"It has wandered off, so if there's room that's great. If not we can find another, maybe a bigger one."

"There's probably room, no harm in checking." Up to the library. Stairs stairs stairs.

Annisa has left her hard-won copper and tin and screwdriver and wood in her room, but filled her backpack right back up with textbooks so it's barely lighter. Oh well, you get mana out of it.

Bella leads the way to the reading room. The Atlanta/New Orleans room is not bursting; there aren't enough chairs for everyone, but she and one Group member can each have one and the others can sit nearby at the weirdly low table that was possibly built expressly for floor-sitting.

It'll do. "Naima, you speak ancient Egyptian, right?"

"Technically ancient Egyptian is like five different languages, because of the time span involved? But yeah, I know the one starting around four thousand years ago."

"Do you want to translate us the original, then, maybe we can get some extra credit for that.  - I'm hoping to skip the final," she adds to Bella so Bella does not think she is a crazy person who just wants good grades.

"Sure." She is absolutely not intending to skip any finals because she has no idea how much slack she has here, but this is also a reason to get some extra credit where she can, if that's how it works.

Annisa takes notes. Writes down things done by magic or maybe done by magic, writes down ways you might do them with artifice.

"Convenient," Bella remarks, regarding Naima's speaking of Ancient Egyptian. She has class notes and reviews those for things germane to the assignment.

She feels like it's less convenient and more a deliberate choice to learn the language with one of the longest-running literary traditions in existence, which is going to sometimes come up on homework because it has one of the longest-running literary traditions in existence, but also she probably thought of it more easily and was able to learn it more easily because she was herself Egyptian, which is convenient, sort of, apart from all of the ways in which it is inconvenient, like the fact that it's going to get all of her siblings killed.

She has just enough tact to avoid saying any of this. She nods, instead.

With this information Bella has some questions about what the original text is like on this and that and the other points.

"Have we got anything for 'vines grew up choking the wheels of the chariots' - it seems like obviously an incantation, honestly, but it's a big blank spot for nearly an entire page if we can't come up with anything there. I guess you could....have thrown rope that turned into vines when it hit enemy artifice? Or tripwires that did the same?"

"The chariots could be artifice, that just didn't have a very good anti-vine-incantation precaution built in?"

"I think precautions against vines would be hard to build in, actually, because it's not like the vines are interacting directly with the artifice, just with the space where it isn't - if I were designing a war chariot I'd maybe try having the wheels solid rather than spoked, to prevent that - I guess that's worth writing down, actually, that the vines are suggestive the chariots had the usual artifact weakness of difficulty defending their negative space, which is evidence they're artifice. Good one."

"If I were trying to design anti-vine chariots I might just make them mundanely sharp in the wheels and count on the initial momentum to carry them through anything in the way."

"I think chariot wheels were often scythed but not like that, they'd just literally have a knife sticking out of the axel. Which I guess is also artifice and can go on the list. In pictures it looks kind of stupid but presumably if flying at you it'd look less so." She flips through the textbook to find a picture. "Here, see - this is not the time period we're presently working in at all, but it's a scythed chariot and the scythes just look rather ridiculous -"

"It's like a Viking helmet or something. What time period is that -"

"So it's a sculpture of 'Boadicea and Her Daughters', which is apparently 60AD in Rome-occupied Britain, but the sculpture was itself made in the 1890s, and I don't know that the sculptor was relying on very good historical sources, so I haven't the faintest idea if this is even what we now think chariots in 60AD looked like. Does it say, Naima, anything about the design of the chariots?"

"I'll check," she says, and flips to the part about the chariots.

"The chariots did cross the river at one point, and there's no mention of barges... The scribe might've just left out the barges because they'd be the obvious way, but maybe the chariots could roll on water. Which is again suggestive of artifice."

"It'd simplify your logistics immensely. Okay, chariot related artifice: general strengthening, weapons, wards for the seats, something for locomotion without animals, something to soothe the animals and keep them under control if they were in fact drawn by animals - oh, that's a separate category, artifice for the animals. You can enchant reins and collars and saddles and so on."

"Horseshoes, barding."

She writes that down. "I don't know much about horses, what's barding?" It's not a very embarrassing weakness to confess because there are no horses here.

"Horse armor. I don't know if they had it yet then, magical or otherwise. Person-armor too, maybe. Weapons. This is really a lot of possible artifice, they probably had very little, but to cast a broad net. If I were a soldier I'd want - stuff for camping en route, like something for water, something to protect from the elements..."

