Please explain to Jinye Attani Cocoon Ajian Madurai what goddamn city this is. Right now, please. Last she checked, she was just about to begin a brilliant scheme that would give her utter dominance over Tsirona.

Also, last she checked, she had a computer.

Central Computing? There had better be a sensible explanation, like 'this is just a dream.'

Sorry, I'm not in this story!

... No Central Computing. City. Explain. Please?

Over there's a fighting ring, where a man with wings made of glass and a figure that, wings and all, is thoroughly on fire, are throwing themselves at one another in vicious combat, supervised by cheering and betting human spectators, some with their own winged beings seated at their feet or beside them. The winged beings aren't betting or cheering. The glass one slices off the fire one's left wing, and the fire one continues, silently, trying to melt his face off.

Over there there's a tavern, with singing audible from inside. There's also a couple of human women posed and decorated to advertise their services, attached to the same establishment, loitering out front; in the back, though, a winged being, covered in dark metal, already has a client. She's silent; he's not.

Over there a man has become upset with his winged being - the wings aren't visible but they cast shadows, and they make crunching noises when stepped on. The winged being isn't fighting back or crying out or even trying to shield her face, just lying there generating silent tears while she's beaten.

And over there are the stairs that will take Jinye down from this tower and into the town, if she goes in that direction, or into the fields of lentils and chickpeas and lemons, if she goes the other direction.

Jinye is going to burn this place to the ground.

It's amazing how little time it takes for her to decide this, really. She supposes it's conceivable she'll want to reconsider this decision later, but right now, she's pretty confident on the burning.

If she doesn't see anyone else up here who might have summoned her, into the town she thinks it will be. Might as well visit before the inferno.

She's alone in the tower - in fact, she has to unlock the door from the inside to get out of it, once she's gone down the stairs.

The town does have features that have nothing to do with winged beings. Mothers on rocking chairs, spinning and nursing and darning and separating lentils from their stalks. Human children with glass marbles, building a mud marble run for them. A teenage boy bringing a teenage girl flowers. A man driving a herd of sheep through the streets.

Okay, okay, she can burn it down figuratively. In a manner nigh-indistinguishable from civil reform except for the mysterious transfer of all political power into the hands of one J. Attani Cocoon and maybe a few guillotineings.

How many weird looks is she getting?

... And, uh, where people are talking, does she understand the language?

People are looking at her - she doesn't look local, and the clothes are particularly outlandish. She doesn't know the language.

Then she'll try to pick up what she can from hearing conversations. From what she vaguely knows about primitive civilizations (she might have had to conquer one! Maybe the twist is that she does!), if there's a market anywhere, that will both give her lots of eavesdropping opportunities, and tell her what the local economy looks like.

Looks like it's not market day, although the sheep guy does sell a lamb to somebody who opportunistically asks for one while he walks by.

Darn. In that case, she'll wander around looking for plot hooks people to talk to while eavesdropping as much as possible. Anyone look particularly interested in talking to an oddly-dressed foreigner?

(Unusual things about Jinye: Clothes. Medical alert bracelet on wrist. Glasses and contact lenses. She does not, unfortunately, have any sort of weapon, bar a pocketknife.)

She is being followed by a teenage boy!

Does he, by chance, look hungry, slightly feral, and as if he wants to pick her pocket? She's watched those movies too, thanks.

He actually looks like he's been eating enough! He's kind of checking her out but mostly curious.

All right! She'll raise a hand in greetings, let him know she sees him. He's not one of the people with wings, right?

Nope, no wings, or wing shadows, or glowy wing-shaped absences, or anything like that. He sidles up to her and says words! Which she doesn't know.

She folds his arms, making sure to keep him out of her personal space, and gives him a cynical look. 

"Ajian," she says, pointing at herself.

"Turuyo!" he says, pointing at himself. Wordswordswords?

Wordswordswords! Jinye needs more words! What are those things called? And those things? And those things?

That's a house, that's the sky, that's the road, this is Turuyo's hand and that's Ajian's hand, that thing is green and that thing is blue and that thing is white, that's a sheep, that's an elemental, this is Turuyo's general crotchal region eh? eh?

That's a house, that's the sky, that's the road, and NOPE she's going to learn the language from somebody else.

Turuyo protests but doesn't attempt to turn it into an altercation.

The marble kids are watching her.

Sounds good! Marble kids: Do they want to teach her words? If no, she can back off!

Marble kids will say words but aren't super great at pointing to things, they keep getting into side conversations with each other. At least that's probably a good source of grammar.

So it is.

Do they have any questions for her, once she's picked up a few words?

They want to know where her clothes are from and where she is from and if she knows she's super pretty and why she doesn't like Turuyo.

She bought her clothes from a merchant in the city she lives in, he made them with a special machine. She's from Varayapoli, it's a very long way away. She appreciates the compliment. She doesn't like being hit on.

What's up with the people with wings? They don't have those in Varayapoli.

What is a """"machine"""".

The winged folks are elementals! Why don't they have them in Varayapoli? They're so useful!

A machine is a thing that people make that helps you work, or works on its own, so you can get more done. So a good enough smith with the right tools can build machines that substitute for horses, or are like scythes but swing themselves. Do they have water-wheels? Those are a kind of machine.

Varayapoli is a long way away and they do things differently there than they do...

Where is 'here'?

They don't have water-wheels. One child attempts to start building one out of dirt.

"This is Casox," a kid says.

No, see, you need to make the water-wheel out of something that won't melt in water. Like...

(... Does she want to introduce people to technology? Yes, probably, killing people is bad. She guesses. And she'll be more powerful as the Inventor Of Amazing Technology.)

Thank you. "Casox is very far away from Varayapoli. Did I say it right?"

"Yeah! Casox is in Rixo."

"Rixo is a Shattered State."

"Nuh-uh Rixo is a sovereign power. We're very important."

"Are not. My dad says Sulax is better."

"We have the best magic school."

None of the kids have ever heard of a better magic school, at least.

... "Magic school?" There are magic schools? She can learn MAGIC?

"You can only learn magic if you're a mage."

"WE'RE all mages but if you don't know yet you aren't, you're old and stuff."

... Jinye is not that old, but, uh, she's old enough to try to take over the world so I guess they have a point. "You can't learn magic if you're too old? What kinds of magic are there and what do they do?"

"There's twelve kinds. I have... fire and shine and stone..."

"I have glass and ice and air and earth. I'm gonna be an artifact-er probably."

"I have adamant and air and lightning and fire."

"I have shadow and ice and stone."

"Amazing! What do they do?"

The kid with glass picks up one of their marbles and it comes apart into neat halves in their hand and then goes back together as though it was never broken. The shine kid makes a little glowy light hovering in the air. The shadow kid crosses his eyes and announces that he's looking up Jinye's nose. The air kid rearranges the shadow kid's hair with a gust of wind from nowhere.

