly... And if your computer's fancy enough, it can generally predict where a magical's about to end up and fill that space with explosions, and the best computers can out-predict all but the best combat precogs, because they're just smarter and better at taking data into account."

"I think that universe considers sheltering most targets to that extent prohibitive, and mostly just goes with the 'too many targets to hit a significant fraction of them all' defensive approach, but that's the accepted narrative for how major important targets are protected. And we only have two planets we actually care about, so."

"Mm, yes, that might be different enough of a use that our technology would not be that helpful."

"Probably a shorter jump from you guys to there than from us to there, though."

"Quite possibly."

"Hopefully it won't be a concern soon, though, and ideally not ever; we've been trying not to pick fights with other universes..."

"A good plan."

Heh. 

She stretches. "So you guys planning on hanging around ever even after Bellona gets you back?"

"I will most likely rejoin my group, but I hope we can still visit from time to time."

She nods. "We'll probably stick around here a lot, but we're pretty mobile..."

"I'm sure the others would love to meet you as well."

"It sounds fun, yeah."

"Since you two decided to visit, does one of you want to see if the dragons want to meet the new people?"

"Sure. Why?"

"Elesse can detect alts, and given the dragons are interesting people, it'd be worth checking."

She nods. "Makes sense. Should I check if they feel like flying out here, or bring Elesse along for a ride?"

"I will go with you. We can return together if that seems warranted."

"Okay. I wouldn't mind chilling here for an hour at least, but otherwise I'm ready to head out when you are."

"I can leave now."

"Cool. I'll probably just be TK'ing you around with me, tigers are not actually designed for riding..."

"Do you need me to... do anything?"

"Nah. I guess, like, don't try to use magic to break my hold?"

"All right."

"Cool. I'll say hi to Bellona and get a snack and then we can head out..." (She doesn't actually need to eat, but she's a firm hedonist and the food here's nice.)