Over the next few months they make some small discoveries but nothing incredible. Sometimes research is like that.

A strange rift appears several kilometers out, followed by a humanoid figure with a visual-spectrum-only light source. The humanoid figure begins to disintegrate, then gestures, producing a bubble around themself, and ceases to disintegrate. They begin accelerating towards the station, but not rapidly. They aren't on track to arrive for a little while.

(Being so far out in the Astral Sea that the elements are unstable, and calling Axis fails, is weird. Griffie could navigate via subjective gravity, but that seems inadvisable with no real practice and no other objects to course-correct by falling towards. Creating water and throwing it away from the station should propel them towards the weird ringlike place, right? With a lot less acceleration than falling towards it? The one visible location around is worth investigating, if it's Evil then Griffie is already on track to have problems.)

A radio message gets Emiko's attention. "Coordinator a sentient being appeared in the vicinity of the station. Linguistic magic is still in progress."

"That's exciting. Let's leave them be and see what that do for a minute or two. If they just stay in place send a platform. Keep the elements at a friendly distance for the moment."

Outside the station there are several thousand small metallic objects. Most of them are smaller than Griffie but a few are more like the size of a room. They're flitting around the station a bit like bees around their hive. None of them appear to have noticed Griffie yet.

The being is no longer accelerating, and continues to drift towards the station, on track to arrive in around an hour. The being also appears to be writing, with a primitive pencil, in a primitive journal, but frequently pausing to look at the station.

(Fields of objects like that are among the reasons why Griffie didn’t want to approach the ringlike structure so quickly that collisions would be injurious and redirecting oneself would be difficult. In their notebook, they are working on re-deriving the version of the spell Life Bubble that stabilizes elemental fields before their current emergency usage of the spell runs out.)

When Griffie gets to within a hundred meters or so a pair of small softly glowing tetrahedrons fly up to within about ten meters and try to signal Griffie towards the center of one of the circular sides. There's a door of sorts located there.

Well, a structure full of parks and farms doesn't look too bad, and does seem hospitable to life. Griffie is up to approaching one of its doors.

Griffie puts away their notebook and gets out an empty leather waterskin. They make strange gestures and recite some weird syllables. The waterskin fills. They squeeze the waterskin, ejecting a clear liquid approximately away from their desired direction of acceleration. They don't seem to have much experience with this travel method, and course-correct several times. Each time they do this, the liquid ejected from the waterskin disintegrates after about ten minutes, leaving no trace that it was ever there.

That's fascinating. The doorway opens into a small chamber with another door at the other end. Once Griffie steps through there's a burst of wind from apparently nowhere and then the far door opens. A woman floats on the other side and waves a hand then says. "Hello there, welcome to this station." Emiko is speaking Sylvan. Both in the chamber and the corridor beyond there are big obvious loops to tuck your hands and feet into. Emiko's left foot is tucked into one.

Huh. Griffie would have expected Celestial or maybe Draconic for a place like this. Sylvan works quite well, though.

Griffie smiles and waves. "Greetings to you! I am Griffith of Erlonn, and I am glad to be welcome at this station, because it is the only landmark I can see in this area of the Astral. What is the purpose of this station?"

"Oh is that what this place is called? This station is here to study this place, the astral, and understand its physics and magic."

"You're out here, far away from everything else, to study the Astral? What property of the Astral is easier to study here than an area of it closer to whatever plane you're from?"

Also, why don't you appear have a soul? That's could be a rude question to ask, though, so Griffie ought to wait. Maybe the person is heavily warded, or maybe she's a very humanoid remote-operated construct that's operated in a different means than the last such construct Griffie saw. It'd also potentially be rude and threatening-looking to cast Detect Magic mid-conversation.

"This is the place closest to our plane if I'm understanding your question correctly."

During this conversation, Emiko has had time to notice Griffie's appearance.

Griffie is a small pale-greyish-blue humanoid. Their eyes lack visible pupils, and their hands lack visible fingernails. They look succulent-like: Their head has a rosette of succulent leaflike structures with reddish borders. Their skin looks powdery. The backs of their hands mostly aren't visible, but do seem to have a few neatly trimmed thorns.

They appear to be wearing armor, made of a lot of pieces of what look like leather stitched together. Each piece has a leaf pattern on it. They are also carrying a shield, with a pseudosymmetric depiction of the L10a140 link painted on, and what looks like some type of bladed weapon on their belt, sheathed but in easy grabbing range.

They also have a backpack of some kind, a primitive-looking journal and pencil strapped to their belt, a metallic headband with holly and mistletoe somehow growing from it, a necklace with bits of iridescent beetle shell and an object emitting visual-spectrum light, jeweled handflowers on their hands, a green tunic with leafy patterns, pants, and boots which don't match the rest of what they're wearing.

"This station looks pretty far away from everything to me. What do you call your plane?" Griffie asks.

"We call the closest realm we have facilities in Horizon. I think what we call realms are the same as what you call planes but I can't be sure." The word realm is not in Sylvan nor any other language Griffie knows.

"I've never heard of Horizon, sorry. We could look at what you mean by 'realm' sometime, and I can explain what I mean by 'plane' to be sure we're on the same page. I actually have a Sylvan dictionary on me, if that would help, you're free to have a look. And … you're not very familiar with the Astral, are you?"

"I would be surprised if you had heard of Horizon, we're the only ones who call it that and as far as I know we've never encountered members of your species before. A dictionary could definitely help. If I want to define it mostly accurately though a realm is the set of all points which you can reach by travelling in a straight line and not going through any Gates. The reason it's inaccurate is because in some realms space itself is moving apart faster than we can travel."

"My world has plenty of humans, a species which you're shaped exactly like. My sort of person is pretty rare, it'd be easy to interact with my world without seeing one. And species is the wrong word for my sort of person, we're intelligent plant-constructs. Also, 'realm' and 'plane' seem to be similar enough words that I think you can say 'plane' without serious miscommunication?"

Griffie rummages through their backpack and gets out a book. As they begin to hand it to Emiko, it pokes out of Griffie's bubble. The corner outside the bubble begins to disintegrate. Griffie frantically grabs it back. "What the Maelstrom?" they exclaim.

"What does it mean for you..." Emiko starts to ask before being distracted by the disintegration. "That was unexpected. Do you have any idea what was happening there?"

"Well. Outside of this station, the same thing would have happened, because we're deep enough in the Astral that the elemental fields are apparently absent, which is why I'm using a modified version of 'Life Bubble' to create local elemental fields for me in addition to providing me with breathable atmosphere at a safe temperature. But you seemed to have plants growing here, and to have filled this room with air, so I thought that the elemental fields were present."

"Er. To be clearer. The book is a solid object. It needs the Earth field to support solidity, and such."

"I don't think I've ever heard of elemental fields and I'm a physics researcher. Would it be alright if I ask someone to do a scan of you to see if you're made of the same kinds of material substances that I am? If you have a way to check that would also be ok, but I'd like one of my people to check too for our records."

"Sure, go ahead and scan. I got here via a suddenly appearing hole in space which I didn't mean to go through, I don't have that much research equipment on me."

Emiko makes a small gesture with her right hand. Shortly afterwards a magical scan initiates and tries to determine the composition of Griffith's body in terms of periodic table elements. The magic will also detect 'exotic matter' which is to say matter not made up of atoms.

Griffith is not made of atoms. They appear to be made of four distinct types of exotic matter. Their bubble is full of type 1, with trace amounts of type 2 and 3. Their book and other possessions are mainly composed of type 4, with significant traces of type 2 and 3. All of their metallic-looking stuff is type 4 with traces of type 3. They have clear liquid droplets of type 2 with traces of type 3 on themself, and the contents of their waterskin contain the same mix. They themself contain a mix of all four types.

"Well it looks like you're made of four substances none of which we've encountered before. For reference in my world biological humans are made almost entirely of eleven substances with very small amounts of a lot of others. My body is made up of probably a hundred different substances in varying amounts."

"Are these fundamental substances? That's an awful lot of substances. Also, how do you have biological humans if you don't have Earth, Fire, Air, and Water?"

"Well, it depends on what you call fundamental. All of those substances I mentioned are made of three other substances and two of those substances are made of another six substances. In total we consider there to be eighteen typical fundamental substances that are present in every plane we've visited and a great many more that are only present in some planes."

"I'm pretty curious, but those numbers don't sound familiar to me, so probably there's no Sylvan translation for the names of the substances. How are you speaking Sylvan, anyway?"

"We have magic that automatically learns the languages known by everyone who gets close to us. I can try to explain particle physics if you'd like. That's what we call the study of the eighteen fundamental substances."

"That does sound good to do at some point. Would you like to look over my dictionary first, though? As long as I don't let go of it my bubble should continue to go around it."

"Sure, would you prefer me to reach into your bubble or to have you turn pages for me. I should be able to memorize it about as fast as you can turn pages."

"I'm fine with you touching the book when I hold it out, but reach into the bubble carefully, it might interact weirdly with you though it probably won't. I can flip the pages if there are problems, and that's a good memorization speed, nice."

She tentatively reaches her hand through the bubble to see if it does anything unfortunate.

The bubble does not do anything unfortunate.

"Oh good, it seems whatever your bubble does isn't harmful to me. Can you hold the dictionary out for me?"

