"Magic is real, and the light gods are real, and monsters are real. It's a wondrous place, the world of Tirra."

"Oh, yes, we just saw Tamamo, I'm just wondering what the heck changed.  Or if it was already there and just invisible, and, you know, when and how Earth figured it out.  There were a lot of open questions about some physics things back in my day, and that's not even counting some sort of..."

"...aaaaactually I probably shouldn't mention that one, because if someone tried to do the thing, it could break the universe for all I know.  Which would be bad."

(By which, of course, she is generally vaguely referencing the idea of vacuum energy and - well, not Hawking radiation per se, but the broader phenomenon of virtual particles that would normally appear and mutually annihilate but that sometimes get picked off or otherwise constrained.  ...Somebody pulling the rug out from under a false vacuum would be bad.  Or, hell, the Weave kind of feels like it.  Even though it's manmade.  ...Not that she legitimately expects vacuum-collapse infosec to be a problem, but it's best to be in the habit before it matters.)

"I do not know. But I trust Tamamo not to break the universe. On purpose."

"That's good to know.  I'm more worried about mortal stupid, including my own."

"Universe has held up pretty well so far and it's been thousands of years since the last big shakeup?"

"I mean, that doesn't stop me from knowing just the wrong thing and causing the universe to deflate like a popped balloon.  But yeah, that's a good sign."

"I think vague existential ideological threats should take a step back in favor of concrete physical threats like monsters."

"...Not an ideological threat, a possible-consequence-of-physics threat, but in practical terms I'm not even at the point where I have the tools to make the tools that could possibly do that, so yes, monsters are probably far more pressing.  ...I do wonder if it's possible to cause the curse to collapse by a similar mechanism..."

"We don't have competent-enough mages to try it, though, I don't think."

"I have no idea what your idea is shaped like since you say it's dangerous- And that's not a request to explain! New topic?"

"Ah, yeah.  Hm.  Um.  Yeah.  Uh...  Anything you do want to know?  About, like, Earth, or me, or anything like that?"

"Hmm..... I heard that old Tirra had the most wonderful illusion shows, made by machines, not magic."

"They weren't illusions, first of all.  Well okay computer-generated imagery is kind of illusions, but a lot of that stuff was actual people doing actual things that machinery both generated a record of, and then later reproduced from copies of those records.  But like, people didn't just up and materialize the stuff on the spot either way.  ...Damn, I know, like, nothing about chemical photography except maybe something about silver nitrate, and even less about digital cameras.  Could probably figure out a film player if I had film, though...  That's just a light source, some wheels, probably a focusing lens, and a fast but steady process of pulling the film from reel to reel over the light source so as to exceed the framerate of the human brain.  ...I could probably go on for a while about vision itself and how janky biology can get, just to explain why a series of still images flashing by really fast will look like it's moving - while we're talking about that - but you asked me about, like, movies and television.  Not random eyeball facts.  I know quite a few random eyeball facts.  I will refrain from sharing them right now.  Unless you actually want me to share them.  I could share them.

"Anywho.  Yeah, there was a lot of that sort of stuff.  More than you could watch, at intended speed, in - thousands of years, at least, and I'm probably underestimating how much everybody having the tools to make videos bumps that up.  I'd almost say 'the lifetime of the universe' but I don't think it was quite that much.  The projected lifetime of Earth, maybe, and that sort of technological depth was new-ish in my lifetime.  It probably only expanded, after my reference frame, until the Tirran Empire collapsed - but I couldn't tell you about that.  Since I was mostly dead."

"Oh!  And live TV!  We had the technological capacity to send data from a camera across - well the entire world by my time but even before the Internet, broadcast television covered like...  Hold on, doing some math...  Like, a good fifty-mile radius?  At my random-guesswork estimation.  In as close to real time as the speed of light permits.  ...Range for broadcast signals actually depends mostly on the height of the emitter, compared to the horizon, and whether there's, like, mountains in the way.

