"Around here, people tend to die if you leave them with broken limbs for too long - or, at least, if they want to kill themselves, they generally can in that situation.

With the Thorns on the way, if you don't need to kill people to be sure of neutralising the threat, I think this is a non problem - with your ability to pay attention to the prisoners, worst case, I get some people to sit guard duty and you poke them if they're getting distracted."

    "She says she does still need to sleep - she can work on refining her skills so that an escape attempt would wake her, once she's more recovered, but she isn't that sensitive to that sort of thing yet - and she won't want to be tied up monitoring prisoners permanently, but yes, this does sound fairly workable."

    "She says hopefully she can just show them they're outmatched and let them go."

"People operating on logic and reason are unlikely to try to assassinate a person with unknown powers in the middle of a Navarr Steading full of excitable Briars.

Highguard is a fair way away, though, and so are the League cities, I don't think we'll have an imminent problem.

...more imminently, I guess I'm going to have to plan for some visitor's quarters.

Ideally, I'd start some housing extending the Steading onto the clearing, and possibly move your tent up closer to the forge, if that's acceptable? The Thorns can camp in the woods, but I'm not quite so vindictive as to make Urizeni researchers do without at least some walls and privacy."

    "She says that's fine, ma'am; she'll want a house eventually but she'd like to see where everyone else settles first."

"Right, then. If there's nothing else for now?"

    "No ma'am. Thank you."

Allegra nods, and heads off, calling various people over as she goes - she's got a lot of building to organise.

"Um," says Ytha, who is still standing nearby. "I don't suppose you can talk me through what was happening, over by the waterwheel? You don't have to, I'm just curious."

    "With the electricity, ma'am?"

"Yes! A lot of people were curious about the wire, and I tried not to give very much away, but some people thought we might be doing something with lightning conduction, which I think is a bit like electricity? I think they thought it was for the dream temple, though."

    "Electricity is the same thing as lightning, yes ma'am, just for most purposes you want less of it at once. It's also not an object, but a process - it's a lot like a stream, that it has to be moving to be what it is, and if you took a bowl of water from a stream the water wouldn't be part of a stream anymore, even though the water itself hasn't changed. In the generator Master Deskyl made, the magnet acts as a pump, moving the electrons in the wire around to make the electricity flow, and that flow traveled through the waxed wire to my battery, where it made chemical changes that will let the battery produce electricity inside me over time."

"And electrons are - little tiny bits of electricity, that are already there in the wire?"

    "More or less, yes ma'am. They're in everything, but the ones in metal are easiest to move."

"So - you said it didn't exactly work like you expected it to?"

    "She says that the electricity part did, ma'am, but your physics is opinionated about it - ours at home isn't smart enough to notice why things are being done, usually, and yours was clearly paying attention to the fact that she was generating electricity to power me rather than for some other purpose; she expects it to interfere in most other cases where someone tries to run a generator."

"...I'm not sure what it even means for physics to be opinionated, I mean maybe that would happen in a Realm? Maybe we should find one of the mages and see if there's magical interference?"

    "She says that sounds like a good idea, yes ma'am."

"I think Juny was hanging around..." Ytha scampers off up to the road, calling, "Juny! You still there? Have a moment?"

Soon, someone calls back, "Ytha!", and another fairly young briar woman comes running into view.

Deskyl waves agreeably and starts heading over to the generator again.

The two briars head over with her.

"Did you see the experiment? They think there might have been something with agency interfering with it, so obviously I thought maybe it was magic..."

"Well, I can cast Detect Magic and see if there are any traces."

    "She says she expects it to be subtle, ma'am, if it's visible to you at all; it most likely won't be something you haven't seen before."

"Okay, let's give this a go." Juny bites her lip slightly in concentration, approaching the generator. She peels a scab off the side of her right hand, causing it to start bleeding. "Uh," she says, "I should have asked before I started, does it matter if I get blood on this? I don't have to but it's easier."

    "She says it's fine but preferably don't get it on the bare wire, ma'am."

"Okay, that should be easy..." Juny re-addresses herself to the generator. "I am connected to the world," she states, carefully smearing a little blood on the frame, "and I am connected to this place; my blood dances with its blood, my self expands," and she starts to carefully trace a pattern along it, "I encompass this place, it is part of me, I am part of it, it can feel me, I can feel it..."

She continues to ramble on this approximate theme and carefully decorate only the wooden parts of the device for about half a minute.

"...no, I can just about see the mana that comes in down to the stream, but it's - hmm, maybe - maybe it's kind of avoiding this right here? I'm not totally sure, it's very subtle. I might have just pushed it a bit, looking too hard.

No Realm traces at all, though. That's what I'd expect if something that actually has thoughts is doing it."

    "She says it doesn't seem to have thoughts in the sense that people do; this language isn't very good at explaining what it has instead, though."