She thinks that all this magic is very interesting. (She wishes she had some.)

Do any of them know what the current technological solution is for milling grain into flour?

"Yeah, you have to put it in a rock and then get another rock and go -" The kid makes an enthusiastic gesture.

... Yyyeah they have much better things in Varayapoli.

(Quick calculation of other available options: No good ones. She thinks she could make it as a singer if she had to? She expects she could do manual labor. She's not happy about either of these options.)

What adults should she talk to if she wants to explain how to make those much better things?

The kids suggest various adults, mostly their parents.

Well, if they'd be willing to introduce her to whoever there's closest to a consensus to...

One kid agrees to leave the marbles behind to show her to his dad's place.

Excellent! In the grand future she builds, this kid (what's his name?) will be remembered.

The kid says his name is Rort.

His house is a rather long walk, actually, but after that rather long walk here they are at a farm cabin. Rort spots his dad in the field beyond and heads out to bring Jinye to him.

Great! Jinye Ajian is pleased to meet Rort's dad!

Ajian says she's from a very long way away and they have a better way to mill grain into flour. Who should she talk to about this?

Rort's dad introduces himself as Sarch and would himself personally like to know a better way to mill flour.

The extremely simplified version: Big wheel in the river, attached to spoke, attached to grindstone. As long as it's all solidly enough attached, the river will turn the wheel, turning the millstone, so you just have to feed in grain while the millstone turns and it isn't nearly as much work as using hand mills.

Now, for the less simplified version she'd kind of like to talk to someone who can pay her to help make it and spread her reputation as a making-stuff-person, which is a skill she possesses? There's lots of stuff in her home city they don't have here and she's happy to provide everyone with it.

Sounds like the sort of thing it would be easiest for a mage to put together with a Stone or Wood elemental if not both. They have a lot of those at the school.

Stone sounds about right. Wood might help, too.

... Elementals are the winged p- ... humanoids?

(And the school is where?)

That's them! The school is back the way she came and then some. Can't miss it, they have the most consistently fancy clump of buildings.

... Back the way they came.

Yup. Thanks. Understood. She appreciates all the help.

(Inside Jinye's head, you might observe a tag that somehow resembles:

Quest: Burn The Whole Place Down.

> Subquest: You Need To Be Able To Issue Threats To Punish People For Not Obeying Them.

> > Sub-Subquest: Learn how to speak like a five-year-old! Complete.

> > Sub-Subquest: Learn how to speak like an eight year old! Not complete.

> Subquest: How Are You Going To Burn Down A Mill When There Is No Mill?

> > Sub-subquest: Talk to children. Complete!

> > Sub-subquest: Go on a long walk to talk to a farmer. Complete!

> > Sub-subquest: Go on an even longer walk to talk to a school. IN PROGRESS.)

About an hour and a half That Way: a school! The buildings on this planet are a weird mix of "nice, but not very decorated" - they sometimes have carvings or reliefs on them but they seem very short on paint - and "made out of mud and straw". The school is more consecutive buildings of the former type, and larger ones, than the rest of the town.

At some point, Jinye is going to wake up. Until she does, a school sounds like a great place for her to start. She'll go looking around for anyone she can find to talk to about recent history, politics, or getting her a reputation as a famous Stuff-Maker.

It's a magic school, so they don't have classes on history or politics. They have some of their classes outside, though, and she can listen in on this student showing younger students how to see around corners with Glass magic.

Okay, that's really cool, and Jinye will want to eavesdrop. She's apparently too old to have magic? But maybe being a traveler from an alternate universe (or some such nonsense), or a person who knows chemistry, will let her figure out a way for her to get it herself.

The instructor sets them to their practice assignments and squints at Jinye. "I don't recognize you," she says.

"Ajian. I'm a traveler from very far away who doesn't know how things work here, but does know a lot about how to build things you don't have here. I was told that if I wanted to find someone to help me build an improved mill and spread my fame as a mill-builder that this is where I should go?"

"An improved mill! Do you have a sketch? How much help can you afford?"

"I have no money at all and was hoping to get someone to hire me to do it, instead! Do you have any suggestions?"

"...oof, none at all. How big and how complicated do you see it being?"

She'll point at an appropriately-sized building! "It's an automatic mill that works by getting the river to do the grinding, but it's large. Simple, but large; only three parts," for her VERY BASIC STARTER VERSION, "all simple. I'd think it would be expensive with your tools, but we don't have magic where I come from, and an earth mage might be able to do it very quickly."

"An earth mage? Earth is like, dirt, plants, flesh, I'd expect you to want stone for anything that's supposed to last."

"You're right. Stone." She flashes a quick smile. "We don't have magic where I come from."

"Trick is to eat seaweed when you're pregnant." Sigh. "Can you draw me a picture?"

"... People eat seaweed while pregnant where we're from. Maybe it has to be the right seafood. And - sure." Here, have her PRECIOUS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, first person Jinye has met. She does have more designs for if this one runs out.

Brief sketch of a simple mill design, in the dirt with a stick: Wheel (non-water-minding-wood, non-rusting metal, or fairly light stone) is made to catch the water. This turns the shaft which turns the grindstone, arranged with the building that covers it like so, so the grindstone can turn and grind up the mill without you needing to work. There's a lot of things (she explains) that she can do to make it work better - special wheel designs and feeders so it can't catch your hand and ways to build the shaft to lift the wheel out of the water when you don't need it and so forth and so on - but this is the very very simple version.

"Okay. I think that I can do this in my spare time over the next - week or two - maybe longer if I'm also trying to pick up enough paying work to feed you, do you have a plan for food -"

"My plan was to sell mill designs! I'm also superhumanly strong, if that helps get work." Jinye does look strong, in a lean, wiry way. "I can also teach other people things I know." Jinye is oddly charmed by the way this girl immediately assumes she's paying for Jinye's food. "Footholders and better seats for horses, for instance, and probably better house-heating-without-magic-methods, and if you have very-good-tools I can make boxes that make rooms cold."

(She does not know the words 'stirrup', 'saddle', 'chimney', or 'precision-manufacture', and is, frankly, just grabbing random high-tech things she thinks she understands.)

Jinye pauses. "Can I ask your name?"

"Maurabel. So, uh, I think the mill is a really neat idea, but I don't know if there's anyone who is in a position to buy a neat idea with enough money to feed yourself for weeks. Especially if, uh, you have to explain the idea for it to be clear it's neat."

"... Nobody?" Jinye will let her shock show. "But that will save hours of labor for every person within walking distance of each mill you build, and your country has magic powers to build it faster! There aren't very-powerful-people or very-rich-people or organizations-that-collect-taxes that can do it?"

"- it might be a missing piece of your understanding here that almost everyone with magic is my age or younger."

"Ah. So all mages have lots of very good already-there ways to make lots of money and aren't interested in new ones?" She pauses. "Ways which don't help farming, so food is expensive-compared-to-mage-labor. Do you need to know about ways-to-get-more-labor-from-draft-horses, ways-to-make-depleted-fields-more-fertile, or better farming-tools?"