"Magic picks and shovels? This part talks about some of the Hittites being stopped by a trench around the Egyptian camp, and if they just dug it when they set camp for the night that's pretty quick, right?"

"I don't know that it's especially quick, conventional armies have to dig latrines."

"I think you just have everyone dig a bit and you get a trench. Though maybe many of the armies I've heard about were secretly using magic, now that I think about it. And the Egyptians had had, like, continuity of rule for a long time, right, so maybe they'd been gradually accumulating magic stuff, if they took acceptably good care of it - I think weapons just like doing lots of fighting, and it sounds like they were sure doing that - I feel like we can definitely at least hypothesize weapons, and armor, and horse-armor, and stuff for making camp -" She adds it all to the list.

"I think Malak's right about the Hittite chariots. There's not a lot about their construction or anything, but in the initial charge they attack from across the river, and then during the Egyptian counterattack they don't all have their chariots and a bunch of them drown trying to swim it, so it must have been quite deep. It also says that the Egyptian chariots are lighter and faster, easily overtaking the Hittite ones - could be that the two sides have their chariots enchanted differently, the Hittites primarily for handling difficult terrain and the Egyptians for moving as quickly as possible."

"- also that's some evidence the soldiers were armored, if they drowned in the river."

"Yeah, some? Does anybody have any idea how common it was for people to know how to swim back then? - I guess it probably depended."

"They might just not have known how to swim but armor probably wouldn't help."

"I guess armor is probably useful anyway. - I think we should also think about what artifice Rameses II may have had on his person, this account has him claiming that he was totally alone when the Hittites ambushed and that he found himself in a fight for his life, but he then managed to gather his personal guard and some of the routed Egyptian soldiers, and attacked the enemy as they had stopped to loot the camp. It says he called on the god Amun - that'll have been some kind of incantation - but I imagine that magical weapons or other resources would have helped him, too."

"I'll put shield holders on the list of things for someone to look up whether they'd been invented yet -uh, enchanted clothes, probably the pharaoh's fancy pharaoh rod was magic - I'm thinking of a real thing, right, I've definitely seen depictions of pharaohs where they had a fancy pharaoh rod -"

"I've seen fancy pharaoh rods, yeah. I don't know if he'd have been wearing armor when ambushed if it was totally out of nowhere, unless it was additionally enchanted to not suck to wear all the time?"

"There's an illustration at the end of him fighting, taken from a temple he later had erected - it's a bit hard to tell what sort of weapon he has, but it looks more like a rod than like a sword. I don't think he's wearing armor, though. There's some kind of cowl thing, though, I don't know what that's called."

"Stuff about the pharaoh's personal magic items is probably attested elsewhere, that might be a good lookup for extra credit."

"I'm not sure how accurate the illustration is supposed to be, but it doesn't look like the Pharoah is steering the chariot at all – so that could be stylized, or it might be some kind of self-steering artifice."

Also, weren't they supposed to impress Bella by sharing all their ideas from earlier and pretending they'd thought of them on the fly? Julian distinctly remembers this being discussed. "Also, we haven't talked about artillery at all. They're trying to sack a city somewhere in here, they could have had all kinds of enchanted catapults and battering rams and such." 

"Oh, good one - if the city has walls -"

"The city probably has walls. - is he holding an arrow. You'd almost certainly not enchant an arrow but if he was surprised it might have been what he had on hand."

" - huh, you're right, that actually doesn't look like a rod. Darn. Okay, our open questions for more research are - did the city the Egyptians were attacking have walls - what animals drew chariots, or could they have been magically driverless - what stuff are the pharaohs mentioned to have personally possessed - had shieldholders been invented yet - had barding been invented yet. How about we each look up one of those, and then come back and share our citations, and then we can each write an essay that references five external sources for background research which should be an easy good grade."

"Sounds good to me. Anybody gonna fight me over shieldholders?"

Annisa really appreciates how Bella phrases her requests so it wouldn't be incredibly awkward to argue them!!! It seems like a good skill for an enclaver to have. "I want 'when was barding invented', because it similarly doesn't sound like it'll require reading Egyptian at all."

"I'll take the walls. This school seems to want me to learn about macro-scale wards anyway." 

"I guess that means I've got chariots."

"Great. We can compare notes - at lunch tomorrow?"

"Sure, and then we can all do the essay over work period?"

"Works for me. Maybe once we're busier we'll want to rotate who's doing all the work but we haven't gotten anything else to do yet, might as well get ahead to start."

"Pharaoh's personal possessions, hopefully involving citing primary sources in Egyptian. I'll have it for everyone tomorrow."