Griffie holds out the Sylvan dictionary, open to the first page.

Emiko carefully but quickly pages through the dictionary, barely pausing between pages. "Alright, that should be good. It'll take a bit longer for all that to get integrated into our magic but in the meantime I should be able to lookup specific words when I need to."

"Good for you! I also have a holy text of Immonhiel on me, if you haven't heard of the four elements you probably haven't heard of her either. I'm not trying to tell you to worship her specifically, just, you might be interested in more books. It's in Chraiqun, which you are also free to borrow from me with translation spells."

"This language?" Emiko asks in Chraiqun.

"Yup, you've got it. Pretty powerful translation magic if it doesn't feel like much and you can borrow multiple languages at once." Griffie replies in Chraiqun.

"I know it's great. It's one of my favorite bits of magic. What kind of being is Immonhiel? It seems like this language classes her as a god but that term is translating into a words in languages I'm more familiar with that are very ambiguous."

"Immonhiel is a lesser deity of medicine. Her divine realm is located in the Upper Planes, because she is in the coalition of Celestial deities. The Upper Planes are a lot of very connected planes, you usually can walk in a straight line between two places you're trying to go without worrying about details of Gates, because one of the things that being a Celestial deity is about is letting people in your plane go where they want to go. Immonhiel can make her most devoted followers proper clerics?"

"That's fascinating. So unpacking my understanding of your words the Upper Planes are a place people can go to and from? Also deities can grant non-deity people the ability to use specific magics?"

"You are correct on both counts."

"Then yes I'd be interested in reading that book. Before we go too much further like this though would you like to move to a nicer environment? There's gravity and plants and such on the outer ring. Given that you're made of fundamentally different substances I don't think there's any significant risk of biological cross infection."

"I do like gravity, and seeing your alien plants sounds interesting, so sure, that works for me."

"Alright, this way then." She pulls herself closer to the wall then along the corridor. After a short while they get to a point where there's a pair of circular rings easily big enough to move through. The part of the corridor on the other side is rotating slowly relative to the one they're in. (One rotation every twenty-one minutes) Emiko waits a bit on the other side of the transition looking back to make sure Griffith can get through without trouble.

Griffie isn't as agile as Emiko, but can manage.

Emiko continues on. After a short distance later when Emiko open a door and enters into a somewhat larger room. She floats to the opposite side of the room. There's also another door on the side of the room that connects the one Emiko is on to the one they entered from. "You'll want to be close to this surface and grab a hold. It'll become the floor when gravity starts being a thing."

Griffie can manage this.

The door closes above them and then the room starts moving. It's going slowly but fast enough that they have to hold on if they don't want to end up on what will become the ceiling. "We can talk some while we're moving. The ride will take five minutes in this gentle mode. The elevator could move much faster but that gets unpleasant for most kinds of people."

"I'm not in that much of a hurry. Oh. Gravity and the Astral. You're researching the Astral. You have a fancy gravity setup. You probably haven't figured out that it has subjective gravity, then?"

"Subjective gravity? Also I wouldn't typically call spin gravity fancy. I can explain how it works if you'd like."

"I can show you subjective gravity, though it might make sense to pause the elevator for it. And any setup you have is fancier than using no setup at all and relying on existing properties of the Astral, in my opinion? Though I'm not sure how it works, you might have trouble using it if your mind isn't located inside your body."

"I can set the elevator to constant speed which should work. Stopping it entirely would take longer." She does this and the pull towards the ceiling goes away.

"Alright. So. I'm going to keep hold of the handholds for convenience and safety, it still should be a sufficient initial demonstration." Griffie focuses slightly, and then is strongly pulled towards the ceiling. They focus again, and are now pulled towards one of the walls. They continue this for a few other directions, then stand up on what they were told would soon become the floor, jump off of it, and fall towards the floor again, no handhold required.

"How does that work? And what do you mean by if my mind isn't located inside my body? The mechanisms running my mind are inside my body."

"It works via wanting to fall in that direction. And … it doesn't look like your mind is inside your body, I can't see your soul, do you have very high-grade wards up?"

"I'm protected by not being something most magics recognize as a person or a mind. It's a useful side effect of bodies of this sort."

"Huh. You don't have to tell me the details of your security measures, of course, but I've never heard of minds running solely on mechanisms, with no positive energy or negative energy involved. Who created you? Or, hold on, do you mean that you used to not run solely on mechanisms and you transferred yourself? How damaging was it?"

"I think positive and negative energy are a bit like the elemental fields and are similarly things we haven't encountered before. I'm also not sure that it would be possible to make mechanisms like the ones I run on out of the sorts of fundamental substance you're made of. As for the transfer process, in a completely technical sense my mind was copied from my old body and then that body died." Emiko probably shouldn't share the fact that she has a habit of trying out different ways of dying. Even among her own people that's considered rather odd.

"I've had my soul transferred between bodies before, but the method my community uses causes near-total memory loss. Using that method again would probably require external help from my community, which I currently don't have access to. Unless I figure out access to them, I am on track to die in two decades, at most. I very much like not dying."

"There doesn't seem to be anything obviously wrong with the substances you're made of, and positive energy souls are… Nobody I trust has so far been allowed to inspect the place they come from, and I am suspicious that it has been sabotaged, as positive energy souls tend to decay, but prior to a major war they apparently didn't."

"Is there something I could offer you in exchange for eventually using this transfer process on me?"

"I'm gonna start the elevator again." Emiko says before doing so, then she refocuses on the questions. "That sounds distressing, generally we're pretty free with offering immortality to people though I should warn you though that even if we make you a biological body we can't guarantee you'd keep your magic. I also can't guarantee that the methods we have will work for you at all but we'd be able to tell before getting started."

"You're 'pretty free with offering immortality to people'. Huh. Good for you if you can get away with it? Also good choice being this far away from everything, actually, I would recommend not going closer? And I do not care about my magic or being on a biological substrate nearly as much as I care about not dying. And if I accept your methods and ever in a millennium want to go anywhere near my world again, I want the security-by-obscurity stuff, actually."

"Nobody should die if they don't want to. Are there people in your home plane that are opposed to immortality in principle?"

Griffie laughs for a moment about the question being worth asking, then sighs. "Yes. Definitely. Lots of them. Most notably Charon, second most notably the psychopomps, also the rest of Abaddon really. Charon appears to want to kill everyone, and is at least comparable in power to a god, probably more powerful than most, but hiding it. The psychopomps are more focused on people experiencing their 'natural' lifespans, and to be fair to them, many of them will oppose Charon's servants in their more egregious and blatant actions. Abaddon is where Charon lives, along with various lesser entities who are not unlike him in attitude."

"That's awful. I hope we can find a way to help with that. If we can do something about it we probably will. Though there's so many things to do and we can only do so much."

"Intervening at all could be dangerous to your civilization. You might be in violation of the current treaties around life and death, and if you wanted those treaties altered in your favor, a proof that aging is not fundamental might help, but a lot of those treaties are founded on the balance of power between deities, and I'm not sure how powerful your civilization is."

"In that case we might not. I don't really know how powerful we are relative to your deities. It sounds like they're quite good at creating Gates and the fact that most people are bad at that is one of the things we use to protect ourselves. It's possilbe they can't create Gates to our plane but that is a major risk to take."

"I do discourage you from taking that risk. Deities and the greatest of their servants are very good at creating Gates."

At this point gravity is getting stronger up to about half a g. Emiko is normally on the floor. "That's not my decision but we'll definitely take it under advisement and listen to any advice you have if we do choose to go in that direction. Let's put that topic to the side though. I've asked someone to bring a mind encoder over so they'll be meeting us at the bottom. Is there anything else you'd like to ask me about?"

"I'd like to ask about your society's weaponry capabilities, but that seems like the exact sort of question you wouldn't want to answer for everyone who shows up near your station. I want to have a model of the general structure of your world and societies but I'm not sure where to start asking. Oh. I would like it if you could clarify whether you can make a copy of my mind nondestructively."

"You'd be right that the exact details of our weapons aren't things we share widely. I can probably answer general questions though. The structure of our world is very loosely a bunch of connected planes which are pretty different from the Astral. The structure of our society is a mix of governmental and non-governmental organizations. The governmental ones are called divisions and are ultimately controlled by the assembly and committees thereof. And we can definitely make a copy non-destructively if we can make one at all. Given that our language magic works on you I expect our immortality magic will too. They're based on the same principles."

"Can you tell me the guiding principles that your assembly and committees follow? And if you can make a copy of my mind, can you send it through one of your gates so there is a copy of me even further away from my home than this?" Presumably if this is feasible, the person Griffie is talking to has already done it.

"The central philosophy our society agreed to when we formalized it is based around three principles: First, learn all there is to learn. Second, teach each those who would be taught. Third, never again. That last refers primarily to what we call 'The crisis' a massive war and its aftermath. About half of everyone alive before the crisis died during it. The phrase has a longer history about other past atrocities though."

"The phrase 'never again' has a longer history, meaning that you have lots of intact prewar records? And … we share a close enough definition of 'atrocity' that stuff like mass murder, torture, or slavery are central examples?"

"Yes, we have pretty good records of the prewar time. Part of what Starlight did when it was a network of institutions of learning, before the war, was do their best to have multiply redundant copies of any important records including historical documents. And yes, we share the same definition for atrocity."