(Jinye is totally cheating here with her technically-not-quite-photographic memory. She does not really care.)

"We can help with farming, actually, but mostly indirectly, directly doing stuff to a farm would be -"

"Maurabeeeeel," says a kid, "I have a headache..."

Maurabel allows the kid to go lie down about their headache from seeing around corners.

"- but of the things you listed making depleted fields more fertile would be pretty great."

"Do you already know about how, if you sow grain in a field, the grain will grow less well if you sow grain in it again too soon, and if you sow -" she needs the word 'beans' "- in the field after the grain that partially fixes the effect?"

She pauses. "Also, I can show you how to build buildings-for-taking-water-from-rivers-on-hills-to-fields-on-the-ground and machines-for-making-water-seem-to-run-uphill-if-you-turn-a-handle." "Machine" is a loan-word.

"I am prepared to consider dropping out of school for this if the mill works out."

"Oh, you're still in school? I assumed you were teaching! What kind of magic do you do?"

Jinye has SO MANY IDEAS to fix the economy. Unfortunately she will then destroy the economy, insofar as she will organize a revolution or coup and seize power to end slavery, and this will have predictably bad consequences for all the slaveholders who don't duck fast enough as well as, short-term, everyone else. This kind of sucks for Maurabel, assuming Maurabel does not want to assist with a revolution against her own government, but Jinye is not actually a nice person so that's fine.

"I'm teaching younger kids to cover some of my tuition but I'm still in lessons for people at my level. I have most of the elements, everything except ice and lightning."

"... I suddenly think that a complete description of how magic works, what the elements are, and what they can do is very important for my making-everyone-much-much-richer project."

"Adamant, Shine, Stone, Earth, Fire, Water, Lightning, Ice, Glass, Shadow."

One of the kids volunteers a mnemonic little song.

"Thank you." She pauses. "What do these... mean? Or do?"

Maurabel convinces a kid to demonstrate a little ice and a different one to produce a spark of lightning. Then she does small demos of the other ones herself.

... "So, is it, generally speaking, just the ability to make, shape, and control a substance? Or are there other uses?"

"Most elements also have a healing application, though as far as I know Shadow doesn't and a few of them are very specific. And most of them also have a sensory application, like I'm teaching these kids to see things around corners or very far away or both with Glass."

She nods along. This is fascinating.

"I should learn how to read your language as well as speak it," she says. "If you can put me somewhere there are books I can read, I will be much more effective. Also if there is anywhere I should go to do labor that would help pay for my keep, I am very strong and have good vision and sight and strength, but few trained skills you would recognize."

"I'm not sure if you'll be allowed to use the library as a non-student but I can check some books out after this class and teach you to read there this evening. Day labor gets hired at the village square, line up on the shady side and people'll come by and see if you look likely for whatever they want done."

"Thank you. Can women get day labor jobs, or is it normally entirely men? And is there someone else you should introduce me to to make good use of my skillset?" This woman is considering quitting her job to become Jinye's manager and support staff, which is a very good sign of intelligence, but might not be perfect for aligning their goals, since she might very reasonably be trying to monopolize and exploit her. (Not quite the way that Jinye is intending to exploit Maurabel, but in many respects similar.)

"If you're not a mage you'll have a harder time but you might be able to find something. I'm not actually sure who else you should talk to, usually people with ideas are farmers just because most people are farmers and then they put their ideas into practice on their farm."

"Is there a - people-who-run-things section of building-things-to-benefit-the-populace-they-rule - to handle walls and cisterns and roads things, or is that all private-people-with-clever-ideas-for-risky-things-to-make-money?"

(Do they not have either a strong government or strong aristocracy? Really? This place is bizarre.)

"...I feel like there's some kind of wrong assumption in how you're putting that but I'm not sure what -" She helps a child who has accidentally looked at the sun. She scolds a child for dancing around while looking at random angles, as this has made the child very queasy, and obliges them to sit down. "I could imagine the magistrate collecting a tax to have a new well dug or repair the wall, but that doesn't mean it's their job to fund inventors."

"... I mean, I'm not an inventor, I'm a traveler-from-a-distant-land. But you don't have rich-people who lend money to or hire inventors and travelers-who-have-learned-from-inventors so they can be repaid from the profits of their works?"

"Not really. All the inventions lately have to do with magic, so they don't need much outside funding. If I invented something I could support myself easily while saving up for whatever I needed to do it."

"... Huh. What do rich people do with their money, then?"

"Buy... things...? They have nicer clothes and stuff. And land."

Wow, those poor, poor rich people. They aren't going to know what hit them.

"I recognize the [untranslatable loan-word #16] - uh, situation - we are in," says Jinye. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Maurabel wraps up the lesson and dismisses her students. "Speaking of land, I don't presently own any," she says. "So I'm not sure where we'd put your mill."

"We'll need to either strike a deal with a local land-owner, or I'll need to come up with something else first that will make us money that we can use to buy land." She pauses. "... What's the level of precision involved in making and shaping metal, what do you make books out of, and how do you make and copy them?" Can wood-elementals make paper? Because if so...

"Uh, I can get down to pretty fine details if I want to spend the magic on it. Book's made of paper, wood magic can make it, and people write on it with quills."

Can they make ink? Yes, absolutely.

"Just to clarify, can wood magic automatically grow books complete with writing, or does it only grow paper on which people then write books by hand?"

"Second thing. - I guess I could emboss paper I was making with magic but it would be slower and more expensive and harder to read."

"Right. I can design a metal machine that, given ink and paper, can make hundreds of copies of books. Are there any books people want hundreds of copies of?"

"- there will be if you can make them as cheap as that makes it sound!"

"Sounds good to me!" Inventing the printing press BEFORE the mill is completely the wrong order! Jinye does not care! "Alternately we could see about better designs for agricultural tools, but I don't know if people would trust that those work, and nobody except us has to trust that the printing press works to read the books after it makes them."

... Actually, with these people's metalcrafting she could probably create the repeating rifle if she wanted (and make it air-guns like the ones the Tsironans have so she didn't need guncotton) but she doesn't want them to have the repeating rifle.

"Most people can't read but it happens that my mother is credited with the discovery that it's possible for children to learn to read, and I bet she can get people who come to her about that buy up lots of books."

"SHE WHAT?"

"...you're reacting rather strongly to that?"

"... That... uh... would make her one of the greatest heroes in history? By my people's standards? Up there with the person who invented writing in the first place if not quite as extremely?"

"I mean, what actually happened is that... I learned to read... when I was a small child..."

"... Right. Yes. Makes sense."

She pauses.

