"I mean I'm just guessing you can do artificial petrifaction, it doesn't actually say one way or the other, as far as the bit of Wikipedia I actually read, said, but the conditions are straightforward.  But if you can do artificial petrifaction, you can do that to test the hypothesis that petrifaction would destroy the magicalness of wood, probably?  If you repeat the same test over time with a known-magical test sample?"

"Yes, assuming the conditions of petrification are similar enough..."  She slowly twirls her wand in her hand.  "Now I'm trying to remember...  Back before the Mapmaking, there were some rock-nymphs who captured mages and altered their wands, and some of them were recaptured afterwards.  I know at least one of those wands acted more powerful, but in weirdly uneven ways... but I can't remember if anyone asked or studied exactly what the rock-nymphs did to them - whether it was petrification or something else.

"And then they already were wands before petrification, which would be different from the experiment we were talking about, but still interesting!  And a much faster experiment, which makes me want to take one of my backup wands to a rock-nymph this weekend!"

"...What is 'The Mapmaking', I swear I can hear the capital letters?"

"Oh!  That was when we human mages and the Fay first convinced each other to talk as peers.  At least in theory.  The Fay stop kidnapping mortals; the humans stop hunting Fay; both sides honor each other's rights and come as guests if at all; nobody interferes with the muggles...  It was a long drawn-out process, because for all the different groups of Fay say they have queens and kings, they don't listen to them most of the time and they set up new kingdoms all the time.

"Or, well, they used to be like that.  But then, human mages didn't have a king or congress of their own back then either.  I think the Mapmapking was what gave us our first real governments to talk to each other, though I was never really one for history?

"And the Mapmaking's still going on if you want to be technical; I just heard last month about some naiads in the oceans who don't acknowledge any of it.  But only in the oceans and maybe a few remote mountains... otherwise there're just too many of you muggles with too good communications."

"...That one island where it is the general policy of all the governments that the native human population has made it quite clear that they don't want any - outsiders, that is - must pose quite a conundrum of a similar nature, come to think of it."

"Oh?  I haven't heard - do you get young adventurers who want to prove themselves and go in there, too?"

She almost laughs, but it's a self-depreciating almost-laugh.

"Worse - missionaries.  You have adventurers?"

"Oh yes.  Mostly they go challenge each other to a ceremonial contest of magic or wits or something."  She shakes her head at the pointlessness.  "And then some of them challenge the Greater Fay, who sometimes condescend to accept the challenge... and at least they survive when they lose.  And now with the Mapmaking, we've made sure they were warned several times in case they weren't paying attention the first time like they should've been."

"...What part of don't fuck with the fae has millennia of people making it a point of every story they tell that you should not fuck with the fae managed to not encode in your cultural consciousness where the fae actually exist?!"

"I wish I knew!"

She throws up her hands.  The rainbows around the circle arc up in two arcs of fire reaching toward her hands.

"Most of them aren't even going for anything useful, like mysteries of magic - I've sometimes dreamed of challenging Emerac for that myself - but even for something useful I wouldn't do that for another hundred years at least!"

"What sort of open mysteries of magic do you have, anyway?"

Well, she let one slip right there... though fortunately Mira doesn't seem to be following up on her secret dream of life-extension.

"There's so much we don't know about how the cycle of magic and land-memory work with each other... oh, did I mention that?  Magic is strengthened or weakened by where it's cast and what the land remembers.  That's why most of the Fay and most strong mages stay in one or two places, because their spells are stronger there once some mage has been casting the same field of spells there for a long time."

"I've got my own lab too - but there're so many questions pulling me out on field trips!  Like this semester here!

"And that reminds me - it's a totally unsettled question what form magic takes on the Moon and in the astral spheres!  Maybe someday we can find it out... though not until we can get there!"

She rather assumed life extension was already a thing given how Aeslin talked about planning for a hundred years out!

"...What, you didn't sneak anyone into the Apollo program to go find out?  Or onto the ISS?  For shame!  ...I'm joking."