"If you have not been lying to me thus far, I think I like Starlight. Though there is occasionally information which is useful for development of terrible weapons, or that sort of thing, what is your stance on that?"

"We still have the technologies used to wage the war that caused the crisis. The knowledge needed to create them is inextricably linked to a lot of other important things. And we have the knowledge to weapons even more effective than what we had then. Ultimately, we take the stance that knowledge is all else being equal good to have. The issues come in how you acquire that knowledge and how you use it. That said, the specific details of how to build our most dangerous weapons are only available to a small minority of our population."

"Knowledge of generally useful information in my world that's useful for building the most effective weapons my world knows of is heavily restricted. Perhaps your world's Crisis was less damaging than the War of Aiquzall? The War of Aiquzall was likely damaging to the structure of time itself, I don't know if yours got that bad."

"No, I'm not aware of any weapons technologies that could do that. Our most powerful weapons could kill a lot of people but ultimately the scars they leave can be fixed with enough time and effort."

"Thank you for explaining. I, ah, do think I ought to withhold some information from Starlight until it's clearer to me what your capacity is to prevent misuse of it. Though I do understand that you are offering me a great gift, and that you could simply have misled me in a way which caused me to be more informative, and should there be anything you urgently need to know I will do my best to address your concerns."

"That's more than reasonable. Our help isn't conditional on anything, not for the basics anyway and we consider immortality to be part of that." And they've gotten to the end of their elevator ride. There's a brief jerk as they go from 1.1 g to 1. The doors on the side open. "Welcome to Mistpiercer proper. We named the station after that strange mist outside."

A small metal device with rotors flies by and drops a white crystal sphere a few centimeters across into Emiko's outstretched hand.

Emiko reaches through Griffith's bubble and offers it to them. "This will copy your mind into our central archives. We'll watch to see when your body dies and build a new body for you then."

Griffie takes the sphere.

When Griffith takes the sphere there's a voice in their head. It isn't speaking any languages exactly more raw concepts. Do you consent to your mind being stored in the Heart's archive? There's also a sense that this is the most reliable known place for storing minds and that there are strict rules forbidding using anyone's knowledge from these archives without their permission.

Starlight mind-affecting magic is subtle, and thus if they were going to harm Griffie they probably could have done it by now. Griffie attempts to reply to the sphere. Yes, I do so consent.

There isn't any particular sensation. Maybe a small amount of pressure in their mind and then after about a minute. Your mind is now in the Heart's Archive. Retrieval code is Red Blue Blue Green Purple Black. You may choose to memorize this or look it up at any later point.

Griffie attempts to memorize the code. It's short. "What precisely is the retrieval code used for, and ought I refrain from recording it?"

"The retrieval codes are to give to friends or other people you want to handle getting you a new body. The division of immortality will do it if you ask them to and I filed that request on your behalf but if you want someone else to handle it they need the code. I guess in theory someone could kill your body and then use the code to make you a new one but that's pretty unlikely and we check on people after they get new bodies to try to ensure nothing nefarious like that is happening."

"Alright. Contact with my world is an interesting problem. That said, any archon, and any high-ranking servant of a Celestial deity, is permitted to involve themselves in my case should they consider it appropriate. I do doubt that you will make productive-for-you contact with my world without further knowledge of the situation, though."

"It certainly sound like that's the case from what you've said."

"Well. If you are honest, you have given me a great gift. The fact that you offer it freely does not lessen this. I am willing to share information should you have safeguards against it being used for net-destructive warfare, and I am willing to perform various feats of magic for your organization. And of course, should you be interested in contact with my world, I would be eager to provide you with all necessary information that I have."

"Also, I perhaps ought to ask you what your name is. I have already stated mine."

"Oh sorry, I forgot I haven't introduced myself I'm Emiko Shīkā. If that's hard to pronounce you can call me Seeker. Everyone who works in positions where they might talk with people from outside of Starlight chooses a name likely to translate."

"'Emiko Shīkā'. Is that correct?"

"Yes, that's very good."

"Thank you. I'm glad I can pronounce it correctly. I used to be worse with languages, one of my friends' names contains a /θ/-sound and I approximated it as /t/ when we met."

"You've made a lot of progress it sounds like."

"Thank you."

"So if I've answered your immediate questions could you explain what the four substances that make up your body and possessions are?"

"Oh. That's simple. Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Air is the gas my bubble is filled with. My waterskin is full of Water. The inert solid objects on my person are primarily made of various forms of Earth, with the metal components being the purest. And I don't have any active flames going, but there's Fire throughout, otherwise I'd be far too cold to do anything, and I have some substances particularly rich in stored Fire on me."

"That's odd, we have legends on our world that classify things the same way. Though in our world at least there isn't any basis to that. Are Gold and Silver types of metal in your world? Your language seems to suggest they are. What are those composed of and how do they differ from other metals?"

"They are composed of Earth atoms. Different metals are different arrangements of Earth atoms. I do not know the precise details of any specific metal, I am no alchemist."

"I wonder if it has the same properties as our gold. For us gold is what we call an element. Each atom of gold is made from exactly 79 protons. An average of 117 neutrons and exactly 79 electrons.

"Even if those numbers somehow corresponded to my world's gold, I really wouldn't be able to confirm that. I do have gold coins on my person, though they'll destabilize rapidly outside of my bubble. You probably don't consider coins made of exotic material that disintegrate outside of specialized storage to be a usable currency, do you, but they still seem like currency to me and I do consider it appropriate to compensate people who save my life, if I can. Getting more of the same substance has diminishing informational value, though."

"Given your bubble it seems like it's for the best that all your things stay with you. As for compensating us, what we'd find most useful is your help in our research. In most circumstances, physical substances aren't our constraint as a society. We aim for a fairly closed loop with the exception of new construction. Our currency to the extent we have it is mostly used to allow people to purchase energy and something else you don't have a word for. I think the closest explanation would be the capacity for non-person constructs to solve well defined problems."

"I would be willing to help you with your research, but I would like details on your capacity to prevent the widespread distribution of such information should you determine the potential for misuse is too great. If you trust your organization's decision-making procedures, I will be inclined to as well."

"We have separate storage areas for dangerous research which require authorization to access and audit logs to keep track of which authorized individuals have used that access and which specific files they've accessed. After that access has occurred we use a combination of random spot-checks using mind-reading to determine whether people have shared that information with unauthorized individuals. We also try to create detection methods so we can notice when someone is building a dangerous device or enacting a dangerous magic before they finish it and stop them."

"Alright. If you consider that sufficient for your safety, I am comfortable sharing any information that is a matter of public record in my world, and furthermore likely to be comfortable sharing anything that, in my judgment, Charon probably already knows. But if there are no matters that are urgent on the order of hours, I need to finish a spellwork task to keep my body and possessions stable. You may look over my shoulder while I do this, if you like."

"Nothing is urgent, please take care of whatever you need to. Also, is that a more general permission to observe or only specifically permission to visually watch?"

"You may also use other senses, but this is just going to be me taking notes and drawing diagrams, not me performing a ritual, so there probably won't be much to see."

"I'll just watch then."

Griffie gets out their pencil and journal again, and picks up where they left off, drawing diagrams and taking notes. The notes are not in Sylvan or Chraiqun, but in another language. After a moment, Griffie blinks. "If you acquired knowledge of the language in these notes from me, I would ask you to discard that knowledge, as the Druidic language is private. Once I am finished with this task, I will be willing to explain the spell structure, though, there's nothing worth keeping secret about an element-stabilizing 'Life Bubble' spell. You may look at the diagrams, if you find them of interest."

"I'll mark it as a private language in our archives and list you as the only authorized person. I don't think anyone's actually started learned the language yet, most people use something a bit like a spell to speak languages they're unfamiliar with which is what I've been doing but I'll send out a notice asking people to remove that knowledge if they have. Deleting it entirely isn't something we can do because the Heart refuses to allow anything to be deleted and our language magic is tied into its archive."

"That sounds sufficient, thank you."

"You're welcome."

Spell re-development time! After a few more hours, Griffie thinks they have it down.

"I'm going to meditate for 15 minutes to prepare the spell, and then cast it to make sure it works. If it fails, it should fail harmlessly, since it will be redundant with my current bubble. You may observe this process."

"Sounds good." She makes a small gesture and about ten seconds later a construct drops off another crystal sphere which she holds in her hand. This resonator is a sensor system, it records nearby magical fields for later research.

There is a significant amount of formed and unformed magic within Griffith. During the meditation process, an unformed segment gets 'sculpted' or 'folded' or 'woven' into a structure. When Griffith stops meditating and begins 'casting' the spell, the gestures, including interaction with sprigs of holly and mistletoe, and the syllables spoken seem to trigger the structure at various points, and it goes into action, forming a 1-inch magical shell around Griffith. The shell is a perfect copy of the shell they already had, and the two are redundant.

"That looked like it worked."

"I agree. And now, as long as I cast that spell twice a day, the elements composing me will remain stable. And I'll have air, that's important too."

Emiko laughs, "Air is pretty important."

"So! Where should we get started with your research?"

"Well, you've introduced a number of new research projects with your presence. Before you arrived we were trying to study the Astral Mist but we hadn't made much progress. So far we've been able to concentrate it enough to be a useful light source but not much else."