"... I... wow." She paused. "I'm sorry, it's just - the emotional impact of my arrival hadn't quite hit yet?" This world is so SMALL! But it can become so LARGE! There is an entire EVERYTHING depending on her efforts and if something horrible happens to her then all of her ideas will be lost and this place will have dark ages for centuries or millennia!!!!! It is so YOUNG! Everything is so YOUNG! "... How... how old is writing?"

"About forty years."

"... Can magic be used for immortality, or do I have a time limit on inventing it myself?" She is not, she repeats not, going to let the inventor of writing die of old age.

"If it can it hasn't been invented yet. You know how to do it without?"

"No. There are things I know how to make that can extend lifespan in a lot of separate ways, and more things my civilization knows how to make that I don't know how to make, but eventually you die of something. I don't think anyone's ever lived past a hundred and sixty years. But magic plus my civilization's knowledge can do a lot more than just one of them, and a hundred and sixty years is a very long time."

"Well, some mages have been known to live a long time but I don't know about a hundred and sixty years."

"Part of that is special techniques to cure individual things, part of that is being from a healthy family, and part of that is just generally knowing what sorts of things and activities make people healthy. None of it is magic."

"Magic mostly does the first thing."

"Exercise and a balanced diet. A good deal of the more complicated stuff is just balancing the diet better."

"Balancing it against... what?"

"Oh. Sorry. Meaning, eating a variety of different things. Your body needs different sorts of nutrients to keep different parts of it working, and getting too much of one thing and not enough of another is bad."

"I mean, I'm sure everyone would like to eat more different things...?"

"Yes, I need to make everywhere much richer."

"What, at the same time?"

"I... will have to start somewhere first? Here, for instance?"

"I'm just not sure what everywhere being richer would look like. There's a finite amount of - I guess with enough magic you could pull more land out of the sea?"

"If every [untranslatable] of land produces twice as many crops each year, everyone is twice as rich in crops. If it takes one tenth as much time to travel, everyone is ten times as rich in travel time. If I can make books a hundred times as fast..."

"Hm, I guess that's - sort of like what's already happening, with magic being common."

"Exactly! It sounds like magic is great for making there be more stuff available for everyone. I definitely approve, and wish there was magic back where I'm from. But there isn't, so I'm stuck not knowing basic things until I can learn them all."

"Well, the book machine sounds great. It's smaller than the mill? I could keep it under my bed or something?"

"It actually wants its own room," Jinye admits. "It's going to be - bigger than you are? Not a lot bigger but bigger?"

... Jinye pauses. "I suppose I could start by trying to sell better plows?"

"Better how?"

Jinye thinks they don't have the moldboard plough yet! "With cheap metal, I can build quite strong plows that will turn the soil while they cut them, exposing new soil to the surface and cutting deeper furrows, but that are still very light and easy for a horse or ox to pull." She pauses. "Also, if your plows don't have wheels yet, wheels make them much better. And I can design a harness for horses to better distribute the weight of whatever they're pulling so their collars don't choke them."

"We do have wheels. I don't know about the plows, though, I've never personally lived on a farm."

"So you might already have the technology." All right. "Do you have room for the bookmaker?"

Jinye pauses. "... If not, you can ask me about almost any problem and I might know of some sort of solution, even if I can't make it with what I have on me."

"I could put the bookmaker out in the woods somewhere? My room's pretty small."

"Just as long as you don't expect it to get rained on," says Jinye.

Seed capital. She needs seed capital. All of this is to get her seed capital...

Then, the Revolution. (Or military coup. One of the above.)

"I'd give it a roof. Anyway, I can feed you for a short while since I don't see any of this getting you dinner today."

"It will not. Thank you." Jinye pauses. "I can lend you my knife as collateral?" It's what another culture would call a Swiss army knife; it has a blade and tiny scissors and tweezers and many other useful implements. It's a slightly odd Swiss army knife because you can actually hold a reasonably stable knife-grip, if you have hands Jinye's shape, and use it to stab someone with, but this fact is not obvious on first inspection.

"I have a - oh, huh, that's really neat -" She inspects the tiny scissors. "Okay, cool, sure. Do you want dinner like now or should I go check out some elementals to get started on building a shed for the bookmaker?"

"At some point I still need someone to tell me how elementals work, since we don't have them where we're from? And -" she glances up at the sun "- I assume artificial light is hard to get? We may want to work while there's light."

"Well, it's not hard to get if I bring the right elementals, but I admit I didn't expect to need any of the shiny ones for making a shed. We can talk about elementals while we're building, I suppose."

"Excellent! Thank you!" 

So the bookmaker is made of metal and wood and you can use lead or metal for the keys, and once we start printing it will need ink - oil-based inks are better than water-based inks - and paper, obviously...

Maurabel takes notes on this! They have not invented oil based ink!

... Jinye is aware that oil-based ink is generally agreed to be superior but she has no idea how to make it herself, she isn't an inkmaker and has never read a good explanation of how to make it. Hopefully it isn't that complicated, but this is one area where she doesn't know, she ahs to guess.

Assuming they have a ton of money later they can experiment with it!

With luck!

(Jinye is really looking forwards to having a ton of money.)

So, what are elementals like?

"They're basically just folks except it happens to be very easy to magically enslave them and they don't have childhoods so they act kind of odd before they've met humans," says Maurabel levelly. "That and the magic - mages have three or more elements, elementals have one or two but lots more of those." She heads for the elemental barracks.

... Jinye stops dead. (Inside her head, she's calculating very fast. Odds that Maurabel would have said that if she approved of it, odds that she is really bad at keeping her mouth shut... hmm. Something of a risk... odds that she has a new ally she can actually work with, very good...)

"Wait, what?" She lets a tiny bit of her emotion leak into her voice, then strangles it and catches up to Maurabel. "I would have thought," she says, now very calmly, "that there would be some explanation of why people are enslaving elementals other than 'it is very easy'. A moral justification of some sort, say."

"It's - also very useful?" shrugs Maurabel. "People say other stuff but I think it being useful and easy is all most people require."

"Well," says Jinye, "then it sounds like there's one more thing I need to fix, while I'm here."

"Oh, there's also the thing where if someone tries to free an elemental the elemental kills them and neither I nor the elementals know why they don't instead nonlethally hightail it out of there right away."

"It probably says something horrible about me that my immediate solution is to have 'freeing elementals' as the way society inflicts death sentences." She pauses. "Can you also have one person order all the elementals they own to 'do whatever you feel like' by their power as owner? Because if so you can solve the problem with a simple act of nationalization." 

"It's not quite that simple but it wouldn't not work. Unlike the death sentence idea which would not work at all, you can't make somebody free an elemental they're holding." They are approaching the barracks; Maurabel opens the door. "Hey, are there Woods not checked out?"

"The regular Woods are out but you can have Balsa," says the attendant.

"Can I talk to her?"

The attendant rolls his eyes. "Balsa!" he calls into the back room.

An elemental with very fluffy wooden wings comes out. "Hi Maurabel," she says, though she's mostly looking at her feet.

