"Well, if it doesn't require memorizing complex diagrams, I'll probably fare better than an attempt at normal wizardry," he jokes. "Please, go ahead."

She focuses her mind into the place where her powers live and tries to give a copy of her special talent to Terrance. And it works. "Okay I think that worked."

Terrance is suddenly struck by the impression that what Sapphire needs is someone who will remind her to do things for herself, not just for other people.

He mentally reviews their conversation.

"While I do very much appreciate the offers to help, and the talent you've shared with me — in fact, the talent seems remarkably useful — you know that you don't have to offer me things? You're allowed to just enjoy your time in my city, and use the library, and come up here to ask questions or chat without any of that."

"I know, I'm... I spent my life working towards a goal and when I got these powers it meant none of those plans quite applied anymore. So I'm trying to figure out what my life will be like now and being useful is... it's an easy way to try to grab onto something."

"Ah."

He thinks for a moment.

"It might be an easy thing to grab onto, but it probably isn't the best thing to grab onto, at least in terms of your own personal well-being," he ventures. "But in the short term, it makes sense."

"And I'm afraid this will probably undermine my heartfelt message, but I just thought of a wonderful thing to ask you for. Do you think you might be able to learn flight from a whirl-the-wind and share it with me? It's not quite swimming to explore the sea, but it would let me venture where no turtle has gone before."

She giggles. That's a funny image. "Yeah, I was trying to take things more slowly I should go back to that. As for trying to copy from a whirl-the-wind if I meet one I might do that and if I get the ability to fly I'll definitely offer it to you."

"Heh. Thank you, then."

Terrance's path has at this point taken him around the hills and up to the edge of a small copse of trees.

"In the name of taking things slowly, I wonder if you'd like to share some tea with me?"

"Sure, I'd be happy to."

"You might want to cover your ears," he advises.

And then his voice gets loud.

"Margrave, would you come up here, please?"

A few moments later, the same young man from before, holding the remains of a sandwich, makes his way up the rope bridge to Terrance's head.

"Here I am, Terrance."

"Would you fetch some tea for Sapphire and myself? The spiced Loeffer, I think."

"Oh, sure. It will be a few minutes though, so it might be Jassia who brings it up."

"Excellent. Thank you, Margrave."

"I think you'll like Loeffer — don't worry, the flavor is not too strong, despite the name. It's a warm-bodied, fruity tea," he adds to Sapphire.

"I'm okay with strong teas. Sounds like it'll be interesting. It comes from the mountains?"

"Yes, it does! The high elevation makes it harder to taste things, I'm told. So when drunk at that height, it's supposedly a fairly normal tea. But that renders it stronger — and, in my opinion, richer — at ground level. It's a bit tricky to brew, because if you raise the temperature of the water too high you can bruise it and it will become bitter, but I've got a custom boiler setup that keeps things to the right temperature."

"That's interesting. Is it not actually a boiler or are you saying you have a boiler that keeps the water at a lower pressure to lower the boiling point?"

"Well, finely regulating temperature is a tricky proposition — so actually it's a boiler that raises water to the boiling point, and then puts it into a series of pipes that run through a larger water tank. By changing the ratio of how much water starts off in the 'hot' and 'cold' tanks, you can get much finer control of the final temperature of the water than if you were trying to control the fire," he explains. "I want to get a system that will actually actively pump the hot water through the pipes, but that turns out to be a bit tricky compared to just having a valve and letting it be gravity fed. It's also not as accurate as it could be because of the temperature of the metal in the pipes, but it suffices for tea, if not for alchemy."

"I think in my world we used to use the differences in how metals expand with temperature or something about how Mercury expands as it increases in temperature to measure temperature and use that to control equipment. I don't know if that requires.... harnessed lightning though."

"Harnessed lightning? Now there's a talent. We get pretty far with breezes, but I admit I can't immediately see how you'd use lightning to regulate temperature. I did try a bellows system for regulating the fire, but it wasn't as reliable."

"I don't know that much about how it works but it's not about the lightning exactly it's about how it's easy to precisely control other mechanisms that way. One of the first way we used it was for lighting and you could turn the lights on and off very easily. For regulating temperature it was about turning pumps and heaters directly on or off. In the case of heaters you can turn lightning into heat in the same rough way that natural lightning starts fires just more controlled."

"Huh. How interesting. I admit that I've mostly been concerned with stopping lightning, being the tallest thing around. But I can see why you'd want to harness it, instead. Being able to create that kind of heat on demand would be quite useful."

"Artificial lightning tends to be a lot weaker than natural lightning because clouds are very very big and also the goal with artificial lightning is usually to generate steady power instead of a quick burst."

Terrance chuckles.

"I think people often underestimate the size of clouds," he remarks. "But that makes sense. How do you make smaller quantities of lightning? A chamber full of steam or fog, perhaps?"

"There are really complicated ways that involve really delicate manufacturing but the simple ways are based on spinning certain types of metal near coils of metal string."

"Well, no wonder nobody's discovered that here; it's not exactly an obvious thing to try, is it? But I bet I could get some breezes to turn a crank for that. Do you know what kinds of metal are required?"