“Alright. If you like light sources I can demonstrate the spell ‘Light’ for you, or you can examine my Continual Flame necklace?”

Emiko laughs again. "We don't particularly need more light sources, I just meant we don't really understand the mists. That said a spell that makes light seems like a really good place to start coming to an understanding of your magic."

“I don’t actually have it prepared yet. The simplest spells I have prepared today are ‘Create Water’ and ‘Detect Magic’, which do what they sound like, ‘Stabilize’, which gives a creature a tiny dose of positive energy, and ‘Guidance’, which makes a creature slightly more competent at the next thing they attempt within the next minute.”

"Oh, is create water how you were propelling yourself with water in the area around our station?"

"Yes, it was. I could have used subjective gravity, but I was told travel via subjective gravity was hard to control, and I wanted to not have a high-speed collision with your station a lot more than I wanted to go quickly."

"I see, unless you have very good reflexes I imagine it would be hard to navigate well with such a powerful source of force especially if you have to deliberately think about being attracted to a specific point."

"I do not have good reflexes. Er, by the standards of adventurers. I'm probably better at dodging unpleasant surprises than most people who've never explored a hazardous location or been attacked or done reflex-oriented sports."

"Have you often been attacked? Is that common on your world?"

"Yes, definitely. And violence is unfortunately common, though there are many people who manage to live their lives in peace."

"That's sad. Nobody should be subject to violence if they don't want to be."

"Sometimes they want to build tools for massive destruction without being interrupted, or the like, and then it's in my opinion good to disrupt that. That said, it is an excellent principle. Violence is all too often necessary, however. I at least have the privilege of being able to afford tools for making it reliably nonlethal under many circumstances."

"You're right. Sometimes it is necessary. I'm glad stopping people like that isn't my responsibility."

“It’s not the most pleasant responsibility. But it is, so far as I can tell, where I have been most needed, as of late.”

"Hopefully you can find more enjoyable things to do while you're with us."

"Well, basic research, looking into the feasability of Starlight intervening in my world, and if so lobbying for same through whatever channels people usually do politics through, are in fact more enjoyable than fighting to disrupt other people's attempts to cause problems, and those things are my current long-term plan. …my current medium-term plan! I have more of a long term than I have full plans for! Thank you, again."

"Those all sound like good plans. If you're staying for a while we should probably register you as a resident if that's alright with you. Being a resident entitle you to some amount of currency on a regular basis, a residence to live in, medical care, education should you wish to pursue it and allows you to participate in our political process. On your end it means you're committing to comply the rules of our society and in case of extreme emergencies obey the dictates of the emergency committee within certain limits."

"That sounds potentially good. Tell me about your society's rules and the typical responses of the emergency committee to emergencies, then?"

"We have the basic rules I think are present in most societies. You're not allowed to injure or steal from other individuals. There are exception for extreme circumstances but we try to prevent those from happening. We also have a number of rules that govern how resources are allocated. For the average person all that those rules are relevant for is how many resources they personally get and the restrictions about speed of usage. Even if you accumulate a massive amount of resource credits there's a limit to how much you can redeem at once. You're also not allowed to bribe people to support your political causes. If you break the rules, our justice system is focused on understanding why and building a framework for ensuring it won't happen again. In rare cases, that will mean we take steps to make it impossible for you to do whatever you did again, either by requiring you be escorted by someone or something that can stop you or by banning you from wearing certain types of bodies."

"Do extreme circumstances include self-defense, at least if I am careful to avoid lastingly injurious use of force? …lower rates of violence, right, possibly if someone tries to rob me I can get in their face with a scimitar and they'll just stop immediately without us needing to attack each other. Or I can spend a Wild Shape usage on running off without having to worry that I'll urgently need that usage later."

"Self defense is a broad category. In general the expectation is that you'll attempt to disengage and only attack back if that's for some reason infeasible. That said, in most cases, the justice system will find no wrongdoing on the part of the defending party. The cases where self defense would be unacceptable would either be in a case of disproportionate force, such as dismembering someone in response to a punch or kick, or if you goaded someone into attacking you with the intent of being able to defend yourself. As for protecting yourself from theft, if an item is replaceable we generally prefer you just let the person go, you'll be compensated either by the person or the justice system. In the case of something irreplaceable the same comments about disproportionate force can apply."

"That sounds overall reasonable. Is flight rare enough that it's usually an effective means of disengagement from hostilities?"

"It should be. The generally speaking only operatives and a few committed hobbyists have personal flight. It's pretty resource intensive. Magecrafters can do it too but they're extremely rare. We don't have any here at the moment."

"I could take the form of a large bird and fly you around the station, if you liked, though at that point we wouldn't be on a telepathic communication network together so I wouldn't be able to speak. But I digress. If flight is a good means of disengaging from attackers, and violence is rare, I ought to be able to do so."

"That sounds fun. I don't really care if I can't tell you where to go. Though flying here is likely to be weird. Apparent gravity decreases as you get higher and that takes adjusting to."

"Oh, I'd be able to hear you just fine, and make various expressive bird sounds, just not to speak. But I like being able to talk. I suppose if you have cheap infrastructure for safe falling I could go Air Elemental, they have a problem with dropping objects they try to carry but they can talk."

"Hmm, I could get a wing suit. It's a piece of clothing that lets people fall safely from large heights."

"It's your choice, I just thought you might like flying if it's cheaper than usual. Anyway. Your justice system sounds good. I will research how to conduct myself honorably regarding politics and do my best to adhere to the guidelines, I don't have much political experience anyway so I'll need to do research no matter what. I can survive almost anywhere people aren't actively trying to kill me so I'm not deeply worried about resources."

"I am always up for new experiences as long as nobody's being hurt in ways they don't want. Sometimes they aren't things I want to repeat but I don't know for sure unless I've tried them. I can get you setup with access to our libraries, those are open even to visitors. There's a physical library I can show you which is likely more like what you're used to but you can also get access to most information from a remote access system."

"Are your libraries integrated with the translation magic? And is your remote-access system in the form of single small storage cores containing libraries worth of data and attached to multiple viewing terminals?"

"They're mostly integrated with the translation magic. The main gap is that not every word has a good translation. The translation magic as used by people makes them aware of that and allows them to actively rephrase. For books though it just leaves some words untranslated. For languages with a sound to character correspondence it will also transliterate the word. Our remote access is something like that, though the cores are not physically present near the viewer and their contents are temporarily copied into the viewer."

"Well, it sounds like you have lower manufacturing costs, if you're willing to let non-residents handle the viewers. I'd be happy to have a look at the library."

"They're cheap enough that everyone who wants one can have one. A lot of people don't bother with them because a large portion of our population can just use a mental interface with no external parts. I have a couple just because I enjoy using them. Let's walk over to my house. People get slightly cross with me when I use direct delivery in ways they consider frivolous."

"Offer to fly you is still open. It'd be a little frivolous to go to giant bird form just for a short trip and then detransform so soon, but the impression I get is that I'm not going to need all my wild shape uses today, and for a short trip I'm fine with a nonverbal form."

"That would be fun. My house is that way," She points in a direction. "You can't miss it, it's the one painted in a rainbow's worth of colors."

Griffie transforms into a giant vulture, picks up Emiko, and flies in the stated direction.

The area is mostly parkland with scattered houses and other buildings. Nothing is more than three stories tall. There are what seem to be well maintained paths and all the trees around look fairly young. It's immediately evident when they're approaching Emiko's house. Most homes have been one or two colors at most and usually fairly sedate tones. Emiko's is bright white with splashes of color some like paint splatters and others more like what you would find on a tie-dye shirt.

Emiko for her part is laughing and peering around though she isn't moving much out of an abundance of caution. "This is fun."

Griffie makes a pleased chirp in response to Emiko's statement, then sets Emiko down by her house, lands, and detransforms.

"Thank you, that was great. I've tried flying like a bird before but I hadn't thought of being carried by one."

"Glad you liked it. If you get safety gear or I prep the spell 'feather fall', I can do more aerial tricks sometime."

"That sounds like a lot of fun. If you enjoy that sort of thing you might like roller-coasters they're a vehicle that goes very fast on rails for fun. It's pretty different from flying under your own power but not being in control is it's own kind of exhilaration. Anyway, this way." She indicates a direction. The area immediately around her house has a fine gravel with islands of vibrant flowers and stepping stone paths. She starts leading the way to her door.

"I'll think about it."

Griffie follows Emiko, presumably towards her library.

They reach the door and Emiko opens it, no particular locking mechanism is apparent. Inside there's a nice sitting room. The walls are once again white though here instead of wild painting of the base walls there's artwork and colorful technical reference tables attached to the walls along with several large panes of what seem to be glass showing images that shift over time mostly with fractal patterns. There's also a vertical fountain running down one wall. There's a couple clusters of chairs each with their own table and also doors leading off to another couple of rooms that are currently closed. The tables have some scattered books papers and toys. It's one of these tables that Emiko is walking towards. She picks up something that looks a bit like a book at first glance and then walks to another cluster with bean bag chairs suitable for a variety of body sizes. "Would you prefer to sit or stand while I explain how this works?"

Griffie takes a seat and looks towards Emiko.

