"I'm not sure we have anyone who studies the kind of thing you keep talking about. But I'll try coiling up some wire and dropping a magnet through it. Does it matter what properties the wire has?"

"Dropping a magnet through it just the once won't produce a steady current, but it will produce any current; you really want to have a back-and-forth.  Also, I will probably be able to jury-rig a charger for my electronics with that plus some additional hardware, which would be really useful because then I can use them properly instead of hoarding charge.  ...I have no idea how I'd actually make something that regularizes pedal power, but it's surely somehow possible.  People out in the middle of nowhere could charge their phones by pedaling a stationary bike."

"...And the wire...Most people used copper, back home, but I think that was just that gold's scarce; circuit boards for electronics sure are gold-on-silicon."

"Why was g- oh. So, gold is good?"

"Yeah.  And it's not like copper doesn't work.  Most metals should, it's a property of being-a-metal that does the thing.  Electrons can flow freely between the various atoms.

"...Wow, I wonder what that'd look like troported on to other materials.

"...That's for later.  Reconstruct the foundations first, then push the boundaries of knowledge, future me..."

"I use troported tools but generally don't want to troport my ingredients, so I don't know if that's ever been done."

"I doubt it, electricity's not exactly a thing yet that most people would think of troporting - unless, do you have lightning rods?  You stick a conductive wire up on top of things that get struck by lightning, run that wire down to the literal or metaphorical electrical 'ground', and lightning goes through the wire, and not the building, if it finds it, because electrical discharges always seek the path of least resistance.

"I think the infographic I saw once said lightning had about a 60-meter search radius when it 'jumped' point-to-point on its way to earth, not that that's a number I'm confident in."

"We don't have those - search radius?"

"Not an actual search radius, it's not intelligent, just that - you know how it's jagged?  That's why it's jagged.  It's made of individual line segments that leap point-to-point, rather than being smooth direct flowy...whatever."

"Huh. How did your people learn that?"

"Photography, confusion, and really good computer models, probably.  Plus math.  There's lots of math in physics."

"Ah."

"...I should talk with a mathematician.  I wonder if y'all have calculus yet.  Abstract math isn't my most studied field, but you do have quite a bit of a math requirement to really do computing.  Boolean logic, if nothing else.  ...Truth tables.  And then I studied simulating things on computers."

"The math professor I know is called Feather."

"Then maybe I should talk to them.  ...I bet they'll love my calculator," she laughs, subduedly.

"I bet she will. She takes a lot of classes in her schedule, though, I'm not sure when she'd be in her office."

"I could probably just slide some of my homework under her door with a 'talk to Wheat to find out where all this math came from' note and wait."

"...That's half joking."

"I don't exactly have a way to get a message to you. You just show up sometimes."

"Yeah, I don't really have an address, for mail or otherwise.  If I'm not here, though, I'll probably be in the library, reading stuff.

"...really want proper timekeeping to exist already, that would mean actual scheduling could happen.  It's impossible to define 'tomorrow at three,' and I will fail at keeping track of passing sands."

"I don't understand what's so difficult about it."

"My brain is very bad at understanding the passing of time, so I cheat by having deadlines instead.  Now I can't have deadlines for time."

"Why can't you?"

"Because sands are a rate of time passing, rather than a fixed point in time.

"...Taking a whole tangent into spacetime being a thing and relativity and the speed of light in a vacuum is not actually going to help explain that.

"But yeah, uh...I can't look at an hourglass and see a number, and I need a number."

"Are you colorblind?"

"No; what, do y'all have a standard pattern for that?"