[Yes, the not getting inconveniently bright close to the source is one of the interesting parts, and I think if you have three you can avoid the problems with plant growth but they also needn't strictly be stationary.]

[Put 'em on a little train?]

[I bet I can get them to change their lighting internally but if that's harder than expected they can float or something.]

[What do you mean change it internally?]

[Are you in osanwë range?]

Yes.

So she sends the idea. Gem-shaped, not even quite too bright to look at but lighting everything in the room to the same intensity, as if the gems were selecting the angle to make everything perfectly beautiful and shining on it from that angle, shifting the light for everything that looks better in motion -

Oh, pretty. Okay, if they can bounce light around corners it's much less of a problem if they're in one place.

I can make them do whatever I want. It's going to be such a project I actually think I'll build a lot of other features in, there's a lot you can do with 'artifacts of arbitrary power' whatever form it's taking, and I'd normally worry about introducing something that powerful but I firstly needn't tell most people what can be done with them and secondly there's already very powerful magic around.

I mean, don't make them do anything you don't want a sufficiently curious divination psion figuring out.

Noted.

Why several of them?

The way the Trees work, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do it in a way I can replicate later. So I'm guessing I'll find it useful to have spares.

...what about the Trees means the jewels wouldn't be replicable?

The respect in which they can be hijacked to be an arbitrary power source is - hmm, something of a vulnerability? And the Trees are guided by magic that's at least somewhat self-willed and self-correcting and seems likely to notice it can be branched and used that way and react by changing that.

Aha. So how many spares?

If I want them designed to interact and interface with each other that problem gets exponentially trickier with more of them. Three'd be at the reaches of my capabilities without a supercomputer; since I do have one I could maybe do four.

What part of the process does the computer do and have you looked into psionic computers at all? They're expensive to rent time on but not out of reach.

Has anyone explained artifact-making to you? The vast majority of what you're doing is magical data sorting, and you can plan and test your algorithms on a computer and get significant performance improvements. I haven't looked into psionic computers, should I?

Cursory overview only. Sounds like you should, they're basically just much better at being computers than we know how to do nonmagically, but they do have the disadvantage of needing psion attention the entire time they're operating the same way virtualities do.

I'll check it out. Thank you for the memory, it's lovely.

You're welcome! I can hand it out to whoever now, let me know if there's anybody else who ought to have it without shelling out for the privilege.

Most of the magical engineers in Tirion are doing useful work and wouldn't have any idea how to acquire money to trade you for it, how much effort is it?

It doesn't take much time, I'll just be unusually hungry if I do it a lot.

Then maybe you could suggest people bring you their favorite snacks? I'm sure they'd be happy to summarize what they're working on but it takes some background to identify what's actually groundbreaking -