She sits in an adjacent seat. She folds over the cover and it sticks to the back revealing a matte panel of what looks like glass. She holds it out for Griffie to take. "I've set this to Sylvan for the moment but you can change it to another language if you'd like. I've also set it to be in a basic mode so that it's easier to use. That does mean some of the other features aren't available." On the screen there are four large icons: a book labelled as 'library', a depiction of a person labelled as 'talk', a depiction of a gear labelled 'options' and a depiction of two clasped hands labelled 'assistant'. "The panel is sensitive to touch. Generally you can make things happen by touching the panel in the right places."

"Why is 'options' represented with a gear?"

"That is a good question," She laughs. "Mostly it's a historical artifact. People did it that way on some of the first machines like this and people keep copying it because it's familiar."

"Ah! Thank you. What do I need to read through to get a better understanding of the residency agreement?"

"There's a book on that called 'Joining Starlight' that should suffice to get you started. It also references a number of other books if you want to read more. I can set it to be immediately visible in the library view if you want. I can also show you how you find specific books in the library view."

"Let's go over finding specific books in the library view, and then I'll have a look at 'Joining Starlight'."

"Alright you can tap the library button to get started." After Griffith does the screen changes to show three smaller icons at the top of the screen: a magnifying glass labelled as 'search', a bookcase labelled as 'browse' and a circular arrow labelled as 'history' Below that in large text there's the words. 'Currently reading' and below that in smaller text 'It doesn't look like you're reading anything right now. Below that there's another section labelled as 'to read list' and a similar message that says. 'there's nothing here right now'

Griffith and Emiko go through the library tutorial, and then Griffith settles in to have a look at 'Joining Starlight'. They're mostly interested in confirming that the details match Emiko's description, and would also like to know if there's an exit procedure available.

The details do match what Emiko said. There is a chapter titled "What if I want to leave?" In that chapter it explains that people are free to leave if they wish. If you leave for another civilization you aren't allowed to bring certain items with you, generally things that are either dangerous or easy to make into dangerous things. Exact rules can differ from civilization to civilization. There is a more complex procedure if you want to leave during a declared extreme emergency but as long as you're not currently essential to protecting others from harm you're free to go as long as you can make your way to wherever you want to go by your own means.

Well, if Griffie wants to protect others from harm during an extreme emergency and then leave before the emergency is over, it's going to be a complicated problem no matter what, so that's fair.

"Having considered their policies, I would like to become a resident of Starlight," Griffie says.

"Great, that shouldn't take long to setup." Emiko asks a few basic background questions about how Griffith wants to be listed in records and a few small other details.

Once that's done with Emiko says, "Congratulations you're now a resident. I added the 'accounts' view to this device for you and you can keep this as long as you'd like, that will let you see how much you're allocated and let you use this device to pay for things. We can get you something more convenient to carry if you'd like."

"Thank you! And my belt pouch is actually a connection to a larger extradimensional space, it should fit in there fine."

"Really? That's awesome. Also you definitely shouldn't us a transposer. I have no idea how one would work with trying to move an extradimensional space. We should test one to make sure it works with your type of exotic matter before you use one regardless but that especially sounds like a bad idea."

"The technology works just fine across teleportation and plane shifts. What's a transposer?"

"It's our version of teleportation. We use it for travelling between planes and also sometimes for travelling within them. Transposers sometimes don't manage to keep active magical effects working though. Some magics work and others don't and a collapsing extradimensional space seems potentially dangerous."

"Hmm. I think your teleportation and plane shift mechanisms may be worse than ours. If my friend were here he could demonstrate at least the teleportation. As it stands I won't be able to help much unless you can get information by looking at my boots, which are designed to enhance the wearer's capacity to bring passengers when teleporting via the magic bonds between distant plants of the same species. I'm not actually strong enough for that, yet, but I'll hopefully get there eventually."

Emiko chuckles. "That's intentional, transposers and other means we have for moving between planes are designed to be selective. We can add compatibility with additional magics but the default is excluding magics and other exotic effects instead of including them."

"Ah! So it's a security measure. Well, everywhere you can access is apparently all made of incompatible exotic matter by my standards, so I don't feel the urgent need to travel."

"I bet we can find a way to make things less incompatible and give you a safety net."

"Oh, that'd be nice. Until then I'm going to need to expend two of my three best spell slots a day on stabilizing myself, the spell only lasts sixteen hours."

"Yeah, needing to remember to do something twice a day to survive isn't something I think anyone would enjoy."

"So. We've gone over the residency agreement. What are your research priorities?"

"I think there's three broad categories off research I'm interested in. First is learning what you know about your magic and how things work in the planes you know about. Second is directly studying the magic you're capable of performing. Third is understanding the matter you're composed of. As for priorities I think they highest priority should be giving you a safety net if we can manage it. That probably means focusing on either the second or third category though if you know if you know anything that might be helpful that's a good place to start."

"So. Conjured matter seems to be stabilized outside of my bubble, a bit, by the residual conjuration magic. If you want to inspect a sample with instruments that I should be more than an inch away from, I can get you a water sample that will last around ten minutes. And it'll have trace amounts of fire for heat. For further examination of samples, I could work on a stabilization spell that can target containers and not just people, or if I take the time to prepare spells, I can get you other samples that'll persist for minutes that way. I can also go over in more detail what my stabilization spell does with you."

"I think starting be explaining what your spell is doing is a good place to start. It's potentially possible that the spell trace I took earlier would be sufficient for one of our mage-crafters to copy it but more information can only help."

"''Life Bubble' surrounds me and any objects I am holding with a 1-inch shell of clean air with the appropriate temperature, humidity, and pressure. Thus, it contains trace amounts of water and fire. Furthermore, it resists loss of air in a vacuum, or compression of air underwater. The modified version also locally creates enough of all the elemental fields to stabilize me. Including the Earth field, despite the spell producing no Earth. Normally it would just have a weak Air field and and even weaker Water and Fire fields."

"Hmm, so there are two parts to the problem, first you probably can't breathe our air and so you need to keep it with you. And second you need these fields to survive. Does your air become less breathable over time and need to be refreshed?"

"Yes, and 'Life Bubble' refreshes it. Though if I'm sufficiently inactive and exposed to sufficient amounts of the right wavelengths of light, I can actually refresh it myself: I am a plant creature, I photosynthesize. But I do like performing enough activity that I respire more than I photosynthesize, it's nice to be awake and moving."

"Can you tell when you're photosynthesizing? If you can do you know the limits? Manipulating light is something we're quite good at assuming your light and our light are the same and I expect it is given that we can see each other."

"In bright direct sunlight, shining more light on me will not make me photosynthesize faster. I think if we can solve the fields problem the air-revitalization problem will be much easier, though. I could probably design an air-revitalization spell for you to analyze, if that would help."

"Interesting, I would have expected that shining light of the correct frequencies across your entire surface would be better than what you get from just whatever angle the sunlight is coming from."

"Oh, that's an idea. It could be a marginal improvement though currently on my less-exposed surfaces I don't have the highest density of photosynthesis-structures? Seems like a route that would still likely be insufficient for my current lifestyle, though."

"It's weird how many parallels there are between your plane and ours when we're composed of different sorts of matter. I'm not sure if I should lean into it or not. If I was going to I would assume that photosynthesis consumes water while respiration creates it."

"That depends on what you mean by 'consume'. Many organic compounds involve a combination of fire and other components, including water, which get the fire to be fairly inert until it is needed. Photosynthesis captures energy from light and fire in a structure of mostly water and earth, while respiration unravels those compounds."

"Aha... I think that's what I would expect if we materials in your world corresponded to materials in ours. I wonder how far that correspondence goes. We don't have any beings like yourself, plants-based beings who can think to a significant degree but I wonder how much you resemble our plants anyway. Maybe I'm getting sidetracked though. It's always hard to know what's important when embarking on a novel project."

"I certainly resemble unintelligent immobile plants from my world, I was built from them. If you're … nicer and less desperate and thus less prone to irritating the wilderness … I suppose it wouldn't feel as much need to empower the occasional tree and the like, and then if you don't have any treants or dryads around you don't bother thinking 'what if we created something kind of like that'? Or, wait, you think your worlds have no positive energy, so do you have no spontaneous awakening of creatures and objects not born to intelligent parents or crafted by intelligent designers?"

"We don't. If forests spontaneously manifested protectors when threatened our history would be very different."

"Is there some specific historic failure mode you'd like to discuss or have me read about? And in my world, it's not as though forests manifest protectors reliably or they reliably win, if that's what you were picturing."

"That makes sense, I don't think there's anything specific unless you count the impact of the crisis. It's just a long history of ecosystems being destroyed either to make way for development or as a consequence of pollution. We're trying to rebuild the ecosystems on our first world but it's a long slow process."

“I can see why that might be more destructive without counterbalancing pressures. I can accelerate plant growth if that’s of interest to Starlight?”

Griffie pauses. “Though possibly not your plants, since they don’t have positive energy spirits.”

"It's worth testing whether your can use your magic on our plants... if you're limited to only a few spells a day though I don't think it would make a significant impact. Maybe it will help more if we can copy it. We can make exact copies of plants but extrapolating natural growth given different conditions and genetics is somewhat beyond us."

“…huh. Speak with Plants might also be soul dependent. I’d be happy to run some tests. I’m also not quite sure I understand what your goals here are, I think it’s okay for a forest to look silly for a little while and it’ll hit equilibrium eventually?”

