"Destruction, death, rifts, and a few other things make tiles - unstable. Causes nasty weather, earthquakes and sinkholes, and yes, the entire tile to fall into the abyss eventually. Horrible, nasty stuff."

"I suppose that would do it. But it still sounds—extreme, to not have records, to be unable to think up precautionary measures and things like that."

"I'm sure someone who knows what they're doing is playing war-games in the King's army. Can we be done talking about this?"

"—yes, I'm sorry."

"It's one of those topics that's hard to talk about without someone getting offended. I'm sure your world has them even if they don't get treated the same."

"Well, yes, but there's the thing where in academic contexts everything is fair game." Pause. "Well, no, some things aren't. Eugenics, for instance. Huh."

"See? Land war is eugenics, here."

"Well I feel like eugenics should also not be taboo? At least in textbooks and academia and stuff. This hits way too close to censorship."

"You do have a point there. As long as whichever book is sufficiently academic and not-actually-advocating-illegal-for-good-reasons-things."

"—which is also a problem with eugenics, back home, it's so taboo that most papers and authors willing to discuss it at all are advocates for the less savoury versions of it."

"And let me guess, anyone who does address it is generally seen as a deluded crackpot unfit for society and the whole subject retreats further into taboos?"

"There's more of an echo chamber effect, but sorta, yes."

"Hmm... I don't have a good solution for that off the top of my head. Might be inevitable given human nature."

"Well, if the topic weren't taboo in the first place, even outside academic contexts, it wouldn't happen, but I'm not sure that's feasible either."

"So here we are, discussing taboo-ness, which we can't really do much with or about. Let's talk about magic instead?"

"Yes, do let's."

So this is what Terel learned in class today, with lots of supporting context from other magic lessons...

Ooh cool and Sadde asks questions and understands everything very quickly.

Productive learning!

Eventually he circles around to engines again. Cars seem to have much better ones than ships here do, if they can't progress on computers until they have silicon and other things might as well try this.

Is it that people don't focus as much on developing good engines here or are they just behind on their equivalent tech tree?

It seems like the relevant kind of engine is low demand enough to be a curiosity, so probably the first thing?

So are there very few airships, or do they all fly by magic, or?

"No, coal engines are a relatively common thing, I'm talking about oil engines, didn't we talk about this the other day?"

"We did, yeah, but I meant that if there are lots of airships why would that kind of engine have low demand?"

"I'm not actually sure what you mean by that? Steam engines are common-ish, the oil engines you talked about I've bravely heard of."