“There isn’t a principled difference, actually, just a difference of scale! Colors look different from each other based on how much energy is in the light, and that’s the difference between the different kinds of light we’re talking about, too.”

"Oh. Oooh. Wait, then, is it like, one energy two energy three energy, why do rainbows have specifically those six colours rather than a whole range? —you do have rainbows here?"

"We do have rainbows! But we're kind of running into the edge of my knowledge of how colors work here. I do like physics, but I'm not a physicist, I'm an engineer. To whatever extent I am in fact an engineer instead of, like, a cardboard wizard. Which is not much."

"Okay, fair. ...do colours have names when you can't see them? I kinda wanna make a spell to see some new colour."

"Yeah, the one right below our visual range is called infrared and the one right above it is called ultraviolet. You can tell we put a lot of effort into those names."

Kaede giggles. "Okay, let's see..." She closes her eyes, hums for a second, then says, "This is a spell I am now creating and binding to allow me to see ultraviolet, as defined by the people and peoples of this society. Ultraviolet, despite the very generic and broad name, refers to a narrow range of energy values that light can take, one that is right above typical human visual range." She opens her eyes and looks around for stuff that has colours. "No things within my field of view are strictly violet, so this implies that this colour range is above the energy levels of most if not all visible light around here. This spell will last exactly five minutes from the moment I have finished casting it, though with the requisite expenditure of mana and the repetition of these words I will if I so desire be able to cast it once more." She smiles, as if telling herself an oft-repeated private joke. "Should this experience begin to deteriorate my eyesight, my otherwise-physical health, or my mental health significantly more than what normal visible light does, I will instead return to being unable to see ultraviolet light and my vision will return to normal. The next time I say the word 'light', this spell will be in effect, for the time length determined before. Light."

And she gasps. "Whoa. That—it's—everything looks different, it's not just a new thing, it's—whoa—"

"Oh- yeah, sunlight has a lot of ultraviolet in it, it's kind of everywhere. You doing okay?"

"Yeah, it's fine, spell would cut it out if it were doing something I'd on reflection not want it to do, but it's just—man, do you want to see some ultraviolet light, it makes everything else look so different, I was kinda expecting a sorta-purple but it's something else altogether—gods, how do you describe a colour—it's kinda garish? Except it's not what the word 'garish' was invented to be used for..."

"I absolutely want to see some ultraviolet light. If it's not - too expensive, or anything - I remember your magic has a resource limit?"

"Oh it's not expensive at all, regular arcanists gotta limit their spells to short words or phrases and gestures but since I can just bind a one-time spell to a long descriptive thing and then unbind it once I'm done I can make it almost arbitrarily cheap. Not as cheap as if I were designing myself a blessing but I'd have to convert arcanist mana to elementalist mana and I couldn't be bothered." She grins. "Okay, lemme make up a spell for you..." She closes her eyes again, then starts another long paragraph describing what exactly the spell is meant to do. It's very similar but not identical to the one she cast on herself, and references Morty instead of her.

And after she's done, he can see ultraviolet.

"Wow. That's - really, really cool. It is kind of garish - wait, we have to look at some flowers. Flowers are designed for pollinators that can see ultraviolet light. I think I saw some over here-" He hurries over towards a section of the store that has a couple of bouquets on a stand.

He's right. They're extremely pretty.

"Oh wow I never knew—gods, I'll have to design a blessing for this—no, better, I should make ultraviolet vision goggles—"

"You absolutely should. Actually - depending on how your enchanting works you could enchant contact lenses, if you could reclaim the magic before replacing them? Even if you couldn't, hard lenses can last for years."

"I can reclaim the magic, yeah, but a regular enchanter wouldn't be able to. But these, er, contact lenses, if they don't last as long, could be enchanted with only as much magic as they last, so I don't think it'd be a problem anyway."

"Oh, cool, I thought it might be a permanent thing. I wonder what kind of things you can draw energy from in this world? You said my power is a kind of magic, maybe you could draw from one of my inventions?"

"Yeah, where I'm from I'm used to being able to just draw magic and convert it from anything but that's all within my system, right, I don't know what I'll be able to do here. The cardboard was definitely not magic after I'd arrived, though."

"Well, it wasn't exactly an invention at that point. Would you ordinarily expect to be able to draw from the broken pieces of an artifact?"

"If it weren't doing artefact-y things by then, no, should be spent. Active artefacts are really hard to break, though, even if you like physically fracture its structure the magic will hold it together, although it'll spend mana faster if it has to do that in addition to whatever it does originally."

"Huh! I don't think that's what magic stuff in this world is like but I don't know a lot about magic. It's certainly not how Devisor inventions work, those break like anything."

"Yeah, whole different system here, I shouldn't assume anything in particular works the same way." Shrug.

"So, yeah! Is there anything you think you're still missing?"

Well, if her budget covers one of those phones she wants it, but she also should get, like, clothes and stuff to drop off at her room? And maybe some pretty-but-useless things like pebbles or whatever that she can enchant with various functions later, it's always good to have some of those.

They pick out a phone, and some bedding and toiletries and clothes, and some shiny pebbles from the bin of shiny pebbles that is for some reason on prominent display. Then they check out, paying with Kaede’s card, and head towards her dorm to drop off the purchases.

”You’re in Poe,” Morty says. “It’s a coed dorm, which I guess is how they’re going to accommodate you, uh, sometimes being a boy? A lot of the Poe kids are kinda weird, but they’re nice folks, in general.”

"Weird how?"