"...Well, this ain't it...  But I think that it is the other half of what we need, if we crossreference it with some Factoriolikes."

"Yeahhhh... They'll give us things to try, at least?"

"I think so, yeah.  Though what I think we want to find the most is any games that have accurate magic simulations.  This is from the future.  Hopefully it'll have something interesting."  Let's see if there's a way to filter for that.

It turns out to be hard to separate out the massive deluge of fake magic from ones that might be trying to depict ""real"" magic? There's a few things set in the Tirran Empire's expansionist phase, like Helldivers except it actually completely believes itself and isn't being sarcastic at all that involve defeating evil witches and such?

"Realistic glyph physics simulator"?  No?  Nothing in the Factoriolike mods?  ...no, that wouldn't help, she'd be better off looking for Minecraftlike mods, actually...

...oh dear gods what fresh hell is this bullshit.

"Whoever put this game on my account...  Dishonor upon them!  Dishonor upon their cow!  Why the fuck!"

But actually, now that she's thinking about it, she doesn't want simulationist "magic", she wants pure simulationism of a world that's used to glyph circle stuff.

.........Game with cute little mouse-wizards who have to balance and make use of the 47 unique types of mana with complicated logistical chains? Lots of glyph circles and writing your own is core gameplay loop.

...She will, at least, investigate this one for known-pattern compliance.

Nope. It's its own super complicated thing involving concentric circles and rotations and steady-state flows of linked circles. Concentric circles can be used in the local wizardry but they're kind of a 400 level practice.

"...Well, that's..."

"...I don't think it works as a magecraft simulator.  Darn."

Unless there's a 400-level circle she can crosscheck!

She has one of those from a library trip with Weiya!

It doesn't match at all. Completely different runes, completely different paradigm, like comparing assembly code to a band saw.

(During all this, Nicole is cleaning up dinner and doodling napkin math about the giant steel anvil version of the diamond-making idea again.)

"...Well, damn, that one's a bust.  Guess I'm going to have to make sims the hard way, which...

"That's going to be a pain.  Mostly because I'm sure there is math, good math, that accurately describes rune stuff in more precise details, that I just don't have because it would've been lost in the Fall.

"...I fucking hate lost ages."

"...Tamamo once told me, 'I know it sucks, but we do have a reason not to just steal a library.' For whatever that's worth. When I was wondering pretty much the same thing and trying to do a steam engine. She followed it up with 'Or maybe I'm lying!' though."

"...I feel like that's completely orthogonal to the thing that was annoying me about this, but that is also an annoying thing!  Fucking...  Cursed shit.  Half expect that it'd be full of... fucking... Vashta Nerada."

"I don't get that one. But... Do what we can with what we have, right? That's all anyone ever did."

"...Vashta Nerada are fictional shadow monsters that I really hope they stayed that way.  First showed up in a library.  And yeah.  Do what we can, with what we have.  At least I have industrial simulators!"

"Mhm! Gonna stare at the crush spell some more now... You never know, might be missing something obvious..."

"I think it's probably equipment error, really.  Just wasn't sharp enough."

"So we need to go in for... A larger circle, written more precisely, and a better caster. Well, we can look for all that once your Red Dream fully passes."

Hug!

And then: Magic geometry!

Time passes.

Also, cuddling, because she's having a Red Dream and if she can't use that as a reason to cuddle the shit out of cute people she's utterly hopeless.

At some point, though, she actually starts to care if she's wearing clothes again.  (What a shame.)

"Ah, so we're done. You can always just not. I half suspect the Red Dream is designed to show us what it's like to be carefree... I think some of it did stick with me, I'm less hesitant about some things now... Where next? Back to the City of Silk? Head south to Noten? The canyon is really something else."

"I do think that I'm going to be a lot less hesitant about existing while naked, to be honest.

"...Ah, fuck.  Planning.  I should probably...  I ought to thank Weiya, whatever I'm doing next...  ...You probably would better know about how to feasibly industrialize anything, once we've gotten the magic working.  But that does depend on getting the magic working, so maybe we should be heading for that one magical researcher kitsune...  And I should also dig into the sims to see if I can find anything I didn't already know about how to diamonds."

(The game Captain of Industry has a diamond press; It consumes Salt and Graphite and 2 megawatts of power to produce 1 Diamonds, and looks a lot like Nicole's earlier idea with six huge hydraulic presses arranged in a cube.)

"Sinnah. I've never met her but the reputation is 'irritable mad genius'. So, to the City of Silk, say goodbyes and pack maybe raid the library, try to contact her? Which might or might not mean heading south, I'm not sure."

"I think I did already write her a letter?  I...  Forget, actually, whether I did."

"...why the heck does the diamond press in this game consume sodium chloride?  Diamonds have neither sodium nor chloride in them!  Is there some sort of...  Do we need a medium for this thing?"

"...Maybe? Just to even out the pressure?"

"I don't think that's quite...  I mean, maybe? I don't actually know how this works, but...  Come to think of it.  Yeah it probably needs a medium."