"Precise fire – uh, maybe? I could probably do some heat but – I'm not sure if it's actually good for chemistry, I've not done a ton of that, could be it's making a flame on the inside or something." She considers. "I don't actually know on the toughness thing – Akien might have something?"

"Hm. A flame inside something doesn't make much sense, physically. But a magic oven could do manage much the same effect. Make plants grow? Anti-disease or other healing?"

"The former is more rituals and cornerstones to your fields, healing and diseases are doable. Can also do speed boosts – brief or minor, for the most part, you might have seen Akien earlier…?"

"Yeah. Rituals and cornerstones could work well. Speed could be useful. Communication?"

"Hmm." She bites her lip. "There are some sorts of – old, lost art things – that produce moving nonliving creatures? So we have a few fake-bird things flying around transporting messages, at home – and Akien takes an interest in making old, lost art things… less lost."

"That could work well. And, admirable quest. Compass? Night vision? Sensing animals one could hunt? Other navigation?"

"Kinda, ish, I have no idea, and – I'm not coming up with anything for 'other' but I don't do a ton of navigation… Uh, compass is more 'point me towards a specific place', kinda acts weirdly, and the night vision I'm not sure about the details of."

"...Point me to a specific place could be very good. How does it act odd?"

"Kinda limited number of settings for where you can point to, adjusting this can be hard – I think this is one of the commonly backfiring ones – and also usually comes in the flavor of 'weird sense of where the place is, for a couple of seconds, disorienting'."

"Can you make things that are easy to point to? If towns could reliably find each other, for certain values of permanent, anyway. It could be a big shift. How do I explain... Everything moves around relative to everything else here. If you leave your home, you will in all likelihood never see it again. No permanent trade routes, no pen pals, no exchange of knowledge, stranded orphans whose parents are still alive."

"… Reaching the end of my understanding of this, I'm afraid – I don't think it'd be easily doable, at least, I think most of the current thing is, uh, pointing to absolute locations?"

"If 'absolute location' can be defined on something that moves sometimes it could still work. Even large cities migrate."

"I mean, the examples I know are on a clocktower in a large town, deep in a basement in a university, and one that's buried but nearby another large town. And I've never heard of a moving one."

"It might be worth the experiment. There's a lot of possibility there."

"Seems like priority is getting rich and somehow getting a fireproof area in which to experiment a ton as safely and quickly as possible."

"Well, magic lanterns and gold and iron are the most immediately exploitable. Silver might actually be better than gold, depending on how hard it is to make? Silver is very precious - telescopes that aren't utter cr- garbage require it."

"I… think Akien said he didn't have practice with silver, but he might be able to swing around to it without much difficulty, depending. Should I go ask him? And also remind him about the lights, actually."

"If you don't mind, sure."

She goes to do so! And is back shortly!

"He had forgotten about the light but promises he would've remembered after doing this batch of iron, says silver is probably quite a bit harder than gold since he doesn't have a great feel for how it responds to Chi passing through it and its environment and doesn't have any on him to examine it, and also he thinks we might be stuffed on the locational tracking thing seeing as how we're on a different world."

He produces a very shiny small coin, embossed with an image of an eye. "This here is sterling silver, low alloy. About 94% pure, with some corrosion-resistant components."

"Then he might well be able to create more of this! … Silver was very expensive, though, so no tests that could be destructive, et cetera?"

"Eh, it's ten grams. Slight sentimental value, but only so much. If he destroys it he'll owe me about half that first chunk of gold, sound fair?"

"… I guess? Be back in a minute."

Flying the ship and doing miscellaneous ship-chores does keep him rather busy doesn't it?

It does! She's back in almost no time, really.

"He says he'll try not to break anything, that he honestly doesn't expect he'll break anything, and that he's not sure how well the thing will fare with non-pure metals but he'll try his best and really expects at most it'll fizzle, not do anything dangerous."