"Oh... did you mean you can cast the four orisons as many times as you want? If that's right we should probably start there. We've tried stabilize, I'd be interested to see what create water looks like, I'd be curious if you can detect our magic with detect magic and I can't tell from the name what guidance is supposed to do."

“I can cast my orisons as much as I want, yes. Subject to limits imposed by casting time. And Guidance is a nice one. It makes you slightly better at the first thing you try to do in the next minute. Well, not for literally anything, but a lot of things. It’s pretty subtle though, and it might not work for you.”

"Unfortunately I think I have to pass on that test. Maybe we can get another volunteer but while I'm doing an official risk assessment I'm not supposed to let any mind magics be cast on me and that sounds like one. Circling back to detect magic is it actually as broad as it sounds or is it more limited?"

"Guidance isn't what I think of as mind magic. I can only really mess with the minds of animals, not people. But it makes complete sense to be cautious in your position."

"And Detect Magic isn't very precise. Gives you information about magic auras, so it can be fooled by spells that mess with auras. If you focus enough on the information it gives you, you can eventually figure out how many auras there are and how powerful each one is. And if I knew more about how to interpret the results, I could maybe learn what school of magic an effect is, but I never focused on learning to do that. There is a sphere-two spell, Greater Detect Magic, which is somewhat better."

"Can you cast detect magic now just to see if Emiko and I show up as magical?"

Riley has several analysis spells running in addition to a communication system. She's also feeding a trickle of magical energy to power her implants.

Emiko has a communication system using a resonator and another resonator that's currently inactive (It's a microfusion reactor.)

Griffie utters some non-linguistic syllables, makes gestures though not ones involving their headband, and stares intently at Riley and Emiko.

"Riley, you've got a bunch of effects up, and you've got some magic items, too." Griffie correctly numbers them, and also waves a hand in the general direction of Riley's implants.

"Emiko, you've got two magic items." Griffie can vaguely gesture at their locations, too.

"These all produce pretty faint auras. And I could try guessing the properties of the magic items, but I'd need to thoroughly examine them. And they look internal, which would make that difficult."

"I could invert myself to expose at least the language sync interface. I could also disconnect the reactor. I'm not using it right now. It might look a bit strange though."

"I've seen the internals of a clockwork creature before, and I've also performed autopsies. If you think partially disassembling yourself while active is a reasonable decision for your research goals I'm not going to tell you not to."

"Alright." Emiko casually pulls off her top and then a previously invisible seam opens in her skin revealing a number of metallic branches, some almost too fine to see supporting a thin layer from underneath. Things rotate inside her body and a metallic sphere about ten centimeters in diameter comes into view. The branches detach a few tubes and cables from the sphere and then Emiko reaches inside with her hand and pulls it out before her body closes back up leaving no sign. She holds out the sphere to Griffith. "It's off at the moment, I'm not sure if that matters."

Griffie looks startled by Emiko's construction, but not disgusted or horrified. "Oh, Karapek would love to meet you," they mutter, in a tone which might be admiring.

They then perform the detection-spell gestures again, and peer closely at the sphere, rotating it. (What magical properties does the sphere have, and how complex is it?)

She smiles at their comment.

The magic in the object seems vaguely similar to telekinesis and maybe distantly related to durability enchantments.

"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.