"...The land has a memory, huh?  Interesting.  I wonder...

"...Would that be more of a noöspheric effect, or...

"Oh, hell, Australia must be kind of a way - the people there have already preserved stories of some truly ancient things; I can't imagine how long the land's memory might be...

"And - wait, what do you mean the astral spheres?"

"Noöspheric?  As in, founded in people's minds working together?  I don't think that can be all of it - we've got some effects out in Alaska that look seriously ancient, underlaying all the more recent things, beyond what anyone actually remembers as far as I know.  Maybe elsewhere too, but there're few enough more recent impacts in Alaska that I can check.  Can't prove it, but my theory is that it dates back to the first migrations into America!

"And the astral spheres - uh, space.  Beyond the moon.  We don't know anything about it you don't, unless Pamela's theory of magic ultimately coming from the Sun proves true after all."

"...Get you a historical anthropology degree or something...  And - huh, when are the earliest archaeological finds in that area, I don't actually know...  ...Has that ever impacted things?  Like, somebody turns up evidence of something that had been lost to time, and suddenly there's new field effects?"

"...And I had been a bit worried that there was - something up with the magical version of space, but I think you're implying it's just vaguely ossified jargon and not, uh, an actual celestial sphere that you could run into with a spaceship?  I mean Voyager worked fine, probably, but it wasn't manned..."

"No, just jargon; no literal spheres out there far as I know, except the planets and stars and such everyone knows about.  And if Voyager's got any problems, I really don't think they're magical.  Unless all computers do somehow silently depend on magic from the sun; I guess Voyager and such would be the first test of that wild guess I just thought up with zero evidence...

"... and hmm, no idea about new discoveries impacting things.  I know a few people who might know.  There's clearly some influence from people's present beliefs; national border changes can be reflected in magic pretty quickly if the people living there actually start thinking of themselves as belonging to the new country  - and that's not the only thing just the clearest -"

"I think in literary references too much, so it's a story where Neil Armstrong bonked the Apollo mission into the skybox that had me questioning the astral sphere thing - and the Voyager probes have passed the heliopause, or, at least one of them has for sure.  I wonder if you could do, like, a sympathetic magic thing, bounce off the Golden Records, to see if the solar system is relevantly a domain?  ...but how would you differentiate..."

"Well, I wouldn't think there's a different domain outside the Solar System at least until you get near another star, so it'd keep whatever it started with.  If it did start with any magic on it; a normal book or picture is inert except as a symbol, and I don't see why anyone would've enchanted the Golden Record.  It's not like you could put yourself in it and see what magic is like up there...

"...Unless they wanted to send a message to hypothetical alien mages, I suppose, which's actually an interesting idea..."

"I mostly meant that if you could target it because of any of its uniqueness, cultural impact, or design intent, it would be a way to get a spell out there?  Unless spells also have to obey the speed of light in which case you may as well just point and shoot up into the sky..."

"The Fermi paradox sure is a question, though!"

"Enough people have tried casting spells on the sun, and most of them fail, and a lot of the ones that seem to work give wild enough outcomes that I'm pretty sure they don't actually do anything to the sun.  If you could get something that reliably does contact the sun, maybe we could settle that question... how long does light take to the sun...

"... and the what paradox?  Is that a thing about space travel?"

"Eight minutes or so?  And the Fermi 'paradox' is the open question of why nonmagical observation can't find any aliens.  Well.  Any people aliens.  We've found life-bearing planets.  Just very simple ones."

"I wish I could help there.  But we don't even know whether magic exists outside the Earth.  So if we can answer that and the Sun question..."

She glances up at the full moon in the sky.  "Our spells probably have contacted the Moon, at least.  Probably.  Not that we can fly there - flight spells exist but they're slow and unreliable enough we fly in airplanes just like muggles."

"...bloody hell, magic had better be universal or else I'm going to implode of paranoia that magic isn't.

"...Why not just launch an enchanted Cubesat or something?  Human flight might be finicky but surely you have vectored thrust enough to accelerate a small object out of Earth orbit?"