She smiles. "This is a research outpost, nobody will mind the growth being a bit unbalanced if it's because of an experiment."

"I mean more generally. You can make exact copies of plants, but this doesn't solve your ecosystem problems because you … don't have enough plants to copy to fill out a functional ecosystem? You're impatient for results to look natural and don't want to wait decades for it? You want to mimic old-growth forests and you think they will be terribly unaesthetic if all the trees are still almost identically shaped a century from now? Your replication stuff doesn't handle root networks well? You're immortals, but you're recently immortal, so you think that setting up some test ecosystems with replicated plants to see if they approach the state of the previous system, waiting for results, and then making more of the working setups everywhere, takes too long?"

"I don't actually know, I'm not deeply involved in that project. I think the concern is that with literal copies it's harder to replicate environments with a lot of plants in close proximity without making each section identical which means changing the contour of the terrain and we're not sure what the long term implications of that sort of tiled uniformity would be."

"Ah. Yeah, that does sound complicated. Not sure how much I can contribute, my main suggestion to a society of immortals would be 'mimic the points in primary succession where seeds and such get brought in from other ecosystems, and otherwise wait' and it's not a very insightful suggestion."

"Yeah, I think a lot of it is aesthetic many of our people want to roll back the clock instead of letting nature build something new and that's much harder. Also, like you guessed we're impatient. We expect to live millennia but nobody actually has."

"…huh. That's an interesting aesthetic preference, but it suggests that people who themselves share the preference will be better at working on the project. I myself tend to like partially-wild places that are managed with a somewhat light touch, but not so light a touch that it's not obvious to people who are looking for signs of it."

"There's a lot of reasons, part of it is that the weapons used in the war that started the crisis caused a lot of collateral effects. Also before that we were changing the balance of gases in our atmosphere which was causing increased temperatures across our entire world. Some places were regularly hot enough that people would die of heat stroke just from being outside."

"Why did you change the balance of gases like that?"

"It was a consequence of a technology the people living at the time used widely. Alternatives existed but for a lot of reasons people didn't adopt them in time to prevent the consequences from getting out of control."

"Ah. And then you eventually fixed it because you got wealthier and so it was easier to solve?"

"In a sense, really it's because we got magic and that was both directly and indirectly useful for fixing things. Our industrial capacity is larger now than it was before the crisis but it took fifty years to get to that point."

"How'd you get magic?"

"Oh... we were experimenting with something like a gate. And we ended up in the Heart's plane. I say we but I was born after that happened."

“…that’s interesting. Can you recommend me any books about the Heart?”

"I like 'The Heart, its Library and its Magic' It's a fairly neutral take and it acknowledges the impact it's had on us."

Griffie looks for this on the library terminal.

It's easy to find. It's a combination of a history, a reference guide and an analysis of the cultural impact. These are mostly divided into their own sections.

The introduction summarizes a lot of the content.

The Heart is a pulsating crystal structure in the center, loosely speaking, of the Heart's realm which is itself a non-euclidean archive, sometimes in the form of books and other traditional stores of information but sometimes in more exotic forms such as small or large ecosystems apparently copied or transplanted from other realms.

Historically speaking an experiment fifty years ago led to easy travel being established to the Heart's plane. One of the early explorers became the first known mage-crafter. The magic available to mage-crafters allowed for several revolutions in nanotechnology and also their current backup-based immortality system. It also opened the way to exploring new planes. Currently resonators, as magical artifacts made with magecrafting are called are used extensively in construction, science and providing aid to other societies that can function without major infrastructure.

Mage-crafters are able to ask questions of reality, and copy effects they've analyzed sufficiently . They can also create resonators which allows ordinary people or automated machinery to invoke a single effect given that they supply the energy needed to make the magic happen.

The catch as it were is that the Heart only gives magic to people obsessed with discovery, those with a drive to exploration either in the literal sense or in the more metaphorical sense of pushing they boundaries is science and technology. If those gifted ever decide to settle and stop pushing boundaries they lose their magic. The worry that something like that will apply more broadly is a very present concern is a strong influence in Starlight's politics both from those pushing to prepare for that possibility and from those who want to ensure it's never a risk by exploring ever more places.

This sounds like a god with a divine realm and clerics sort of situation.

Do mage-crafters reflect different facets of the Heart? Is it possible for them to produce pure essence of pursuit-of-knowledge and use it as a selective weapon against anti-pursuit-of-knowledge entities? Do mage-crafters look pursuit-of-knowledge-ish to magical scans, moreso than people with the same tendency towards pursuit of knowledge who aren't mage-crafters? Is their magic a consumable resource that restores daily, and what do they need to do to restore it if so? Is there some symbol-of-the-Heart that they use?

Also, does the Heart have holy texts? Has it created nonhuman very-aligned-with-itself intelligences to serve it? Do its followers maintain temples to it?

The Heart doesn't communicate except by giving magic and taking it away as such all their knowledge about what aspects it does or doesn't have are speculation.

Mage-crafters analyzing their own souls do see marks of the Heart's influence there and a connection reaching back to the Heart but it isn't conceptually aligned.

Mage-crafters all have a uniform magical power which is to say an amount of energy they can use each second. It never varies even when time is passing at different rates for them relative to the Heart. They can channel that power through arrays, meaningful symbols inscribed or written in the world in some way. Anyone can design arrays but Mage-crafters can only use them if they understand what they array is doing.

What methods have people tried for communicating with the Heart?

People have tried written messages, speaking to it in a variety of languages, using various analysis magics, meditating near it, thinking loudly while touching it (which is what people do to be granted power if you fit the personality profile) and leaving offerings. People have also done very in depth analyses of the light it emits but haven't managed to find anything resembling communication in that data.

Well! That's very interesting. Establishing communications with the Heart is probably important, relying on divine casters as a major power source in a war involving gods is a terrible plan if you're not confident that the god granting the power is on board with the war.

"The Heart is remarkably similar to my own understanding of how gods tend to function, but bears notable differences, such as the lack of communications. I would like to make attempts to speak with the Heart using my own magic. I have a spell designed for communication with entities that not only do not know any languages but would be incapable of learning them. Additionally, if I cannot make contact with the Heart or otherwise get better information about its preferences, I do not think I ought to push Starlight to intervene in my world, because that is the sort of activity that might cause a god to suddenly withdraw power from a lot of people at once."

"That will probably take time to arrange, both to ensure you can safely visit and because some people will likely want to make preparations for magic that we rely upon suddenly going away.'

"I would hope that mere communication attempts would not cause the Heart to withdraw their power, but I suppose that it cannot be guaranteed."

"I would hope so too but it's been over a decade since the last attempt and that seemed less likely to succeed."

"Well, it's good to be cautious with this sort of thing. I do wonder whether the Heart would like the idea of being a Celestial deity, though. There are other celestial deities of knowledge and exploration who would share their records and such with the Heart if they joined. Though the Heart would need to take a live-and-let-live policy regarding, say, Ghenshau, the god of, among other things, refraining from the pursuit of knowledge due to the need for rest or contentment with a simple life."

"That's really hard to know. I think it would welcome new knowledge but I'm not sure it really understands the concept of exchange or diplomacy."

"Well. Maybe they can acquire the knowledge of exchange and diplomacy. I wonder if bringing them a sample of holy water would help. It contains magical essence of goodness, which includes concepts like that."

"I don't think we've encountered conceptual magic which embodies anything that complex before. Do you have any with you?"

"I just have the one pint of holy water, which I can't renew, but you can have a look at it. I also have a renewable source, but it involves transforming into an animal again and poking you, and it could be unpleasant but not lastingly harmful if you're secretly a terrible person? Or it might not work at all because you're soulless?"

"I'd like to think I'm a good person though I'm not sure what definition is being used. I do expect that the procedure wouldn't work with this body but I expect we could find a volunteer with a biological body. I'm not sure if that would count either if what you mean by a soul is based on the presence of positive or negative energy. They'll probably send a Mage-crafter to expedite deciding if it's safe to let you visit the Heart and they all have biological bodies."

"The issue wouldn't be absence of goodness, it'd be the presence of significant evil, which I really wouldn't expect you to have."

"If some of your people have non-positive-energy-based soul-like constructs, I suppose I could call mine a 'positive energy soul' and call theirs some other more specific term. I don't know how the touch-based value-expression effect would interact with those."

"Oh, that's interesting. I haven't had to make any really decisions that would put me at risk of that. The technical term we use is magical interface. Given that our mind magic works on you, you have one or something equivalent."

"It's not … being pushed into a bad situation where you had to kill a non-combatant to accomplish some genuinely important goal isn't a central example of 'significant evil', here? The central cases would be about things like seriously harming people because you either actively wanted to do so or didn't treat harms to them as a cost. For you to be sufficiently evil to be harmed by me using the ability at full intensity — which isn't optimal for testing anyway, I'd use it at a lower intensity that wouldn't even harm an evil person — the way you're acting towards me would need to be non-representative of your overall character."

"Oh, it's based primarily on intent not outcome. That makes sense."

"Outcomes likely matter too, but I don't think they're generally sufficient? It might draw from my specific moral sensibilities some? I don't actually normally study this and it doesn't seem like a particularly promising line of research."

