"Extremely, but I'm in my element. What's up?"

"I'm not getting much of it, is all. Maybe - just the dissonance between how metamancy does stuff and how I usually do it? It's different in lots of little ways."

"Might be the dissonance between how magic in general does things here, the more advanced types are very, hmm, involved."

"Yeah, that 'book' is talking like someone from London University. I don't know any science and barely any maths."

"It's mostly, sort of, figuring out which instructions a golem needs in order to actually work?"

"Hm, kind of like procedures? Things that you get ordered to do and must do in exact order, just so? 'About face' and 'parade rest' have one clear, exact motion to them."

"Yeah, but you have to define what a 'parade rest' even is, here—where each part must move, what circumstances would allow it to change that, exceptions, commands, contingencies..."

"...It sounds kind of like the calculating machines the boffins were going on about last time I was doing magic for them."

"Not knowing what calculating machines are, I cannot comment on the likeness."

"It was, like, you tell it every piece of what some complicated task does, and it does math and math and more math and has - conditionals - and then you can put instructions in and let it math and it does something useful like calculating if a bridge will collapse. Except the calculator machine only did information, not actual physical tasks, but it sounded sort of the same?"

"...some things can do that, yeah, er, were these machines of yours not able to move anything physically?"

"No. Or not really, maybe you could use them to control some other machine? I think that's a thing. But no magic at all in them, only gears and stuff."

"No magic? How do they do it, then?"

Shrug. "Math?"

"...do you just maths at your world and it obeys you?"

She giggles a little bit. "No, but science comes up with that kind of crazy, unbelievable stuff all the time. If I didn't have magic I probably would be learning engineering, but instead I learned to fight Neuroi."

"Wait but now I'm curious, how does science do that?"

"I don't understand calculators! Or much of physics. I think it's all these rotating gears, where you set notches on them so they only go five clicks before spinning this other one, which depending on where its notch is set might spin a third one or not, I don't know. They're trying to do it with electricity instead, which, wow, electricity is crazy stuff, but it's gears and the like for now."

"What's electricity?"

"Um..."

This is telepathy, right? Here's some lightning, and here's little lightnings racing through telegraph wires carrying messages, and little lightnings in a glass bottle making light. "Yeah, basically tame lightning?"

"How do they do that I want that."

"You really should have gotten a scientist instead of me, then. I'll try to remember as much as possible, but..."

"It's okay," she sighs, shaking her head. "If our physics is the same we will probably be able to figure it out eventually."

"Yeah. As long as we're talking about it... Voltaic piles make small amounts of electricity. Copper and zinc plates stacked on top of each other and soaked in lemon juice, I think. It doesn't have to be lemon juice but that's the one I remember. It goes through wires, and it will make muscles twitch, even after something's dead, if you put the wires on it. Telegraphs send electricity through hundreds of miles of wires and it gets caught at the other end and makes sound, for fast messaging. Ummmm..."

"Fast messaging, really? Using lightning?"