"...Hm.  Wonder if I could figure out the quartz radio.  Speaking of broadcast signals.  I know it's been done and that...  Hm.  How the fuck do speakers work.  Wait, no, I know that one, it's motors.  But how does the encoding...  I mean if it's just amplitude modification..."

"...Anyway yeah they had audio stuff too, not just visual."

"Broadcast sounds like something a lot of people would enjoy! There's some very useful documents that they make tens of thousands of, with special cut wood stamps, but it's slow. Definitely not great for news or announcements. Magic transmission is too expensive to use casually."

"...Damn.  If only I knew what Gutenberg did for moveable type.  Like, I could absolutely draft out the frame, probably, but there was something about it being a specific mix of metals that was easy to cast that I cannot replicate.  And I think one of the components of that mix was lead, which, just, no, that shit's a horrible lingering poison.  It fucks up the brain and it never goes away.  It might have some uses, but I would really rather not, because then people will start doing shit like lead paint.  Or leaded gasoline, which was a common fuel that then ended up with lead everywhere in the air from people burning it.  ...Back to printing - well, there's the bit where your language is ideograms, which doesn't help.  But I'm kind of surprised you don't have at least some kind of metal-based printing.  Woodcuts are - they work, I suppose.  But - oh, how did...  No, wait, they fucking glossed over it, for most intents and purposes, so that book was rather a bust.  Despite it being a book about someone getting thrown into another world and having as one of their primary motivations a need to reinvent books.  ...Anyway."

"...Actually, I wonder if it would be possible to do something with magic somehow.  Wait, no, you don't have - do you have - artifacts last seemingly forever, but those are artifacts and therefore presumptively irreplicable in their mechanisms - ...oh, hell, I should actually probably be concerned about things in the orrery's threat class but I digress -"

"Anyway I was thinking about making the plates - for the printing - out of, like, magical force, because if you had data storage it would at least be less of a pain in the ass to encode things than to have individual physical objects for every unique character.  Assuming you could encode and decode it in a reasonable fashion, which we can't assume yet.  ...I don't even know if you have data storage in magical format."

"...Wonder if you could...  Hm, but no, drum printing, actually.

"...Yeah, if it's magical printing press it's probably better to just jump a few levels rather than insistently replicate the physical press in magic, anyway.  The idea there is that you have a ream of paper, and a roller, and you put a small amount of ink on the roller as the paper passes across it, which means that the paper picks up the ink."

"...But that implies reams of paper, and I know next to nothing about industrial papermaking."

"...I mean you can use it for single sheets, too, I suppose, but the benefit of being able to do it really fast is somewhat cut back."

At some point during this, the stir fry and curry have come out. Megi hmms thoughtfully.

"There are only so many safe forestry areas. Most get cut down for more space for farms, and then you have the frontier where a lot of people are afraid to go because monsters. Also in terms of magic items, the categories that wizards can make are scrolls, wands, the beautifully descriptively named 'magic items', and lesser artifacts which are really just more complicated wands. Scrolls let people with a little bit of wizardry skill cast spells much easier, pre-charged. Wands cast spells fully automatically. Magic items might be things like magic lanterns, ice boxes, or compasses. Lesser artifacts are just fancy magic items, sometimes with a wand component. Witches can make things sometimes but there's only one witch that can make each kind so it doesn't scale. And sorcerers can't, really."

She nods.  "...Hold on, compasses are just magnets.  Unless there's something weird going on with that or it's an umbrella term."

"It's a term for way finding devices generally."

"Yeah that's, well, that's fair, although personally I'd break out 'wayfinder' instead - but I don't write the rules - but you can make a nonmagical device that points - well, either north or south depending on the mapwise orientation of the poles - with just a free-rotating bit of metal that's been magnetized."

"It's susceptible to magnets, but it's not magical at all."

"If you didn't already know that.  I hope people already knew that."

"Yes, that's what the category is named after. Magnetic compasses, revealed by the Seafaring Otherworlder... Some time ago, I don't know when."

"Good to know!  ...I am now wondering how we both speak the same Fox.  I mean obviously Tamamo did it, but it's interesting that - so far it doesn't feel like either of us are being translated?"