"Also no. But 'scientist' was not a viable career choice until a decade ago. It was all people who could afford to do experiments or charm someone who could and was curious and smart enough to make progress. And manage to avoid the church's backlashes."

"It's really weird that this church of yours is so... anti-science."

"Not so much anti science as anti questioning the church, such a shame that they have so many stupidly wrong ideas about how the world is as points of religious canon."

"That is also weird. Although I suppose our creation stories count."

"I'm more interested in what we stand to gain. Not that I really understand science, but our science or your science might be better in some places..."

"Gain? And better in what way?"

"Have you heard of - Antibiotics, telegraph, steam engines, assembly line, calculating machines?"

"No."

"All of them very useful things that my world's scientists invented relatively recently. I don't know a huge amount about them... But possibly enough to figure it out, or get someone smart to figure it out."

"Oh, that's, like, technology?"

"Yes! Technology in general."

"We might have more of that in the way of magitech."

"Any of my world's technology won't rely on mana at all. You can make however many steam-trains as you have the steel and craftsmen for."

"Yeah, probably strictly more useful. Although perhaps not as versatile?"

"Most likely not. But in my world, the new age is the age of mass production. Almost every single person can have a - a - lots of good clothes, because they make them by the hundreds in weaving mills. Plenty of baskets and pots, because they make them by the thousand in factories. More and more people have heated houses. Stuff like that."

"Oooh that sounds very useful."

"Yeah. But I'm not an engineer... So we'd have to find an inventor and try to get as much useful information out of my shoddy human memory as possible, I guess."

"Yeah, probably."

"...These ruins seem like a library or something, don't they?"

"Yeah, of sorts. I'm trying to figure out how to make them show me stuff. And I'm purposefully ignoring the statue-that-is-probably-a-golem over there because otherwise I'm going to spend the next five hours squealing about it."

"It's very, very quiet. Do artifacts fade? Lose their, um, structure, not just their power?"

"Not unless a meta tampers with them. Otherwise they just need a mana refill."

"Kind of strange how... Hard to see that one is, then. I would have expected I would be able to tell its structure clearly even if there's no charge."

"I'm not sure how your thing interacts. It is harder to see what an artefact does when it's not actively doing things, though, it's sorta dormant."

"I suppose. Let's go back to 'each poke the magic books in our own way', then?"