The place she finds herself in is glowing.

It's a room, not extremely large but enough to comfortably contain some twenty people, and the walls are covered in symbols and letters she can't recognise. All of them seem to have a glowing shadow to them, a blue-white echo floating a couple of centimetres above their surface. In the centre there is a stone table with stone tablets that contain more symbols like that etched on them. The floor has a large circle (also glowing) of drawings and carvings, and the corner where she landed has a pool as still and unperturbed as glass.

Across the room from her there is a double-door made of stone, closed, and standing next to the pool there is a tall mostly featureless stone statue, not glowing at all.

...Great. Why did she do that.

What is the overall character of the nearby magic? Is the pool's magic gone?

The pool is completely magicless. The rest of the room, though... is practically made of magic.

It's definitely artificial, this magic, or at least made by someone, directed. It's organised and ordered like that. It pulsates with magic that runs through it and is... spent. It's not permanent, there's definitely something fuelling it. And it's connected specifically to the door—there's a certain sense in which the only relevant magic here is in the door and in the tablets, and everything else is superfluous and decorative.

And it looks like whatever-it-is that's fuelling this magic is being actively recharged as she watches.

This isn't natural magic. It makes sense. She can pick apart the moving pieces almost like another Witch's magic. Though it's all very very... Bright. 

Wherever she is she can't be sure it's friendly. They didn't give her a gun, but she has a broom and a knife. She floats near the ceiling to watch the door.

Over the next few minutes, she can see the magic... move. Almost like someone's trying to feel their way around it and see what goes where. What goes where isn't actually obvious until it does, though; whoever's doing this is having some trouble figuring out how to do whatever-it-is.

And whatever-it-is turns out to be, somewhat predictably, opening the door.

She can hear a male voice whooping in glee through the expanding crack, and then a boy in what appears to be the Fantasy Middle Ages equivalent of hiking gear walks into the room, beaming.

Well, that confirms the 'other world' idea. Time to be polite.

She waves from her position near the roof. "Ho! Do you speak English? Or Ostkav?"

That startles him enough that he actually trips and falls. He asks something in a foreign language.

She gives a confused shrug and glides down.

She's decent at illusions. Figure on broom investigating pool in forest. Figure on broom shrugs at more people. Figure on broom touches pool - and makes alarmed motions when the forest disappears and makes a copy of the current room.

Blink.

Blink a lot.

Squint.

This magic cares about something about her. It's strangely obvious. Something like mana pulses with her breath, but it's not the local kind. It's making her fly, it did the illusion, it's making her stronger, it's doing something else, possibly sensory? It can definitely do at least one more thing he hasn't seen. Probably more than one. It feels sort of... Chaotic, like the central structure is surrounded by shifting aspects of other things.

She's looking at him quizzically. Studying him in turn.

He raises a hand in what he hopes she'll understand as a "wait" gesture, and starts saying something in his foreign language.

The magic inside him—shifts, a bit. It doesn't directly respond to his words, but it looks sort of like it's... straightening its back and raising its ears, waiting for something, almost expectant.

No really what is that, so clearly designed. That is a trigger. Where is the pattern it's waiting to trigger...

Hmm it might be somewhere deep inside the boy—

—and then it clicks—

—and then there's a whole new thing around the boy, as if he's gained an entire new sense, plus something a bit more active about this sense. This magic reaches for her, trying to get inside her mind—

"No, no, what's this for?"

It meets her own magic and has a tense standoff, the reaching tendril destroyed as it approaches. Counterspell is handy, but usually draining - quickly, she's seen a fair bit of mind magic, what does this one feel like...?

He's startled at first, then he laughs, points at his mouth and says something, before pointing at her again and at his left ear. In very deed, the magic feels like something... back-and-forth-y? It's rather hard to describe, even though it's obviously ordered what the order actually means is not clear at all.

Eh.

Sure, it's probably translation. Not like there's much else it could reasonably be, she lets it pass.

"So can we understand each other now?"

He shakes his head, and his voice sounds in her head: Hi! This is strictly voluntary, I can't read anything you don't want me to, and sorry for startling you. Can't understand what you say unless you send a telepathic translation simultaneously.

