"Is that like how spren taste bad if they smell people?" says Iss.

"If it sounds similar it might be. In general it's bad for animals to be in situations that upset them."

"I don't think the spren die of it or people would've been unable to invent farming till they invented plastic and all those chemicals they wash the plastic with," says Uamok.

"If they're domesticated that might make a difference," the prince muses uncertainly. "I've never been very interested in livestock."

"We only have fossils that far back, writing was invented later," sighs Uamok.

"Someone might be able to scry it, if the scholars are curious."

"Ooh, that works on things thousands and thousands of years ago?"

"I'm not sure! Diviner Aatika should know, though."

"That would be so cool!" says Uamok.

"We could write history books about it!" says Iss.

"Are a lot of people interested in ancient history in your world?"

"...it seems important, doesn't it? Everything is caused by stuff that happened before so it's hard to figure out what's really going on if you don't know how it used to be," says Uamok. "This is less true about some things but even in math you want to know how much is really basic intuition and how much is actually built up over time with proofs and - acculturation -" Kiv is nodding along.

"That makes sense," he nods. "A spell like that might be expensive to have cast, is why I ask - we have Aatika on the payroll for when we need that kind of thing but I don't think we'd want to send her to another world."

"She'd need to be in our world to do it?" asks Zoi.

"I'd expect her to. Most spells have a limited range."

"So she'd also need to be somewhere people were living that long ago..." says Uamok.

"Mmhmm. And maybe try it more than once, depending on how the spell works. It might be easiest to have one of your historians learn divination themselves."

"I want to!" chirps Uamok.

"I'm sure she'll be happy to teach you the basics. - I have to admit I'm a little curious why it would be you learning it rather than your husbands, that's not how we do things here."

"Oh, they can learn too, if they want," says Uamok.

"That's good," he nods. "I'd just expect you to have trouble finding time for scholarship with husbands to support."

"We're still school age," she says. "And here all the arrangements are peculiar anyway because you don't have our sort of food at grocery stores. If I go home and know magic I can do that for money!"

"And I suppose you won't have to be very picky about what you learn, without any other wizards there yet," he nods.

"Yeah! There's probably some spells that aren't worth any money but even ones that are very cheap here aren't there."

"It sounds like an exciting opportunity. Is there anything else any of you are interested in picking up while you're here?"

"I think Iss and Skon maybe wanted more languages and to see all the tourist stuff, and Zoi maybe wants to translate some of your fiction, and Kiv mostly just wants to be a wizard with me because it's math-looking in places," Uamok reports.