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Emiko looked around the new research outpost. It was fairly small by Starlight's standards but it could be expanded later if necessary. The station was a mere 2 kilometers in diameter and only the same amount wide making for an inner surface of about 12 square kilometers. For now it was mostly park land and some small farms. There was constant soft illumination through the transparent siding of the station's outer ring from the silver mist outside and fusion powered lights provided brighter illumination on a daily cycle. The strange mist didn't seem to be affected by gravity and was close to uniform in every direction they'd sent probes out for at least a few million kilometers. A magecrafter had come through and determined that the mist was probably harmless but none of them were currently available for follow-up tests so at least for now the team here would be relying on resonators and good old-fashioned physics.
"I'm not confident in this, but this seems like it does something telekinesis-ish or durability-ish, or maybe both? I haven't seen the crafting tradition before and I was never an expert."
"That's actually pretty accurate. It's an energy generator that pushes things together at a very small scale to cause tiny explosions before channeling that energy into generating electricity."
“Huh, interesting. You like electricity as an energy form then? Anyway, it sounds like my detection spell does work on your magic, so that’s nice.”
"Yeah, that says good things about future collaboration. As for electricity, most of our technology runs on it. It's a very flexible form of energy."
"Well, I do like the idea of future collaboration, and I'm glad you have an energy setup that works well for your purposes."
"Thank you, do the peoples of your world use much technology? What do you use to power it if not electricity?"
"We don't have a single unified power standard? In Temda we draw power from the sugars of the city-trees for some biotechnology, like the glow-leaves, and the passive-upward-water-transit of the city-trees for elevators and plumbing. And the trees are magic but do get power from sunlight. There are mills powered by rivers and by wind, for grinding grain and such. Clockworks need winding and I think store the energy in springs or something, though magic clockworks don't need winding and just use magic. Smiths need fuel to heat their metal, farmers want beasts of burden to pull their plows. And lumber trees and grain and grass, for feeding fires and humans and beasts of burden, all need sunlight to grow."
"Regarding what I have on me: I have a lot of magic items, which are require magic added to them at the time of casting, but mostly don't drain over time or lastingly drain when used. My wand lastingly drains when used, though, and I can't make another one. A lot of my nonmagical things just passively exist. I guess my spring-loaded wand sheath is an exception, but it's not even a clockwork, I just give the springs energy when I shove the wand back in. Stuff like my notebook and scimitar and compass are passive, some people might think compasses are active but it's actually the world's magnetic field acting on the compass."
"Huh, you have magnetic north. That's another weird point of commonality. I guess it makes some sense if you also have electricity. Come to think of it I wonder how electricity works with your kinds of matter. You aren't made of protons electrons and neutrons. It makes sense that you use a bunch of things for energy. I think that's pretty common. In general electricity is a way of moving energy around more than something it's easy to make directly."
"Well, if you want to run tests on my kind of matter, air's a poor conductor of lightning and metal's a good one. So if you have some non-conductive tongs and you don't put in too much energy I could hold one of my metal objects for you and you could try zapping it."
(Griffie is not confident that this will be totally non-injurious, but is pretty confident that exposure to lightning from people who aren't actively trying to kill them is going to be fine in the long run.)
"I think it would be safer to just levitate the object so you're not touching it at all. That sounds worth testing though."
"Currently my bubble only goes around me and things I'm holding, so it'd need to stay pretty close to me anyway. If you can manage that I suppose that's fine. Also I have definitely been hit with lightning before, and it wasn't a big deal once I healed up, so I think that if you're actively trying to avoid seriously injuring me I should be pretty much fine even if I get struck by it."
"Oh, I didn't realize it was that tight. Maybe a better first step would be seeing how hard it would be for me to stabilize your kind of matter myself." She removes a disk from her staff and looks at it intently, patterns slowly carve themselves into the surface. She'll be at this a while if not interrupted.
Griffie does not interrupt Riley, and pulls up a book that seems likely to be informative about Starlight on the library terminal while she works.
About five minute later a translucent blue sphere appears it's about twenty centimeters in diameter. "Alright, I think I isolated the stability effect for the water element. You said you could conjure water easily so that seemed like the lowest cost test. Can you conjure water inside the sphere here?" The sphere doesn't let Griffie's hand pass through it if they try.
"Definitely, that shouldn't be hard." The sphere disappears and she focuses a bit more, the symbols shift in small ways and then the sphere is back this time a section of the top is missing.
The water stays in the sphere. "Well that seems to work. It's not a trivial expenditure but it's doable, I wonder if I can split your water like I could with our sort of matter. We should probably go to an different lab for that we don't really have the right equipment here."
"Uh. This is pure water, I normally wouldn't think of it as being splittable at all. Trying to split the individual water atoms seems … maybe do it with the tiniest sample you can handle and with a lot of different shields, or something? I'd tell you to contact Axis, the Plane of Law, about it, but we're out of range of them."
"I was just planning to pass electricity through the water do you think that's likely to be dangerous?"
"Oh, that should be fine as long as you don't shock yourself. But it's not going to split the water."
"That makes sense, I'm still interested to see if your water does something like ionizing. Splitting your kind of atoms would also be interesting but I don't know how I would do that. Regardless we should go to a chemistry lab instead of this biology one. It'll have more useful equipment."
"This way then." She leads the way to a different lab this one has a number of meticulously labelled vials of liquids and powders and a lot of drawers also with labels. The sphere with water in it follows along.
