How old do Ekachta and Muim look, to her eyes? Likely to have teenaged daughters?

"I do not know how it is in your realm," she says conversationally, "but in my home noblewomen would be attended to by others of nearly the same rank. Perhaps there is some young trustworthy Blue who would suit as a lady-in-waiting."

Ekachta might have teenaged granddaughters! Muim might have teenaged daughters.

"Attended in what capacity?" asks Ekachta. "I can put about that we need an assistant for you but ideally there'd be a clear job description - is it important for some reason that it be a woman? That they be young?"

"Assistant is about right," she says. Writing a job description for it--well, that'd be easier if she knew her own job description. "It must be a woman, for sake of propriety, comfort, and ease of understanding. I would expect her to live here in the house, and to be available as I need. No doubt I will require many points of your culture to be explained to me, and the use of your tools demonstrated."

She holds a chair for a moment, thinking of Lady Maria, hoping to see her again. "Youth is not essential, but is helpful." Among other things, it will make her a bit more controllable, which they have precious little of at the moment. "But a married woman would no doubt expect her husband to join the household as well, which it seems premature to do before getting our feet beneath us."

"Single female blue cultural consultant with round the clock availability?" recaps Ekachta.

She purses her lips slightly. "As a major duty, yes." How to cross the cultural gulf? "A lady-in-waiting is... a magnifier for her mistress. She can read correspondence, she can host guests, she can discuss the affairs of court, she can keep her mistress's confidences and scheme with her. She is much like a friend."

"Some of those things we're in the habit of employing yellows for but I think it folds into a blue job on the whole just fine. Cultural consultant and... attaché."

"Yes, that seems better."

"Do you want to interview candidates - that'll complicate information security, though not prohibitively - or read profiles and choose among them, or shall we just assign you someone?"

"Interviews would be best. If you got me some blue hair dye, we might not even have to let anything slip, although I imagine part of the appeal will be, well, the cultural novelty."

"Very much so, and - you sound like a native speaker of Tapap, but you carry yourself like you're important enough that anyone in a serious blue career track in your own country would expect to have heard of you, they might guess something was up."

"Well, it sounds like Felip plans to make an announcement soon enough that I doubt it will be too serious of a leak."

"Still, better to have a controlled release. I'll see who we can scare up by way of attaché candidates."

His tour of the house was somewhat faster than Isidonia's, focused on different things, and now he finds the greens at the dining room table and joins them.

"So, now that we're a bit settled in, do you have any more questions for me tonight?"

"Oh, absolutely - can you tell us more about the magic you can do?" says Hepka.

"I know about twenty different spells, across five different 'circles', which roughly corresponds to their complexity and difficulty." He'll gesture, and the color of a plate on the table flips from white to black. "That is a zeroth circle spell, which I can do without exhausting myself. The effect will fade after about an hour. Spells of higher circles deplete a reservoir of power, which recharges daily as I sleep. Many of my spells have subtle effects, which are nevertheless powerful. For example, there is a spell to create invisible armor and a spell to protect against arrows, which each last about a third of a day. I cast them on myself as a precaution against assassination or accident. The ones I use most often now besides those are one to draw forth someone's heroism, and another to allow them a moment of skillfulness. I can also enlarge someone's body, or cause them to move faster. Many of those spells last for a rather short amount of time--minutes or seconds. Useful in a fight, but one where I have to participate, rather than simply being part of preparations."

"Arrows in particular, or would it catch bullets too?"

"What does it mean to draw forth someone's heroism? Or allow them a moment of skillfulness?"

"...you use slings?" he asks, confused. It seems out of line with the rest of their material wealth.

"...no, guns."

Tahu pulls up a video of a grey shooting a gun and the fate of the paper target many yards away afterwards.

He has ever seen an arquebus, but he thinks of those as firing balls and this slim handheld weapon reminds him more of a wand with a curious grip. "Fascinating," he says. "That would be accomplished by magic in my homeland, and far too expensive to outfit every guard with." He'll also take a closer look at the device displaying the video. "Likewise this illusion. How are you creating it without magic?"

"A lot of our technology including pocket everythings like this runs on electricity. This grey in the video is a real person, with an electronic device pointed at her while she did these things exactly as you see them; it committed the events to recorded format, a video, and then I'm pulling it up on the internet, which is a network of many devices communicating with each other."

"And this pocket everything was... created by an artificer?" He didn't quite get an answer to his question--"runs on electricity" is about as informative as "runs on magic"--but he hasn't exactly been able to give them all that much detail himself.

"...it was made in a factory? A lot of people are involved in making them, and they're mass produced"

He doesn't actually know much about how magic items are made, but he doesn't think it helps to have more than one person working on one at a time. But that might just be wizards being antisocial.

"Electricity is used in our magic, but only as a weapon. To think that it can be tamed like fire, and open up such possibilities..."

"Electricity is great! I can probably find a Watch Us Work about making pocket everythings..."

Yes, he can. A video montage of manufacture set to jaunty music comes up.

The video is not very long, and he feels lost for most of it. The jaunty music and the transitions are both a bit disorienting. Objects are being moved around--sometimes by hands, sometimes by what are either complicated machines or strange stationary golems. He is left with the impression that these greens understand electricity about as well as he understands magic--which, to be fair, is enough to get by. It reminds him of watching a blacksmith at a forge.

When the video concludes, he changes the topic. It's late enough in the day. "You asked earlier about what it means to draw forth heroism; would you like a demonstration?"