"Hi Balsa. I want to go build something, do you want to come? Same deal as last time?"

"Yeah," says Balsa, "of course."

Maurabel accepts the Balsa amulet from the attendant and puts it around her own neck.

Jinye thinks Maurabel is very naive about the ability of governments to make people do things they really, really don't want to do. Either way, she will listen to this, and smile at Balsa, and attempt to determine, using her keen political senses, just how keen Balsa is on murdering everyone in sight.

Balsa doesn't appear to feel very urgent about it, at any rate. Once they've left the building she flies into the air, circling above Maurabel and Jinye.

"I try to, like, pay them," Maurabel explains, "but not in money, since they can't keep that, I just keep them checked out longer and let them fly around or read or something."

Jinye nods. "That makes sense. Can she hear us from that high up?"

"If she were using magic she could but she's not."

"Understood," says Jinye.

After that she has MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT MAGIC. She still doesn't have an intuitive understanding of how it works, and she really, really wants to get one.

Maurabel can ramble vaguely about magic if Jinye doesn't have any specific questions. "Elementals are born with an intuitive understanding of their element - or elements, like in Balsa's case, some of them are hybrids. Same as they coalesce already able to talk and walk they can already do magic, though not necessarily all the fancy things and nothing that involves elements they don't have. Mages, being humans, have to learn to talk and walk, but we learn magic for all the elements we have in roughly that same way. Can be dangerous, especially with fire. The point of a school is to exchange what we've learned so far with each other, and to have," sigh, "a pool of elementals to share - we can tap them for energy of their elements, or control them into doing magic directly."

Mostly she wants to get really, really specific about what precise superpowers come with each magic type and precisely how effective they are in terms of, say, Newtons of force. (She cannot get this, but she wants approximations.) She also wants to know about precision; if you're getting free matter (!!!!!) from something, can you get any type? Could a metal elemental copy "the metal in Jinye's knife?," which she suspects is a much harder and more rust-resistant steel than any local metal?

Also, "Does tapping elementals harm them directly, or is it just that the school needs elementals around to tap and they think slaves are cheaper than employees?"

Maurabel doesn't even really have approximations. She knows that it's not generally feasible to fly even if you're tapping an Air?

"We don't make matter out of nothing however we want it. We can take pieces of elemental halos or wings, and then transmute them. If you tell me about the steel I might be able to do it, or an Adamant might.

"Elementals aren't harmed by tapping exactly but it does mean they don't have magic leftover for their own purposes and if they were free to use their magic - and didn't decide that no amount of money was worth staying here - they'd probably keep some back."

She nods. This all makes sense. "And telling you about the steel would require... showing it to you? Describing which elements go into it? Giving complete forging instructions?"

"I'd use magical senses on it. Though forging instructions wouldn't hurt, it'll take less magic to do it if I do some steps without."

"I think you need specialist tools you don't have to forge it," says Jinye. "It needs to be raised to very high temperatures." Jinye tries to remember her taking-over-the-world-in-a-low-tech-planet training. "if the difference between the current outdoors temperature and the temperature required to forge tin is a one, it needs about a nine?"

"I don't have... numbers about temperatures, or a way to guess how much Fire I'd need to throw at something to make it a two on that scale you made up."

Thaaat would be a the problem, yes.

"I can check out a Fire later and get them to heat things till it - looks right, or feels hot from the correct distance away, or whatever?"

"I can get you a simple heat-measurer with concentrated wine-stuff in glass," Jinye says, "but it doesn't work at too high temperatures." She pauses. "I think it may make more sense to transmute the metal directly, or else to see if what you're detecting matches to what I know from theory is the - composition of the alloy - in which case I can just describe the alloy to you." Once she teaches Maurabel chemistry.

"Sure."

Great! "By the way, do you know how to use heat to refine liquids, both those that become more concentrated under heat and those that become less?"

"...do you have an example?"

"If you put a pot of water over a fire, the water turns to -" she gestures vaguely at the air, not having the word for steam - "and then you have less water in the pot. If you do that with wine, what happens?"

"...wine sauce, I guess?"

"The wine tastes less like wine and stops making you drunk."

"Huh, I guess I don't have to avoid dishes with wine sauce then. Anyway, we've invented wine sauce, is it important?"

"Some things boil at a higher temperature than water. If they are in liquid, you can separate them out by boiling the water off. Some things boil at a lower temperature than water. If they are in liquid, you can separate them by trapping the - " will Maurabel help her out with the word 'gas' or 'vapor'? - "that forms when you boil it. Purifying liquids is useful for many purposes."

Closest thing Maurabel has is "unbreathable air". "I don't think we have much of that going on besides wine sauce but it's not hard to make artifacts that'll cook things."

Right, her word gas refers to breathable air, unbreathable air, water-after-it-has-been-boiled, and other things in that general category.

So, what all can you do with artifacts?

"Lights, heating, air circulation, water purification. Amulets for enslaving elementals, of course..."

She may have to step up her game. "Apply pressure in arbitrary directions? Concentrate heat how precisely?" She may need to reinvent metalworking, if she wants to end up making everyone immortal.

"Pressure isn't an element, I'm not sure what things qualify as what you have in mind. I can't say I've ever had a reason to make something hot very precisely?"

"But can you, say, make a wind spell that sends wind blowing in a certain direction with a lot of force, or a water spell that makes water do the same? If so, you can use that to power a mill if you don't have a river." She keeps walking.

"And - heat is important for a lot of different chemical reactions, which are important for making substances with rare and valuable characteristics. Often things change shape with heat - the way water freezes and boils - or change composition, like the way boiling wine makes it weaker."

She pauses. "... Also, if you concentrate too much heat too precisely very very bad destructive things can happen, but if you haven't noticed it fire-magic probably can't do it. I hope."

"Interesting!" Maurabel is taking diligent notes about this. "Oh, I wonder if you could do something along these lines with sticky-metals."

"Sticky-metals?"

"Do you need magic for those - you can make metals that will pull other metals toward them and stick together? Or push apart, but we still say sticky-metals for the category."

"You do not! Our word is magnets." She grins fiercely. "They're very useful!"

"Magnets! How do you make them if you don't use magic?"

"Some are naturally-occurring and you can use those to make more. Or you can make made lightning, but then you have to make made lightning."

"Is that different from... making... lightning...?"

"It is different from making lightning bolts, which are very powerful and hard to control. But it is the same basic sort of thing, so no, not really."

"That's one I don't have, so I'd need an elemental."

Jinye nods. "Or to recruit another mage, I suppose. How do you make sticky-metals with magic?"

"I can't teach you, you're not a mage. Can you be more specific about what you want to know?"

"... Is it a fundamentally basic technique, or are you doing some specific thing with magical-control-of lightning which can be replicated by non-mages if that ends up being cheaper? Really, is it complicated-and-expensive or cheap-and-simple is a much more urgent question."