"It'll be a few minutes, copying this... Mind stuff is hard." She attempts to convey the sentiment with tone and gestures. Tapping on her wrist to indicate a watch?

Oh this is two-way, you can use it to respond directly, just think "at" me. It'll be obvious once you try it.

There I go trying too hard... 

Okay in my world - I do think this is a different one - weird magic just happens sometimes, separate from the kind people get. One of those sent me here. There is no obvious way back, the magic went dead.

It probably is another world, your magic is really different, but I'd never imagined there could be others...

You can see magic too?

Not 'see'. It's a synesthesia of all senses, sight is only usually dominant. Your magic is very different too. For one thing, boys never get magic where I'm from.

Right that's what I meant, I don't actually even get synaesthesia, just an entirely extra sense. And, er, why don't they?

It's just how witchcraft works. Very mysterious. I don't actually have an extra sense, just synesthesia. It's troublesome to figure out new magic but I can usually compare to things I've already seen.

Huh. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than my thing, I can't actually relate to much and get very little intuitive feedback, it's somewhat frustrating. Oh, also, here you should probably not tell anyone you can perceive magic, metamancy is punishable by death.

What.

Yeah, it's a religious thing, there are—care to listen to a whole spiel on how magic works here?

Since I'm apparently not going back home right now - I do need to know how things work around here, yes.

Okay so pretty much all magic—one exception, I'll get to that—is human-made. Some people, randomly, are born with one of the four kinds, with the overwhelming majority being one of the three that aren't metamancy. This magic is dormant until the potential mage tries to voluntarily use it, and since no one knows who has magic in advance and the way to do it is very idiosyncratic and ineffable everyone tries. About one out of two hundred people do in fact end up succeeding, but there are probably lots who are mages but just haven't found the right way to do it.

There's religion involved in all of this, and people believe each kind of mage is blessed—or cursed—by one god, with the three non-metamancer kinds being blessed by the good gods and the fourth by the evil god. Questions so far?

There's only one religion? Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam were all trying to get into that position in my world. Plus a bunch of less popular ones.

Yeah, the whole continent's a theocracy, no one can reach the northern hemisphere, western continent is mostly uninhabited, southern continent is ice.

For us, Christianity dominates the northern continent, Islam the southern and the central not-quite-a-continent, Hinduism the eastern continent, which is huge, and the far west two continents have a bunch of different ones. But this is a sidetrack.

Yeah. Anyway, so, four kinds of mage are metamancer, arcanist, enchanter, and elementalist. Metamancers can see and manipulate and destroy and borrow and steal magic, but we cannot produce any of our own. Understanding magic that we didn't shape is also incredibly difficult and takes a long time and lots of study and concentration. We can help the other mages be more effective and efficient, but we can also wreak havoc with their magic and there were some pretty nasty wars and every now and then an evil metamancer shows up—or at least a rumour does—that wants to take over everything, just to keep the fear alive in everyone's hearts.

...Honestly this situation, despite being pretty shitty for metamancers and wasteful of resources, sounds preferable to what my world has going on right now. No offense.

...really? What's up with your world?

The Neuroi war. Omnicidal monsters showed up out of nowhere and started burning cities, towns, farmsteads, expanding and replicating. They created a giant permanent storm. And continued to advance. The world got its act together to oppose them - badly at first - now they are barely contained by the combined might of half the Witches of the world and what seems like half the world's industry to supply us with weapons and food and other support. Current estimates say... One point five billion people have died directly or indirectly because of it in the last twelve years.

...giant permanent storm?

Yes. I don't know the details of how anyone studied it - but they're reasonably sure and have science to point at it that they are actively maintaining the storm and it didn't just happen when they showed up. It screws up farming for much of Europa and Orussia.

Okaaay that is kinda bizarre because we also have a giant permanent storm. It's why no one can go explore the northern hemisphere.

She squints. I need to try to pull farsight out of my memory... I know how to look for Neuroi in a storm. I really, really hope you don't have any.

We don't—I don't think so? We don't have any monsters, just humans.

I'm going to worry about it until I check. Neuroi are really damn scary. So I'll check.

Fair enough. Er, but the storm is rather far away, it'll take several days flying.

