"Hydrogen, or wood, or other plant matter. Burnable stuff. Dangerous. Not that solar heat can't be dangerous, it could also ignite, but it's an experiment."

"Huh." Pause. "Maybe it's just because I'm used to sorcery, where I try to poke around at – well, basically everything, but not recklessly."

"Oh, don't be sorry. The world could use more engineers. I'm just very much not a teacher."

"It is weird you don't have Chi, though. I mean, it makes sense what with you having no sorcery, but still."

"What are the properties of Chi?"

"… Sort of hard to describe? It's not usually visible, it's produced by humans, it can be channeled in particular ways to produce particular results especially aided by rituals and foci and so on, usually present in low quantities around the world, congregates around living matter… Can be dangerous if you don't control it appropriately?"

"Fuel for the sorcery, then? Is it consumed during magic?"

There aren't that many carrots. They're done harvesting, and move on to watering.

Watering!

"… Yes? Ish? It sort of – becomes the magic, shapes itself to produce the right result, requires constant maintenance to continue? Like if I made a fireball, it'd be shaped around where the flame appears, flicker around the edges."

"I kind of feel like doing experiments but you know more about it than me and also I can't observe or manipulate it directly. That never stopped particle physicists, but..."

Shrug. "I can at least do demonstrations, and it's not really done in any systematic manner – most of it is finding rituals in old books or from other towns, checking they don't seem utterly ridiculous, trying them under careful conditions and then trying to modify from there. Akien does most of it."

"That feels very unscientific. I'm talking about finding the origins, the primitives - If making a lightbulb was a ritual, figuring out electrons. It'd be pretty difficult, obviously."

"Dangerous, more like. I'm pretty sure that if electrons are, say, letters on a page, what we have are books written in various colors and thicknesses of ink that all have particular meanings, and we have a couple of guesses at what the colors do in certain contexts from people who have survived messing around with them before."

"Would good safety gear protect you? Fireproof rubber suit, your own air supply, that kind of thing? Or is it magical damage that ignores everything."

"Good safety gear helps, for sure – it often backfires with flames for small things, explosions for anything bigger, and you can have large craters or dramatic changes in temperature if you touch the wrong thing, suddenly everything decomposes in an area, etc. Mainly flames."

"The decomposing thing sounds nasty."

"Yeah," she agrees. "It's only happened twice, as far as I know – two people messing with the same ritual, and fortunately the second time they weren't in the radius as the effect happened."

"...How far away can you work on it? How big was the radius?"

"In this case? A few meters, but it was slightly delayed before the effect actually occurred, so – well, so I hear at least, Akien was the one there – when Akien noticed what the person was doing he grabbed them out of the circle before it happened."

"Eesh. I wonder if anything could shield against that - are there things that provide immunity to sorcery? Any materials impermeable to chi?"

"Nothing seems to be impermeable, and there aren't any modern wards against it, but the walls around a lot of the towns will block it. It also has trouble going through solid surfaces, if people are directing it, but – it's not globally true, the decomposition thing was absolute."

"If you want to add a third perspective to your experimenting I can look at the data once you're done with your experiments."

"Yeah? Most people aren't too interested in it or don't have enough of an idea what we're doing to… even really want to help."

"Resources are resources. If it's a good avenue of exploration, why not?"

"I'm glad," she smiles.

"Just like I ignored everyone who told me it was insane to try and make a ship's frame entirely with live floatstone - this is a living ship, technically. It was hard, but it needed trying because it could have been revolutionary. As it is, I think it's too much effort for the benefit incurred for most."