"I have no idea if non-mages can stickify metals. I have never seen one do it. It's easy as magic goes."

"Then it's probably worth focusing on things magic can't do, especially if most of the next generation will have magic."

JINYE WANTS MAGIC. She has largely managed to stop thinking about it but it is still true.

"Most of them, yeah. It's not a hundred percent success rate if you eat seaweed while pregnant but it's like, ninety, most families can get at least one kid magical and that'll just go up."

This is a cruel joke, isn't it. All of this is just a virtual reality created by one of her enemies to mock her.

... Predictions predicted by this hypothesis: Her printing press experiment will fail disastrously, as will all non-humiliating ways of making money.

Predictions antipredicted by this hypothesis: Her printing press experiment will go great and she'll make lots of money and take over the world.

You know what to do to preserve my belief that what I perceived is reality, evil simulators.

"Understood," she says. "So. The printing press..."

"Printing press!" she agrees. And when they have arrived at a good place to have a printing press in the woods she calls Balsa down and has a very careful conversation with her about compensation again and gets started on magically building a shed to go over and the wooden component parts of a printing press.

Jinye eavesdrops, then gets started building! Given that this is just a shed she will try not to make too many suggestions about earthquake-proofing and guttering and materials selection, since those look like they'd alarm Balsa and the shed isn't actually that important.

She's paying close attention to just how Balsa works; this is nearly her first chance seeing magic and she wants to make sure she understand how it works.

Balsa and Maurabel are actually doing basically the same things - Wood is among Maurabel's elements. They're touching trees and having pieces of them come off already shaped just right, like the tree was all along a three dimensional puzzle. When they want to assemble the pieces they can just make them join up again, no glue or nails. Maurabel has less stamina for this activity than Balsa and taps Balsa to even it out; this involves just a brief fingertip-touch.

Fascinating! Jinye has no magic, but she can assist in assembling the parts even if not in creating them.

Yeah, that'll make things go a bit quicker. The shed is fast and the press will want type that Maurabel will want an Adamant for so it's all right that they aren't quite done by the time she and Balsa are collectively out of magic.

Then Jinye can thank them both! (Excitement!) Do they already know what book to start printing lots of copies of, yet?

"I was thinking one of the primers my mother wrote for her students. She'd be able to give them all their own copies."

"Excellent," she says. (Will this pay for itself? Probably not, but it'll get her partner on her side..) "Will we want to include a leaf in the back, suggesting that if people want books copied they should come to us?" She pauses. "Do you know any booksellers we could recruit, after that, and what they'd specifically want?"

"There's a school scribe, but I think he'd probably resent being put out of a job. I guess we could try to retrain him as a printer. A leaf in the back saying to ask us if you want a book printed seems good though."

"There's no stores that sell books?"

She pauses. "And, yes, we'll want to start recruiting new printers once we've started selling books. Eventually we can sell off this business and get started on a bigger project."

Like FIXING THE WORLD.

"Not that many people can read. And paper is expensive if you aren't a mage making it yourself."

"Well, we'll want to find someone who can buy books," she says, "otherwise we aren't selling much."

"Yeah. It just might be a little slow to start. Can you use it for pictures?"

"It can be done," Jinye says. She thinks a moment "- yes but it'll be more expensive and you'll need an artist to do the picture we're printing."

"Do it how?"

"Make it a single, very big letter," she says drily. "The same way we do any other type, with an Adamant mage shaping the plates."

"Oh, I guess that makes sense. It'll help the kids, I think. I'm sure other people will buy books, I just don't know right away who they are, you see."

"It's very important to help children learn how to read! It's just -" she pauses "- I want to fly."

She smiles, suddenly and fiercely. "I want to make this place have everything my home did and every moment I wait is a moment I shouldn't be waiting - there are real problems and humans and elementals are suffering because I haven't fixed everything yet, and the faster I can get resources the faster I can throw them into fixing this problem at a profit which lets me fix that problem at a profit which lets me delegate fixing this problem to someone else -"

"- and that's who I am."

"...it's like looking in a mirror," mutters Maurabel.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." Maurabel gets up. "Well. We can probably finish this tomorrow, us and an Adamant, and then I can print a primer for the kids and show my mom."

"Excellent, thank you." She nods to Balsa. "And thank you, too."

"No problem," says Balsa, "always nice to go get some fresh air."

Back to the university they go.

And Jinye can pass the time telling Bella about other cool technological things they can do. Antibiotics! Compound pulleys! Disinfectants!

(She's doing this in kind of a random order.)

"- how are disinfectants different from antibiotics -"

"You take antibiotic pills or medicines to make you better if the sickness is caused by bacteria, which some but not all diseases are. Disinfectants are used to remove bacteria from surfaces before they get into the body - soap, for instance, is one you might know about." Actually, do they know about soap?

"Yes, we have invented soap."

"Great! Soap is very important, but -"

Actually, uh, quick question what do their cities do for sanitation.

"- what do cities do for it? Why would a city - do - a city can't take a bath, can it?"

... Right then, in that case Jinye will explain plumbing systems and just how much they cut disease rates and just how important it is to never use lead for any of them ever. (She may have some trouble grasping for 'lead'.) This will cut disease rates a lot, she has no idea.

Gosh. Okay. That sounds like a lot of work compared to the printing press which will take just another day to finish but Maurabel writes this down very seriously.

This will take a tremendous amount of work and she needs either a great deal of credit with the government or enough wealth to build her own city, if she's going to do anything with it. But it's on Jinye's fix-everything list.

"I'm starting to like the idea of building my own city, honestly. I could save up to buy a ton of elementals and work out conditions they'd like to help with building all this stuff."

"Is there anyone accepting immigrants from all the world's countries, or could we be the first?"

"...as opposed to - what, killing anyone with an accent?"

"... Oh." She pauses. "As opposed to saying that the only citizens with a right to decide things are the children of citizens and a few people the government likes, and everyone else is driven out by force or enslaved."

"How are you supposed to figure out who someone's parents were if they don't tell you?"

"Assume guilt," says Jinye drily.

... Okay, no, she's incapable of not nitpicking.

"Also, humans contain the instructions for replicating ourselves inside the tiniest parts of our body - that's part of how reproduction works - and we can read those to compare. But incompetent countries were handling the problem by assuming guilt long before we know about those."

"I think if you assumed everyone was not a citizen and drove them out or enslaved them you would have... so many problems? Like for one thing who is going to do the driving out and enslaving... probably there are nuances you're not covering. Anyway, I don't think anyone is looking at tiny parts of people's bodies to determine if they're native."

"Sorry. The usual rule is that when the city is founded, they say that the founders are citizens, and then everyone keeps track of who their children are and gets them added to the list of citizens. And anyone who isn't on the list of citizens - who can't prove they're on it - is assumed not a citizen."

"Sounds like a lot of work and I'm not clear why you'd bother."