Far, farsight. It has a range measured in thousands of miles - mental impression of one mile, of a hundred - 

- oh. Yeah you can probably—just aim north, you'll eventually find it.

When she eventually digs out the right memory in enough detail, her magic does - something - and now a piece of the blurry chaotic foam is firm and still and active.

She looks north. And more north. And more north. Not great resolution on this, but a storm would be hard to miss.

It really, really would. It's enormous and everywhere, it literally encircles the globe—which is about the size of the Earth, and the continent they're on is only slightly smaller than Africa—and it's devoid of Neuroi.

The storm - it's not a giant hurricane? It's just... Everywhere except the local couple of continents?

It might not be everywhere because past a certain point her farsight just—refuses to go on. It's a huge storm, no hurricanes, just thunder and clouds and huge ocean waves and something that completely prevents her from being able to see any farther.

She probably looks weird at this point - and her mana is fizzing down steadily - she looks up, into space if necessary, how far up does the 'nope' region extend?

The 'nope' region covers the whole surface of the planet above a certain latitude (not the Equator, which passes through the continent), and blocks everything from several hundred miles into the earth up to the very top of the storm clouds above.

That is... Strange. No Neuroi on the edges... There's something completely impermeable to this version of farsight a couple hundred miles in. So I can't say for sure there aren't any but it seems likely to be something else? But, Jesus, that is one big storm.

Yeah we can't really see beyond it with our magic either. It's just a huge blind spot.

That's unsettling, but not as much as Neuroi... Right. Kinds of magic. Metamancer, arcanist, enchanter, and elementalist. Metamancers sense and edit magic, and are stereotyped as evil. Where are we relative to civilization, anyway?

Er, rather far, this is an ancient abandoned ruin no one's ever found before.

At least I can fly. You're a metamancer, correct? Didn't you say those don't generate their own mana?

Yeah but metamancers can drain it off other people or, since I'm not a horrible person, off magic scrolls and artefacts. Want me to explain the rest of magic?

Yes, but first I want to see if you can drain my mana, and the mana in this amulet. (Toss.)

He squints at the amulet.

It's magic! It likes that the amulet is shiny and golden, and this gemstone has a minor flaw but it's only leaking a little bit. Does he want this magic?

Yeah, he'll try getting a bit of it. He'll see if he can't just—"hold" it, before assimilating it.

The magic thinks he's weird and doesn't care about him. He can't hold it for long and it won't do the thing where Kaede's children could maybe have this kind of magic. Assimilating it might still work, but he definitely can't keep it in this form.

...that is a lot of information and he's not really getting all of it. Can he assimilate it?

...Mumble grumble fine, nobody else is using it right now.

Okay so he does that.

And he has a little of a new kind of mana. And then he doesn't anymore.

I absorbed the mana but it disappeared as soon as I did. I might be able to convert it into one of my kinds, though.

Interesting result. Maybe Witch magic doesn't like you because you're not a Witch? That's what it sounded like - whoosh, gone.

Yeah, possibly. Do you have any more for me to try to convert it?

Sure. She telekinetically grabs the amulet with a little tugging motion, touches it briefly, and now it has some more mana. Toss again.

And now he tries to convert it into arcanist mana—

It's physically effortful, like climbing a set of stairs- Or more like picking up a fork with just this much. But it doesn't flee him, he now has some Arcanist mana.

...huh. That's interesting, is using your kind of magic tiring? And for that matter is your kind of mana finite?

"Hm... Using a lot of mana at once damages the body. We generate more rapidly, at least until we get older. I would say a day's worth is about the maximum you can hold at once without gold."

Huh. Fascinating. The only thing we have like that works like that is the mana of individual elementalist blessings.

Seeing as I am a renewable resource, how do you feel about mana being your wage for being the local guide?

...I was gonna do that for free but sure why not I'm not going to refuse magic.

Any excess mana would just go to waste. There's a national program of mana sharing back home. I'm used to this sort of thing. The going rate is three ergs for one half penny neither of those units meaning anything to you.

They don't. Alright, that sounds like a good deal.

To be renegotiated later if either one of us feels slighted, of course. Talk about the other three kinds of magic now?

She pours more mana into the golden amulet. Way more. Way, way, way more than before.

