"Yeah. Electricity moves really fast, once you know how to tame it. Sending telegrams is expensive though, it's like... One pound," (a solid two days' wages) "for a thousand words. They need a lot of equipment and chemicals to do it."

"Awesome."

"And they're coming up with new stuff really fast too. Refrigerators! You can make cold, using special gases in pipes... No I don't know what the gases are but you need to pump them around to get it to work..."

How long will they spend trying to exhaust Gren's patchy-at-best knowledge of science?

As long as it takes for her to get bored of it because Kaede won't.

Maybe two hours, and then read the magic engineering textbook some more?

Works for her!

And with some new perspective of golems-as-magic-computer-thingies a lot of the stuff here is starting to make a little more sense. Neat! She almost wants to make a tiny golem just to see if it'd work.

Well the golem is, even with this new understanding, extremely complex. It is effectively an AI. A tiny one that just moves a bit could be made, though.

So she does. It's a toy that will roll around on command, relatively easy to make right?

Depends on what she means by 'roll around' and 'command' and how much of the detail work she's letting up to the magic. Mana cost varies along those lines, very quickly.

'Command' being 'four slightly different ways she can poke it magically'. 'Roll around' being 'spin the wheels on the mini carriage'.

Okay she can definitely do this. If she's particularly careful about the maths (specifying angular momentum and whatnot) it'll cost even less mana!

So cool!! She made a magical artifact!!!!

Yes she did. Watch it roll this way and that under her command.

"It actually worked, Kaede!"

"What di—oh! Cool! Congrats!"

"This is a big deal to me. Magical artifacts are supposed to be impossible. Wow."

"Well here they aren't. But they do have a finite lifetime."

"If I could make it so other Witches could power them... Or get them to take power from amulets... That sounds like a research project if it's possible at all though."

"You're borrowing my magic, though, aren't you? Or something?"

"Well, my magic copied your magic. It's... Really complicated, but if I stare at it for long enough, sometimes I can change what I copied. Make it do other stuff. I'm already doing some of that, to make a golem that rolls instead of - everything that one does."

"That might just have been you copying the magic, though, doing different things with it is fairly straightforward once you get the hang of how it works."

"It felt like I was doing different things the way I do different things, but I don't know. I'm not exactly precise about it."

"Hmm, wanna do it again while I watch?"

"Sure, but what should I make? Lantern?"