"Agreed, I wouldn't want to intentionally manufacture people who counted as evil and it would take a lot work to arrange a broad enough sample of volunteers, especially since it would likely require pretty broad use of mind magics that haven't been certified as permissible."

"You still shouldn't do it, but it is technically possible to create evil insects which aren't person-ish. If you have a source of concentrated evil-quintessence. Which I don't recommend trying to acquire."

"I don't think that would help us understand what counts as evil. It also seems a bit dangerous. I'm not really sure what I would expect it to do either."

"It would be dangerous. It likely wouldn't be very helpful. If you wanted to test the edge-case behavior of my specific moral-quintessence-generation effects you could in theory generate tiny samples of lots of different quintessence types and observe the reactions, but that would also probably be dangerous. And … this isn't going to help discover new facts about ethics itself? It's just going to help discover how quintessence behaves. We can call holy water 'good', but it works from what the celestial deities call 'good', and sometimes people discover new information about goodness and then the celestial deities integrate it."

She laughs, "See this is why it's good to have local knowledge. I had ideas about elaborate series of experiments that were probably impractical but you just know things I don't think I would have thought to test for. Also, I didn't mean to imply that I thought holy water was objectively right about morality. Just that it was potentially worth knowing what definition it used."

“A complicated definition, but I’m not sure how much it’s embedded in the water. The water is useful for hurting creatures made of evil quintessence, and undead, and treating evil-quintessence diseases and whatnot. It doesn’t tend to react to regular people no matter how good or evil they are.”

"When is the definition applicable then?"

"It's applicable to the touch-based power I can get by turning into a celestial animal, called 'Smite Evil', and to ethics-related spells like 'Protection from Evil'. The latter of which definitely draws from my ethics somewhat, my version shields against psychopomps but other people's might not. Er. The touch-based power is called 'Smite Evil' because it's normally useful for combat but if you do it at a non-combat intensity it can be actively pleasant for, uh, people who like goodness. Which is a lot of them."

"If that works on our biologicals I'll have to swap so I can try it. I'm always looking to try new things."

"If you have to design your spells, er, magic-usage-arrays, yourself you might not have anything like 'Owl's Wisdom'? And if my magic is compatible with your people's minds it'd be interesting if you've never tried anything like it. It makes people better at … resisting attempts to interfere with their minds, noticing faint but important sensory stimuli, modeling other people's behavior, and some specific tasks related to those."

"Ooh, that sounds fun. We have the ability to improve memory, let people think faster and increase attentional capacity though all that works much better for constructs than biological people."

“Huh. If I were a wizard I could do something like that for people with positive energy souls with Fox’s Cunning.”

"Cool, is it hard to become a wizard?"

“If you go to an institution for teaching wizardry, and you learn there for years, and you are issued somewhat pricey task-specific tools, and you are above average intelligence, usually you can learn some. It might also require my world’s sort of soul.”

Griffie frowns. “However, I don’t have even the most introductory materials on learning wizardry.”

"So it's a taught skill, not an inherent ability or something that people can easily derive independently. Is most of your world's magic like that?"

“No, there’s a lot of inherent abilities around too. My sort of person can turn into a plant and back just by virtue of their construction.”

"What does that mean and how is that different from how you turned into a bird earlier?"

“It means that any person made by magically turning normal plants into an operable body and then putting a soul in can turn into a plant like they were made from. It’s extremely similar to how I turned into a bird, but it’s a few seconds faster, the plant form is immobile, and I can do it as much as I want. I mostly use it for sleep.”

"How does being a plant make your experience of the world different? Is it just being unable to move or do you have different senses? Also do you need dirt to root in when you're a plant?"

“To the extent that plants have useful senses I have those in this form too, turning into a normal plant is not an amazingly useful ability. I would need dirt for comfort but for a brief demonstration I’d be fine without it.”

"Would there be a safe way to test whether you can root in our dirt? Do you have seeds or small plants we could test with? Or magic that can check?"

"I wouldn't expect it to work except maybe for slightly increased stability, but I would expect any failure to be analogous to interacting with, say, tiny grains of dry metal instead of proper soil, and be harmless? I can touch some soil with my hand or something, if it doesn't hurt my hand or have other obvious problems, I expect any problems with using it as a stabilizer will be slow enough that I can notice and correct for them."

"We can definitely test that if you'd like. There's dirt outside. I'm not sure when you'll want to sleep."

"I've slept in this form too, it's just comfier the other way. And my friends prefer sleeping on mattresses with pillows and sheets and blankets but cope with a bedroll in the wilderness. It's not a big deal."

"So, mage-crafters can ask questions of reality, huh? How does that work?"

"It's a pretty broad ability. In effect, you have to write your question in a way magic understands into an array and activate it. You can ask a really wide variety of questions though some topics are easier to get understandable answers about than others. For example, it's really easy to ask how many people that magic can interface with are around. For that you'd define an area and then just use the symbols for people and number. If you wanted to know how many of them have red hair though you'd need to explain to the magic what you meant by that."

"How well does it handle magical attempts to conceal things?"

"That depends a lot on how something is trying to hide. The Heart's magic won't lie to itself but some other magics we've encountered can force it to return incorrect answers... it's usually pretty hard though and often with enough creativity you can work around it."

“Hmm, interesting. We should look at my soul at some point, then, there’s likely to be a well-concealed curse on it that’s also on everyone else from my world.”

"We can definitely try, though it might be hard without a point of comparison."

“Yeah, that’s our problem too. We had some people who would have worked as points of comparison, but Charon’s servants, namely some specialist thanadaemons, ambushed us and then and cursed them to match. And then lied about it. It was very frustrating.”

"That is frustrating. I hope we can figure it out."

With that the conversation starts winding down a bit. They discuss a little about clerical magic and then they square away arrangements for where Griffith will be sleeping and plan to keep talking tomorrow by which point a magecrafter will likely be available to help with experiments. Before they part for a time Emiko takes a quick scan of Immonhiel's holy book so she and others can peruse it.

Immonhiel's symbol, on the cover, is a toad covered in herbs. Her holy text covers horticulture of medicinal plants, medicine for non-spellcasters, ethics with a focus on medicine, and a history of her accomplishments, including most recently her destruction of the Gossamer King, Ghlaunder, a mosquito-like demigod of parasites and disease.

Immonhiel is said to wander, lending aid, often disguising herself as a mortal. She is also called the balm-bringer.

Ghlaunder was only killed a few months before the publication of this text, and Immonhiel and her followers are very proud of the accomplishment. Ghlaunder had invested his power in a mosquito-borne disease, strengthening the disease but also making it such that eradicating the disease would be a great blow against him. Immonhiel thus worked with her followers to distribute a wide variety of medicinal plants, distribute them, and only discreetly discuss their usage. After long decades of distribution, such that it would be difficult to destroy the supply, her followers finally switched to using the medicines to treat Ghlaunder's disease. Once they had it on the edge of extinction, they coordinated to eradicate it in sync with Immonhiel striking Ghlaunder, such that his moment of weakness would make it possible to destroy him.

From the text, a reader can conclude:

Clerics can channel positive energy to heal people and hurt undead. They can also magically diagnose diseases. More advanced clerics can address long-term harms of disease, magically cure diseases, and even raise the dead, though there are significant limitations on this.

People's souls usually go to afterlives of varying pleasantness when they die, and the Upper Planes is where the nice ones are. Actually, the book seems to vaguely imply that people don't die twice, unless they become a servant for a god and die in noble battle.

Griffie's world has a high infant mortality rate, but a lower maternal mortality rate than you might expect, because people can give birth in the presence of clerics, and healing blood loss and closing wounds is easier than curing diseases.

There are a wide range of intelligent species in Griffie's world.

And the next morning? Well when Griffie is done resting there's another woman accompanying Emiko.

"Hello Griffith, I hope your rest was restorative. This is Riley Clearsky she's a mage-crafter and in training to do exploration. She'll be helping us with researching your magic and the other parts of your world."

"Hi there, it sounds like there's a lot to find out. I'm also supposed to figure out if we can allow some of your magic without allowing all of it and exposing us to hostile deities."

"I read through that book carefully last night. Do you know why disease is harder for Clerics to treat than injury?"

"Greetings to you, Riley Clearsky! It'll be good to have some analysis-magic here, so thank you for coming by."

"Emiko, regarding healing magic: Undirected positive energy heals wounds, but to treat a disease, the positive energy requires a lot of complicated direction. So 'Cure Light Wounds' or channeling energy just requires transferring the positive energy, but 'Remove Disease' has to use a lot of magic on telling the positive energy what to do."

"I wonder what positive energy does to like cell cultures."

"Analysis is great. Probably my second favorite part of being a mage-crafter. The best part is being able to just do experiments without needing to get all the machines I'd usually need to have around."

"I actually came here with a blob of positive energy, even though I likely can't connect to the Positive Energy Plane, so I can do positive energy tests on samples of your biological materials. Today, if you'd like."

"If there's a limited supply the first thing to test is probably whether I can make more and how expensive it will be. Can you concentrate it somewhere so I can be sure that's what I'm looking at?"

"It's an extremely large limited supply. The easy method for me to show you a sample of it would be to poke you with the spell I know that distributes the tiniest amount of positive energy I am usually used to distributing. Though you don't have a positive-energy soul or any other kind of soul I can see either, so I don't know what it would do, so we should maybe poke a non-person first. Or I could give myself a tiny scratch and then heal it with positive energy."