Okay, so, one of them are elementalists. They can only do magic on themselves, and the kind of magic they do is called a 'blessing.' It's a single power—elementalists can only have one blessing active at a time—and very intuitive to use, the elementalist just has to define the power they want and they can switch to it. Each blessing has a finite mana cap; while it's being used the mana is consumed, and when it stops being used it starts recharging, but when the elementalist switches blessings the inactive one stops recharging until they switch back to it. Example blessings are flight, control over an element, or telekinesis.

She 'listens' intently.

The amulet is now 'full'. She hands it back off to him. It's quite a bit of mana.

He starts draining it as he continues to explain:

Arcanists can generate more or less arbitrary effects on more or less arbitrary targets, but they're all instantaneous or have a fixed duration. Arcanist mana starts charging when they're born and continues on forever. An arcanist creates a spell by defining the effect they're aiming for in their mind and then attaching it to actions or symbols. Then, whenever they perform those actions or emit those symbols, the spell is cast. They can also create magic scrolls that contain a single-use spell that anyone else can use. Mana cost changes depending on spell complexity and specificity and incantation length and theme.

I'm going to have sincere difficulty pretending to be one of those things.

You could pretend to be none of them. I do.

...I hope they come after me. There are teleporters in the UDF's employ. I would prefer to participate in civilization, but living without magic would be. Highly irritating.

Oh I didn't mean not use any magic, just pretend not to. And maybe you could pretend to be an enchanter? Those create magical artefacts which are persistently magical objects that do things.

Artifacts! Right, there are some all around us. Our magic cannot do artifacts. At least, not with any regular basis, someone's special might be to make them. What kinds of stuff can they do?

Lots! It's possible to make anything emit light and sound and project stuff, that's a general capability of enchanters, but other than that they can enhance the object's properties—making a sword sharper, a shield sturdier, a hammer more precise—and get new behaviours, like floating, and even store and process information. Artefacts also have a mana charge and once they run down an enchanter needs to recharge them in order to get them working.

We should probably try to learn each other's language.

"We should probably try to learn each other's language."

...Unless the mana cost of this is trivial. And I could possibly do that - can enchanters detect artifacts? I could make glowy patterns whenever I do magic, pretend to have a very flexible artifact or set of same.

"Unless the mana cost of this is trivial. And I could possibly do that - can enchanters detect artifacts? I could make glowy patterns whenever I do magic, pretend to have a very flexible artifact or set of same."

"You can send while you talk, that should work better. Anyway, no, only metamancers can detect artefacts—or any other magic at all—when it's not actually doing anything magical. If an artefact runs out of mana, for that matter, it's still an artefact, it just needs to be recharged, but it can't be turned into something else unless you have a metamancer around. And the mana cost of this is... as trivial as I can make it. Trivial enough, with you as an endless source."

"...The UDF is going to want to bribe you with all the mana. If I can ever go home. Healing things, better weapons, Neuroi-killer artifacts, communication things, so many things. It feels like I could charge stuff up, too... Got an empty I could try on?"

"An empty artefact? Well, anything in this room is potentially one, I had to charge it up in order to figure out how to open the door."

"Worth trying... Maybe in a while. I'm still sort of reeling."

"...yeah, do you need anything? I can't imagine how it must feel for you."

"I've been uprooted before. Never so much as this, but... Yeah."

"What do you want to do?"

"...Not starve in the wilderness or anything similar. Learn local magic, hopefully use it to solve problems without being religiously executed. Churches." She scoffs. "Always ruining things."

"I'm not too thrilled to find out this problem is not limited to my corner of the multiverse."

"Some of them are alright. The ones that aren't just get complained about more."

He nods. "Anyway, I should, er, finish exploring this place then take you to somewhere less ruin-y than this?"

"And I'll poke some of the magic around here and see if I can do stuff about artifacts."

"Tell me what you find!"

And he walks over to the stone tablets and stares at them.

So about this door... She brings out her notebook and maps her impressions of the thing. A real live artifact, gosh.

It's actually rather simple magic, relatively speaking. It opens and that's about it.

She can tell its function easily enough, but what she's really after is trying to figure out how to touch its magic. Trigger it. Refill it? How artifacts work, with regards to her own magic.