"If there's only a hundred [units] of land that can grow food, anyone new you let onto the land is taking land from someone else. So you don't let anyone new onto the land, just your own citizens, and if you do let someone you say they don't have any right to the land, and they can only stay as long as they make themselves useful. That's the model and it's a bad model - you can make land more productive, and every new mind you have thinking about the problem might find a new way to do it - but it's how they think."

"I mean, I don't think I'd be naturally inclined to award a random person land just for showing up?"

"Yes, but most of these places don't sell citizenship, either."

"Yeah, I guess that's kind of weird. I'm not planning to do that."

"A lot of people have made a lot of mistakes, in my home's history.."

"I'm not surprised, it's just not clear why that one was so tempting. I suppose I could waste a lot of time ruminating on it, though."

"... If you can build a system in which people attach their loyalties to an Us that includes all their friends and neighbors, which is under attack from a foreign Them, you can get them to work quite hard to support the Us against the Them. But then We start to ask 'why are we letting Them into the nice happy world we built for ourselves?'"

Jinye sighs. "Also, that usually automatically happens whenever there's a war. Fear causes the birth of both alliances and hatreds."

"Rixo hasn't had a war in my lifetime so perhaps I just don't have enough experience."

"Oh?" Can Jinye get Maurabel talking about local history?

Sure, Maurabel can recite the history of the Shattered States. There was an empire, with a mage emperor, who collected a ton of elementals when they first started coming around human settlements to figure out what was up with the concept of writing. Reports differ on whether he personally invented the amulet technique or if someone else did - it's easy enough that it could have been independently invented several times, though. He and his ton of elementals united and civilized the known world by force and he reigned over the greatest empire of all time till magery became more common with the discovery of the seaweed factor. He optimistically allowed everyone access, imagining it would strengthen his empire, but when the new crop of mages was old enough to capture elementals and do magic to support local powers, he suddenly had to deal with several simultaneous rebellions. One of his elementals convinced him that he could project magical power in more places at once if he set them free to operate as his agents. He tried it, and died, and in the resulting chaos everyone with a halfway plausible vision for independence got it.

... And there weren't immediately a thousand wars as everyone with a halfway plausible vision for independence started trying to conquer each other?

(How recently was this?)

The Shattering was like twenty years back? Maurabel's theory is that everybody wanted to consolidate rather than expanding after attempting to expand ended so badly for the Emperor. That and it's hard to know if your neighbors have a seven year old who has just discovered revolutionary magic that would completely alter the course of a war, since it's a fertile enough field that that's easily the sort of thing that could happen.

Jinye's theory (which she does not say) is that the wars weren't happening to Maurabel's neighbors because Maurabel got lucky.

"I think there's going to be more wars soon," Jinye says, which is not just a self-fulfilling prophecy, "the next time a minor territorial dispute turns into an overwhelming victory for the stronger side and the winner thinks there was an Emperor before and the next one could be me."

She walks for a bit longer, and then says, "I think one of the things we need to build resources for is doing something about that."

"...doing what about it?"

"Surviving it, of course," says Jinye. "Without starving or having our workshops burned down. What else would I mean?"

"I don't know, that's why I asked. Once we have money I guess we can stockpile food."

Jinye smiles quietly and says, "Yes, that would be a good idea -"

And then she clarifies.

"I should say that I have - not - lived in a world without war for twenty years. My home was better in many ways. Worse in others."

"In - having more war recently, or is there more?"

(There is a frozen moment where Jinye Attani Cocoon is thinking:

This moment matters. If she plays it as Ajian Madurai, she might poison Maurabel towards empire-building forever; if she plays it as Jinye Attani Cocoon, she breaks character.

Is character important to maintain? If this is some kind of virtual reality she is trapped in, how precise would it need to be for them to not have the actual information about who she is? If this actually is an alternate universe, does it matter if she drops Ajian Madurai? But this is a very unnatural way of thinking about it, because she can tell what answer those are pointing towards; she could equally well phrase it as "what do I lose if this isn't an alternate universe, and what are the odds this isn't some kind of trap.")

"I spent the past six months living in a city that had been tyrannized over by a state that was shockingly good at suppressing anything that might look like a revolt and shockingly bad at considering the economic consequences of doing so. Or the consequences to popular opinion. Subjugation by a foreign power might not be terrible if they were competent, but they will probably not be competent." Anything that can happen to them can happen to you. Old rule.

"The economic consequences?"

"Any humane cost to a populace can be expressed as an economic cost to the ruler, so therefore good government from a practical sense will always include good government from a moral sense. If the government's good enough."

"...that doesn't make any sense to me. It's very economically profitable to enslave elementals."

"I admit my political experience is limited to humans," she says, "who can't be magically enslaved. But there are a dozen reasons to hire free labor instead of using slaves or forced labor; human slaves work less hard and less imaginatively, people you force into labor might be brilliantly productive in some other effort but people you hire don't have a better option, people working for themselves specifically you don't need to watch but people working for the state you do, so a state will just replace all other oppressions with letting people pay for protection from them - but there are tax rates that make people work less hard or hide more money so the state gets less money long term, or if the tax rates are too high, even short term. So both states, Good and Selfish, will end up protecting everyone from oppression and collecting taxes, and the difference between their competence at these things will be tremendously larger than the difference between whether they're being good to make money or making money to be good."

"That's... interesting if it's a regularity you've observed but I am actually very concerned with the situation of elementals, who can be magically enslaved."

"And you should be! I appreciate the reminder that I am in an alien world and laws I thought were universal now have exceptions."

"Anytime!"

They are back at campus now. Maurabel leads Jinye and Balsa into her room; it's a tight fit in there but Balsa sits on the bed and takes one of Maurabel's books off a shelf to read.

BOOKS.

Can Maurabel teach Jinye how to read in the local language? Jinye only knows how to read in the languages where she's from.

Sure, sounds fun and also relevant to the printing press project, maybe Jinye knows clever things about how many of each letter you need. Maurabel pulls down another book to use.

Corresponding to their frequency in words in the text they're printing but she doesn't know any of the letters.

(Jinye learns extremely quickly, to a really implausible degree.)

That makes this much less tedious! And yes, Maurabel had guessed that much but didn't know if there were other factors.

Not that Jinye knows, she isn't an expert in printing, she just memorized some history books that had mechanical descriptions.

Well, then, Jinye can be taught to read in short order. The book is mostly sketches Maurabel has done of things observed with various kinds of sensory magic, heavily annotated with her observations.

Cool! Any useful devices her magic replicates, such that Jinye can tell her how to SCIENCE thousands of years ahead of schedule?

Glass magic is really good for lenses - actually making them or bypassing the need, depending. Shine can do spectroscope-type things. Water can dowse.

Great! Then Jinye will talk about how to microscopes and telescopes and magnifying glasses, just in case Maurabel hasn't figured out the details out (since they might stack with glass magic) while they work on the language.