"We should probably go to a lab space where we have controlled samples to work with. Do you get motion sick? I can probably fly us all there faster than any other method."

"I'm not prone to motion sickness. Anything you need me to do to be ready to fly me over?"

"I don't think so. Let me make sure I have a couple analysis arrays running first so I can stop if it looks like there's a problem." She shifts her fingers slightly on the staff she's holding. "Done. Initial test." Emiko Riley and Griffith float a couple centimeters above the ground. "Ok things seem to be working fine. Here we go."

Visually they begin moving quite quickly (a bit less than a half of the speed of sound) but they're insulated from the wind and the force is applied uniformly to their entire body so there's no inner ear sense of acceleration if Griffith has a structure like that. And maybe thirty seconds later they're landing outside a small looking building. "How was that?"

"Nice work! Very good wind insulation. How much of your energy does it use, and how much design work did it take?"

"That was using basically all my output at the peak on each end when I was getting us up to speed and slowing us back down. The design work was mostly a standard design. Basically it selects a volume of air in an aerodynamic shape around the targets and then accelerates that volume smoothly while inducing some specific repulsive effects in the nearby air to decrease resistance. It took me a few hours to wrap my head around all the details. If I was making it from scratch it would probably be a days work or so if I didn't have a base to work from. With standard components it probably wouldn't have taken much longer than it took me to understand it. Safeties are always the hard part and standard components have those prewritten."

"Huh. Yeah, in terms of capabilities you're really not much like my world's divine casters. And let me guess, if for some reason you wanted to seriously and directly injure someone with your magic, it would be straightforward, but if you wanted to treat someone's wounds, you'd have to do all the detail-handling yourself?"

"You have that exactly right. Part of the safeties are to ensure I don't unevenly apply force if I try to split my attention and power with another spell. Hurting people is easy. You're also right about healing. I'm actually one of the best healers among mage-crafters because I'm also an expert at biological engineering. We do have resonators that do it but those are the result of thousands of days worth of effort from a large team of people."

Griffie looks enthusiastic. "Bioengineering is great! Do you want to tell me about your projects now, or later?"

"I think my biggest solo project was an improved template for joint hyper flexibility." She demonstrates the free motion one of her shoulder joints, the ability to bend her wrist to put her hand flat against her arm at either extent and the ability to bend her elbow past straight. "Hyper-flexibility itself is easy enough but the designs before mine lost a lot of overall strength and durability. The real capstone was making it so that it would breed true for at least two generations. Most people just design modifications that can be applied after you grow up which is a lot easier."

"Huh. And this scales? How many days of the currency all residents get on a regular basis would it cost for one of them to get this?"

"What do you mean by scales? As for cost, it would probably be around seven days of energy and computing allowance, maybe twenty-one if you have normal expenses and a biological body so you need to save up. It's also within the standard body-mass allowance for most people so you wouldn't need to spend possession mass allowance on it. People working in fields where it would be useful might also be able to get it as part of an occupational allowance. And it shouldn't add more than an extra percent or two to a body switch."

"When I asked about scaling, I was wondering about how hard it would be to give it to lots of people, and things like that. It sounds like it can be distributed to lots of people without tremendous cost, though? That's important-but-difficult, so it's good that you managed it."

"Thank you. Scaling is hard but there's been a lot of work already done on that so the scaling itself isn't really my doing."

"Still, nice work."

"So, want to have a look at me casting some very simple spells?"

"Yes, though if it's stuff that needs to target something we should go inside because that's where the samples are." She opens the door and walks into the small lobby that makes up the above ground space of this building. "Do you prefer stairs or an elevator? We're going down a couple floors."

"How about the elevator? It probably isn't hydraulic, so it'll be interesting."

"It is not." She walks over to the elevator door and it slides open. There's a panel of buttons on one side and the one for sublevel 3 lights up without any apparent action by Riley. There's a total of five sublevels apparently. Once they're inside the elevator starts moving down much more smoothly than Griffith is accustomed to. It's also a longer ride overall for travelling just a couple stories.

"Yeah, this is pretty different from the elevators I usually use. Much smoother ride."

"It's a very old and tested design. We use a set of cables on a spool connected to the elevator by pulleys and we turn the spool to raise or lower the elevator. There are some other safety features but they only apply if something goes wrong."

"Oh, neat. I don't know how much the elevators I'm used to have safety features, but they're moved upwards by sudden bursts of water from below, and for downwards they use brakes."

"That sounds exciting, well going upwards anyway. I feel like using brakes would require semi-frequent maintenance because of wear."

"The brake systems might regrow themselves to compensate for wear, though I don't know if they do."

"The lab is this way." She leads the way to a small but well lit and ventilated room. There's a large bank of refrigerators with petri dishes along one wall and there are a number of racks of plants in plastic trays on racks under glow lights and a small aquarium with a number of shrimp and small fish along another. The other two walls have lab benches and there's another couple lab benches in the middle. A man is working on something with safety glasses at one of the benches along one wall. He looks up when they walk in but turns back to his work without saying hello.

"Oh, nice. All the lifeforms look lifeless to my spirit sense but they're still neat and they're clearly in practice alive."

"That's interesting. Do you have an idea about a good first test? Does positive energy persist in a subject after you cast a spell on it?"

"I think a good first test would be causing extremely minor injury to a plant and then poking it with the mildest positive-energy spell I have. And no, it doesn't."

"Sounds good." She walks over to the rack and retrieves a small lettuce plant and carries it back to a workbench. Her staff floats beside her when both of her hands are busy. "Alright, I have diagnostic spells running, do you want a scalpel for damaging the plant?"

"Sure. Or you can if you want. I can do 'Stabilize', the lowest-power undirected positive energy administration spell I have, at range, so we can do this without me touching the plant if that would get you cleaner data."

"That sounds like it would get very clean data." She pulls a scalpel out of the drawer and makes a cut on one of the leaves. "Whenever you're ready." She's recording both what the energy is doing and how it is shaped. Also where, if anywhere, it goes when the spell ends.

Griffie targets the cut lettuce with Stabilize. Nothing visible happens.

After a moment of looking, Griffie reports that the positive energy just unraveled and dissipated, instead of healing the lettuce.

"Well that's inconvenient. I wonder whether there's a way to make your magic work on things made of our sorts of matter."

"We could try higher doses and see if it gets flashier, or spells that direct the positive energy more? There's one which has it target pathogens and such, maybe at least the destructive portions of that would work? At least this does suggest I shouldn't accidentally cause something weird by leaking trace amounts of positive energy."

"And I have some lightning spells, could those be compatible? They don't use the elements or positive energy."

"If nothing else I'd be very interested in seeing how a lightning spell works without electrons. If you don't mind my asking what are the constraints on how many spells you can do? If it's particularly limited maybe we would be better off making a plan instead of just trying things as we think of them."

"Every day, which is 24 hours, which is … I don't have a clock, but I know some timekeeping songs to get an estimate for now, and we can calibrate it off my casting-capacity refreshes later. Anyway. Every day, I can prepare 4 orisons, 6 first-sphere spells, 5 second-sphere spells, 4 third-sphere spells, and 3 fourth-sphere spells. Orisons can also be called zeroth-sphere spells, but they're different because I don't expend them when I cast them."

"Good to know. Was Stabilize an Orison? And what sphere would the others you mentioned be?"

"It seems like an odd coincidence that both our civilizations divide the day into 24 hours."

"Stabilize, Create Water, Detect Magic, and Guidance are orisons. Life Bubble is sphere-4. Remove Disease is sphere-3, though if I were to do tests with it I'd want to use Diagnose Disease first, which is sphere-1. The lowest-sphere lightning spell I know is 'Aggressive Thundercloud', which is sphere-2, but that's not a fundamental limit, my druidic tradition just doesn't emphasize low-sphere lightning much and I haven't bothered to compensate. And I can do undirected positive energy at any sphere."

"As for 24 hours: Sometime around an hour is a nice length, and of all the numbers near 24, 24 is the one that can be divided the most different ways? I think?"

"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.

"Could you make an opening in the sphere?"

"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.

Griffie conjures water into the sphere.

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."

"Water can bear electrical charge. And sure, let's go to the alchemy lab."

"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.

"If you want I can add a program that will translate the labels for you."

"That sounds nice, but I'm not really sure how much of it will translate. Though transliterations are still good, I haven't learned your script yet."

"From reading your dictionary we have a lot of the same words though I'm not sure how good the matches will be. I'm actually pretty curious what'll happen with Riley's experiment. With our kind of matter pure water is made out of two substances. One of which is the part of air we need to breathe and the other is the lightest of our elements."

Riley in the meantime gets out a strange assortment of items including a couple plates of metal and a spool of wire. Then she pauses "I just realized this actually wouldn't work with pure water even for our kind of matter. If I was working with my kind of matter I'd need an acid or a salt. Do you happen to have either of those handy that you don't mind potentially losing and do you know which fields they'd need to exist?"

"Both of those would require the Earth field, with Acid also requiring the Water field to be in liquid form."

"I suppose I should just get all four. Do you have ways to test whether they're all working without losing anything important if I make a mistake?"