Sarun, Appointee of Rixo, is pacing back and forth in his garden, lost in thought. Around him, the serfs are working the estate; inside, the servants are keeping up the house; his wife is around here somewhere, sitting outside in the cool of the evening with the kids, but he can't hear them, they probably went down to the stream. He is thinking about currency issues; they just keep coming up.
(Silda is thinking very very quickly.
From her selfish point of view, she wants to stay here. She can take over a world and fix everything right by herself and it will end up wonderful and amazing without introducing any of the things about the Attani empire she dislikes.
But, in actual fact, the ethically correct thing to do is to give the Attani Empire magic so it can make everyone immortal and take over the universe. She has no idea if magic even follows the laws of thermodynamics, but whether it does or doesn't, giving the most functional human state tremendously more resources would be worth her death, which would happen if her secret identity became known to the rest of her classmates. Which it almost certainly would.
So, is Silda an ethical person? At all? Even in the slightest?)
The obvious thing to expect is that lots of people will show up wanting to trade, and teach classes, and see about hiring mages to do things mages can do cheaply and that can't be done without magic. Some people will want to move in, either because they don't like living under the Attani or because they want to buy land or because they want to avoid high taxes or just because they think living in a world with magic is cool.
The Attani might want to take over but since they don't have any mages and they don't have any Shadows they would have some problems just getting here, let alone doing anything once they do.
This is very true, but under the circumstances it's also very useful for not being invaded.
She doubts she can solve this problem, since her world doesn't have magic, but if they want technological and/or economic assistance, she's very qualified to help!
She has no idea, since her world doesn't have magic. It's clearly worth investigating, though.
There are individual techniques they have to make doing research better (she'll want to get into the math later, it can be tricky to follow,) but basically she'd want to try to sort mages by how much energy they can store or how quickly they refill it, then see what things mages with very high capacity or regeneration rate do, then see if, if other mages start doing them, they get more capacity or more regeneration rate.
Are there any spells that all mages can do, that drain a small fixed amount of magic regardless of how well you cast them? If so, you could use the-amount-of-energy-that-spell-costs as a source for your unit-of-measure.
Oh. In that case you're trying to measure something imprecise with something imprecise and that's much harder. Is there... a rate at which mages can recover magic, or take magic from elementals, that's fixed?