The trigger is apparently some other artefact but if she pokes this part it works, too. The artefact isn't so keen on being refilled with her mana, though.

She saw this guy do it... Twist and grab and push...

It closes, and startles the boy out of his reverie. "Did you do something?"

"I can activate artifacts. Might want to watch you convert my mana and charge one to see about that."

"I can do that."

She pulls out a notebook and pen.

"—I'll still need more mana in that amulet, though, I converted all of that into arcanist mana. Unless you want me to get it directly off you?"

"Hm, I do want to try that. For science. The amulet, I already gave you most of what I thought I could spare today - can you turn it back?"

He tries.

...Nope. And if he can feel for the 'why' on that 'nope', it's because he is too male.

He cannot feel that, no, not without looking harder. He does notice that—" It looks like there's something about me, in particular, it doesn't like?"

"I don't think I can tell what magic 'likes'. Mostly what it actually does and how it does it, less about the details of operation? But like I said, only girls have magic in my world."

"—oh right you did mention that. I wonder if that's it... I could switch and test."

"...Switch?"

"I'm genderfluid," he explains, "and I have a spell that I use to turn into a girl when I feel like one."

"...I heard of a criminal case, that reminded me. Someone turned a witch who wanted to be a boy into one with their spell, and the transformee lost their magic, the Catholic Church got involved and wanted both killed, and the UDF sued them and got them geased to not use it except with explicit government approval. It was a whole thing."

"...why'd the Church want them killed, and why was it a crime if it was consensual?"

"Rejecting the body God gave you is obviously immoral, you see. And the UDF was mad it lost a Witch."

"What exactly is this UDF?"

"United Defense Force. International military and evacuation organization, that took over quite a lot of stuff from National governments, and the only thing that has kept humanity from being wiped out by the Neuroi. They pay for fighting witches' training, salaries, equipment and support. Also fund science and evacuation and health or famine relief programs, and have their own code of laws now."

"And it includes prohibiting people from fixing their dysphoria?"

"If it makes them unfit for combat service in violation of the enlistment contract... Yes."

"That's barbaric."

"It's an edge case and they've written over new laws since then that improve the situation. The contracts themselves, with exit penalties, I do think are a good system."

"How're the new laws?"

"Essentially, added dysphoria to the medical excuse clause. Now you'd lose your wage and pension but not get tossed in jail or saddled with exit fees."

"...okay I suppose that's more reasonable."

"...Anyway trying to take mana directly from me and trying to turn it back as a girl, both things to test. And watching you make artifact mana to see if I can copy that."

"Right, okay. Should I try getting it from you now?"

"Sure. Just a bit, in case it does something weird."

He tries, then.

This magic belongs where it is screw you very much.

It moves a little bit and might respond to more tugging, though? More stubborn than anything.

He relays this to her.

"Then I suppose you can't take it directly from me. Interesting. I would have thought you could, since you can do the local kinds..."

"It feels like if I insist I might be able to."

"Are metamancers rare? If I meet a hostile one I want to know what they can do to me. I insist you insist." She snorts in amusement at her joke.

"Quite rare, and most of them pretend they're not."

He insists.

Tch. Fine he can have a little magic. A little bit of it. It clings to her like honey mixed with glue. She starts. "Feels... Cold."

"Should I stop?"

"Let me see if I..."

Now he cannot have any of this magic, even if he insists, no sir. "That stopped it. Mental state of that's mine I need it. Would be annoying to keep up all the time."

"Can you adopt the converse state? 'My magic is free to share and anyone can have it'?"

"I might be a little paranoid to be sincere about that but..." She tries.

Now it's only somewhat harder to grab than when it was in the amulet.

And he informs her of this. "Your magic's pretty interesting. Mental state has zero to do with mana with my magic."

"Mental state has a lot to do with Witch magic. I don't think I explained... Every witch gets four basic spells - flying on brooms, casting shields, physical boosts, and manalights - or manablasts, but that's just a matter of magnitude. And then one special, which is something like an Elementalist's thing. A suite of actions strongly themed around one thing. Mine is copying. They seem mostly random, but a few kinds are more common."