Maurabel isn't sure they'd stack with glass magic but they'd make it a one time magic expenditure instead of needing to be done magically every time, to see small/far things.

Oh good. Tech sharing!

Neat! Glass is Maurabel's strongest element so she's excited to have things she can make with it.

"It would also be tremendously useful in warfare and for [untranslatable] at high enough technology levels, but I expect it will take us a few decades to get there," Jinye will say offhandedly.

"Useful in warfare how?"

"Very, very powerful lenses focusing light onto something heats it and can cause structural damage. It's not the most useful weapon under most circumstances but there's a limited number where it is." Specifically igniting missiles. Anyway she'd rather pay attention to translation choices, she's just leaking technology under all circumstances because SCIENCE!

Focusing on the language is fine by Maurabel.

And eventually Maurabel will need to sleep, and Jinye will need to sleep shortly after.

(Jinye might also need food - indeed, a surprising amount of food - but she will not really NOTICE. There are reasons she is possibly-unhealthily-thin.)

Maurabel's dinner is bread and dried fish. "Usually I cook with magic but I want to save mine for finishing up the press tomorrow, in case elemental availability isn't maximally convenient," she says, gesturing at some lentils and raw eggs she has in the cupboard. "I don't have extra, I can go shopping tomorrow for both of us."

"I understand," says Jinye. "Thank you." If the topic of limited food quantity has been brought up, Jinye will be careful to eat slightly less than her hostess.

Small dinners for both of them. Apparently not weird enough for Maurabel to remark on, though she does look consideringly at her eggs. "Eh," she says, "not worth going and borrowing a Fire for. I'll buy food in the morning. You can sleep under the bed; Balsa, you're going to fly all night, right?"

"Yup," says Balsa. Maurabel opens the window and lets her out into the night.

"Understood."

And Jinye, with whatever pillow or lack thereof Maurabel can provide, will go to sleep under the bed.

It's a lack thereof. Magic does not help the textiles situation; Maurabel herself is sleeping on straw covered in linen.

Then Jinye will want to see if she can explain how a textile mill works in the morning.

Maurabel wakes with the sun and returns Balsa and heads to market to buy some food.

Jinye awakens first, and spends her time rereading books inside the privacy of her own head. Once Maurabel wakes up, Jinye will go with her to get more cultural exposure (and, being mildly superhumanly strong, carry stuff).

Well, if Jinye wants to hold the bag far be it from Maurabel to stop her. Bread, dried fish, a couple lemons, some greens, some salt. "I'll try to have a little magic left over to cook tonight," Maurabel says.

"I can cook if you have a nonmagical heat source," says Jinye. "Or a wilderness and half an hour."

"I don't like to use fire in my room, it's smoky, and if I cook outside people come over and want some and get chatty and I'm usually not in the mood for that, but if you want to tromp around the wilderness near the printing press and cook for us that sounds good to me?"

"Sounds reasonable," said Jinye. She'll still need to do a lot of the printing-press work herself, of course, but she did have a wilderness survival course and she does, of course, remember it.

After they've had breakfast Maurabel has classes to teach and classes to take and is unavailable for much of the day - she hasn't dropped out of school yet, especially given that would lose her the option to check out elementals - but after school she borrows an Adamant and can head into the woods with Jinye to work on stuff and cook over a fire.

Excellent! Jinye can put together a fire drill, obtain tinder, and drill up a fire with practiced ease, in spite of not having done it for years.

And they can MAKE A PRINTING PRESS. Jinye is very enthusiastic about making printing presses! It is PROGRESS! And POWER!

Maurabel collects smoke from the fire to turn into ink, as long as they have it going anyway.

.. Oh that's a clever idea, what magic is she using?

She used a little magic to make a clay bowl fire instantly and to make some sticks prop the bowl up but she's not using magic on the smoke, it's just coating the inside of the bowl with soot.

Eh, valid. Jinye is aware you make ink out of soot but this is actually one of the areas her knowledge is limited on.

Fortunately Maurabel knows how. In the meantime she can practice arranging the type, while Adamant collects on his payment of a few hours of privacy off in the woods.

Great! Printing press, metal type, magic, food... everything's going great.

"So what's your - story? What brings you here."

When in doubt, honesty:

"I have no idea. I was in my own home and then I was in a different city. I am still considering that this might all be a dream or a very realistic hallucination."

"...gosh. Were you in a dark place?"

"I was in a place containing shadows but not one that was mostly dark."

"...huh. Well, that basically rules out Shadow-walking unless there's a fancy trick to it I don't know about."

"I didn't consider shadow-walking until I arrived," she admits.

"...until you arrived?"

"... Here. And had how magic worked explained to me."

"...no elementals where you're from?"

"No. Just very well-built machines."

"No mages either? Ever?"

"We have history dating back several thousand years, and there are no reliable reports of anything that resembles mages, elementals, or magic anywhere in it."

"Have you tried scrying the place?"

"Not being a mage, I haven't."

"I mean, not yourself personally... Do you want me to try?"

Has she said anything that will cause a crisis if Maurabel investigates and discovers some kind of horrible crime? She doesn't think so.

"Why not?"

"Well, if you don't know where it is, for one thing, that would complicate the matter."

"... Where in physical space relative to my current location?"

She pauses. "Can you explain the scrying requirements to me, please?"

"For shadow scrying you need to be looking for someplace dark and navigate there in shadow-sight, which is really hard for humans but easy for Shadow elementals. You do need to get there spatially."

"I see," she says. "I do not know how to get there spatially, or even if it is possible to get there spatially."

"How might it be impossible?"

"Metaphor: Two infinitely wide sheets of paper, one an inch above the other; no matter how far you go on one, you'll never get onto the other. Punch a needle through and travel's possible; pull it out again and it isn't."

"...scrying works in three dimensions..."

Sometimes it's like talking to a very small child and sometimes it's like talking to someone very smart who knows a lot more than she does. Visiting other dimensions is bizarre.

"Line segment: One dimension. Square: Two dimensions. Cube: Three dimensions. What's next?"

"...is something next? How many nexts are there? Why can't we do anything with them except apparently be randomly kidnapped for no reason?"

"It's theoretically possible for something to be next, up to an infinite level, but we observe there doesn't seem to be that we can interact with. People can model how it would work if it existed. A way-of-thinking-about-it-that-might-be-true-but-probably-isn't is that your three-dimensional universe - everything you can get to by walking or flying or otherwise moving from here - and my three-dimensional universe are a few inches away in the fourth dimension, and we could just cross over if we knew enough about how the world worked. Only I can't actually answer your third question, other than 'because I don't know enough.' It's also possible that they're the same universe and there's some reason that magic only works on this planet. I don't know, because this is the first time I ever heard of anything like this happening."

"I don't see how it could be only a few inches - or, I suppose it could be a few inches in that one way and much farther in other ways, but if it were right next to us, even if we couldn't see it for some reason, sound goes in all directions, and heat..."