He nods. "Okay, time to turn into a girl." And he starts describing in lots of detail how his spell is going to turn him into a girl-bodied person. She can notice his mana reacting to this, again.

She takes the chance to observe arcanist-magic some more. Not trying to copy it, just trying to feel for the mechanics, like she did with artifacts. Probably won't get any useful detail yet...

There doesn't seem to be a lot of mechanism to it, or not a lot that's separate from just how his brain functions. There's the pool of mana there, and it's... swirling... or something, while he speaks the words, and when he's done—

—a chunk of the mana leaves the swirling pool to cause him to change.

The so-called "diplomacy training" kicks in. When in doubt about the proper reaction, have no reaction. She has no reaction. Deliberately.

He furrows his brows. "Something wrong?"

"Nothing at all," She almost sing-songs.

"Uh huh," he says, raising an eyebrow, but lets it go.

Now if he tries converting some of his own mana into witch mana?

"If you really want to know, my brain did a bunny hop because... I expected to stop thinking you're a little cute when you changed and didn't."

Fiiine she can make some Witch mana. It still leaks pretty fast out of her, but not instantly.

"—I'm flattered?" he says. "You're, erm, a bit too young for me."

"And I'm a bit too on-a-service-contract for anyone. You looked like you wanted to know what I was thinking."

"Right. Anyway—it seems to be okay with me converting but it still leaks away?"

"...Huh. Well you still have enough to turn it back to enchanter power with me watching carefully."

So he does that!

Grab the thing that just happened. Does it work?

Nope. It's like trying to grab the action of mentally turning a pink elephant into a blue elephant: depends a lot on Kaede's particular thoughts and isn't all that grabbable anyway.

"Well, that didn't help. Maybe if I watch you do enough artifact-making it'll eventually click. No rush though."

He nods. "Anyway, I should turn back—" And he starts doing the reverse spell.

She goes back to peering at the door and whatever the other things here are. She was always good at seeing what things will do unless it's completely foreign to her...

The walls and tablets seem to have some... communicative purpose... somehow...

What, like a telegraph? She keeps paying attention.

Poke, poke, poke. Sketch spell structure in her notebook. As much as she can even make it out since this magic doesn't structure things like Witches do.

No, not communication with outside. More like there's information there and it can be communicated to whoever's inside, somehow.

So it's a magic book.

How does she read it, is the question.

Good question! This magic has several moving parts, it's not obvious at all.

Right, but she has practice figuring out unfamiliar magic. The natural magics, she's done a dozen of those. And only really deciphered them by actually triggering them, but still.

If she sort of - bends her mana - she can get it to almost feel like Kaede's when he was charging the door. Will the door accept further charge? The magic book? (It's not full or anything, is it?)

They're neither of them full, and will accept further charge, yes.

Progress! "So I can charge things too, if I twist. I can pretend to be a very unimaginative enchanter with just that, probably."

"If you stick around me I can probably make you artefacts if you ever need to pass for it, but asking people to demonstrate magic is actually rather rude and taboo so it probably won't come up."

"A relatively easy way to make a living, I mean."

"Ah, yeah. Just recharging artefacts, you could work at one of the floating cities, they need enchanters to recharge the city so it doesn't fall out of the sky."

"Would they get suspicious at how I seem to have too much mana? I think you said they build from birth, so maybe not unless I spend years there."

"Yeah, and people don't really agree on whether everyone recharges at the same rate or spends the same amount or has the same amount and stuff, you're safe."

"But I do seem to have rather a lot, especially for 'daily refresh'? It does slow down a lot as we get older, I think I mentioned."

"Yeah. And since you produce extra that you discard if you don't use, I can usefully store all of it and probably convert and give it back to you if need be, I don't meaningfully have a limit."

"Handy, that. Even the crown jewels only hold so much mana, and it decays on a scale of years. I know my amulet holds about twenty ergs, if we want to track the mana I pass to you. Which seems like a bit of a pain to keep track of, but might be wise."

"Problem is my conversion's lossy. I guess we could figure out how lossy it is, with your mana."

"Sounds like an experiment to do."

"Feel free to fill 'er up, then."

"...Filling it to capacity will put me into mana burn unless I wait about half an hour."

"Mana burn?"

"If Witches use too much power at once it causes aches, then flashes of pain, twitching, and physical burns and scarring if you push harder and harder anyway."

"—wow that's incredibly unfriendly. And. Physical."

"It's about... A hundred ergs in three hours before aches, and another thirty before twitching and another thirty before burns. You see Witches coming home with burns after hard fights sometimes. I'm sitting at seventy, eighty or so. What's wrong with it being physical? Our magic's already tied to physical things, somehow, probably. There's no, like, overall theory of magic."

"Why not?"

"Not enough science pointed at it for long enough yet?"

"And again, why not?"

"Well, we didn't have much in the way of organized global society until the Neuroi invaded. Before that... People were busy not dying of cholera or starvation or succession war. And the Churches again. They don't like science, generally, since it tends to prove them wrong."

"But weren't there decentralised institutions of research?"

"...No? I'm not sure what that even means."

"Is literally all your research done by the government?"

"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?"

"Yeah, let's."

So she does that. Try enough stuff and eventually it'll work, right?

...maybe? It seems to be taking rather a long time for anything to make sense, there.

She already figured out it's a book. There's only so many ways she could possibly poke it to 'read' it. She keeps trying.

Eventually, after over an hour, she does crack it.

"Ooh!"

Has Kaede managed it? What does the one she randomly selected 'say'?

Kaede seems to not have noticed her success, and continues staring at the tablets while the one she's looking at starts emitting more light and showing an incorporeal representation of its contents: a user manual of sorts.

...She can't read it.

Great.

She gives a great big yawn instead. It's probably like four am to her internal clock...

She she sets gear and head down in a corner and naps.

After a couple of hours what can best be described as a light show starts happening inside the room.

She jerks awake and reaches for her knife by reflex-

Where's Kaede?

Amidst the light show, looking enchanted. There are symbols and words everywhere, and directly in front of him a semi-transparent representation of—something, diagrams and maths—floats, made of floating light.

She floats over. "Turns out I can't read your language."

"—oh, of course. Er, that one my magic can't really fix."

"You got an alphabet, or is it more like Ujijo, with the thousands of different characters?"

"Yeah we have an alphabet."

"Would you terribly mind telepathing at me while reading things?"

"Telepathing the alphabet at you? I can do that. Could also telepath you what I was reading directly, though."

"Either, both, then I take notes. I learned to read through rote memorization once," an image leaks through of dozens, maybe hundreds, of eleven year old girls lined up in a big schoolhouse, all silent. "...Oops. I can just do that again anyway."

"Might be easier if I just bounce the meanings of the words as well as the letters themselves. I can restart reading from the top."

"I was thinking about generalizing the reading skill but yes please do so."

"Right, I mean that this would probably help you learn how to read faster."

He does something—magically, not with his body—and the lights shift and rewind, in a way. The various diagrams floating about disappear and there is now only text, in front of him. He starts rereading, and it seems to be an introduction to a cross between an engineering textbook, a user manual, and an arcane book of spells. It starts going about defining what a golem is (magical automaton), known range of complexity (from not doing anything in particular to fully automating certain construction tasks), and mentioning by name a couple of construction techniques (which are mostly named after people).

This is really confusing! She is very much not an engineer and it feels a lot like engineering. But she is good at copying magic and this has everything to do with magic.

She feels conflicted as she follows along and tries to absorb the information.

It soon delves into technicalities about mana conservation and previous attempts and task definitions.

????????

...She takes paper notes in English about it, anyway.

It proceeds to get even more technical than that. On the bright side, this process does help a lot with learning to read the language.

Her notes devolve into confused scribbles.

After a while he yawns and says, "I think I'm going to eat and sleep, this is going to still take a while. Do you want some food?"

"My sleep schedule is off from yours, but I can try to rest again. And, I understood little of that whole... Book. And, yes to food."

So he rummages inside his backpack and reveals food!

Yay, food! "How much did you have packed for one? Will I need to go hunting?"

"I have a couple of weeks' worth of food here, so unless you eat a lot more or a lot less than me we still have a week." The telepathy effect runs out three words into the sentence, though.

Her side of it doesn't! "Need more mana?"

"Hmm? Well I wouldn't refuse it but I didn't run out, the spell just ended. How're you keeping it up?"

"I sorta - melded with the spell, and was keeping up a mirror image of it, and it suddenly started using more than the tiniest trickle of mana just now so - I guess that makes sense."

"Should I cast it again?"

"Skip it for now. Since you're about to sleep. Mine's more flexible on ending times."

"Okay."

Food food food and eventually he'll sleep.

She attempts to understand her notes for a while, then gets bored and explores out the door that brought Kaede in.

It's a rock tunnel with a slight upwards slope. If she goes far enough she'll find a bifurcation.

She is fast when flying.

She checks for side tunnels along the way and marks the tunnel she came from with a distinctive pock mark blasted into the wall. Then goes left.

She might soon find out this is actually a whole cave system.

Well, she makes a map. And heads back down to the core chamber unerringly after an hour or so and tries to nap.

If the only relevant need is silence and stillness she will succeed at napping in no time.

Yeah, close enough.

Kaede will naturally wake up before she does.

Actually she wakes up when he starts moving and is putting her boots and uniform coat back on before quite realizing that she hasn't been woken in the middle of the night with new orders from some Lieutenant.

"Sleep well?"

"...Well enough."

"I could cast a darkness spell if you still need a while."

"No, I'll be alright. I should adjust to the local sun cycle. But - I went over my notes and had some questions - how well are you understanding this stuff?"

"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?"

"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?"

"Sure. What are you going to turn into a lantern?"

Hmm...

How about this chunk of rock that was part of a wall a moment ago?

That can turn into a lantern! It is rather easy to make artefacts that emit light.

Can she give it a touch-based control that cycles it through superbright-dim-off if any human touches it?

Absolutely.

So she does. "Did that look any different than other enchanter doing it?"

"Yyyeeah it did. It was like... your magic was trying to imitate the effect of using mine instead of actually using it to achieve it?"

"That makes sense. It doesn't work exactly like whoever I copy from, usually."

"That's weird, though. If your magic can go as far as copying the effect... I wonder if I could give you mana..."

"Worth trying!"

She tries!

Haha no.

"Apparently not," she sighs. "Maybe you could try to see and copy whatever mana-generating mechanism there is inside mages...?"

"I mean, all I'm detecting from you directly is the capacity to do effects. That doesn't feel like a thing to copy. Worth a try when I meet some maybe."

"I in particular can't generate mana so I'm probably not the best target to copy."

"Yeah, that. Which is why I'm starting to wonder how long you plan on staying here."

"I was planning on staying until I thought my rations were getting too close to gone or I finished reading this, whichever came first. This is an actual, honest-to-gods multipurpose golem!"

"It sounds really cool, yeah... But I didn't sign up for two weeks in a cave. Can you draw me a map? I might leave when I have enough language."

"Sure... but hmm, maybe I could just. Bring this with me."

"That would be a sight. I can hang around for a few days while you try for sure. It was weeks or months out here I was dreading."

"No, not that long, we don't even have enough food for that long anyway."

"I mean, I could go hunt something. I do have my bow. But yeah."

"Won't find game too close to the entrance, either, we're basically in the middle of nowhere, I flew here. Anyway, don't worry, I'll be done soon enough."

"I'm pretty good at finding game though. But I hear you."

Back to magicking, then!

Yeah! She makes continuous incremental advancements in How To Golem.

Seems to be more tricky to do even basic things than it is for Kaede, though. And not just as a practice effect.

"I kinda wanna stop reading this and turn it on already."

"Not like it's going to go on a rampage if you only tell it to do things that you know you understand right?"

"It might do things without me telling it to."

"Think it's particularly tough? Like, much tougher than stone itself is?"

"It definitely is, turning things magical makes them way more resistant than usual and people often add redundancies over that. This golem certainly has them."

"So there's no guarantee I will be able to blow it up if it attacks us."

"There is not," she agrees. "How would you blow it up, out of curiosity?"

"Massively overpowered version of the trivial light thing all Witches can do blows things up quite nicely. I'd demonstrate, but it'd probably blind and deafen both of us in such a confined space."

"Hmm... I could probably shield us, but I'm not actually in a hurry to see it."