"Flying and the general category of moving things, heating, freezing things... controlling light and sound... life force transfer. Some relatively simple mental things. Protection against all of those."

Life force transfer. Heating, and to a degree freezing things also sound interesting, especially if that can be combined profitably with Calorism. "Fascinating. And you mentioned stamina earlier, I take it that's a...form of life force, I suppose? You seem familiar with breath as well. Are there others, as your magic goes?"

Opero might not actually catch the way Felix's head twitches at super-speed to look at Fernando, but it's not like his brother could give a reaction at super speed. Still, what is the harm in sharing information?

"Five aspects. Breath, Stamina, Wakefulness, Health and Youth. They are used as fuel for sorcery magic, and each is good at different things."

Opero does not perceive it with his eyes, but the extension of his mind permeating his soul-dew certainly does detect the motion, the information trickling back up into his physical brain along with rest of the sensory information his armor is gathering and feeding back to him. "Interesting. And you can...put it, the sorcery, into things, like this bracelet. And I suppose that 'dead city' has somehow come to have a dearth of them?"

"Yeah. The dead city was a very rare failure at making a much less aggressive artifact. I take you can't make persistent artifacts?"

"No, not-- hm." He raises a hand to his chin contemplatively. "I suppose it depends on exactly what you mean by 'persistent' artifacts. How long does this thing last?" He gestures to the bracelet. "If I put a spirit into some of my soul-dew, it can last a few hours, and a specialist in that sort of thing could maybe make it last a week? And if they're around to do maintenance on it they could refresh the spirit, in which case it'll last as long as that same specialist bothers to keep it going."

"Wow... that is... short. I don't know when that bracelet was built, but it was, like, in a dusty box before I did inventory. It probably is a couple of decades old?"

Opero's raised eyebrows of surprise are not really visible but his change in posture may still be readable through his armor. "Wow, that's definitely quite, uh, persistent. I could maybe imagine holding a spirit in stasis for that long, but if it were doing anything on a regular basis, even just moving around, it'd definitely need maintenance at least every few days." That's definitely another major point of interest for future colonists. That's plausibly the birth of a whole new industry, especially if there's any sort of crossover between this sorcery and vitalism. "I understand if this is a difficult question to answer, I imagine this is all quite normal to you, but how does having access to these sorts of artifacts, ah...impact your life? What sort of things in your life are artifacts, or made by artifacts, or enabled by artifacts?"

"I mean... We might be a bit of outliers. Uh, artifacts themselves are not that common. They require Youth, which is the one lifeforce that doesn't regenerate and, well... spending it causes aging."

"Or cancer if you fuck it up bad enough."

"Or cancer. If you're not paying attention, bad enough to create a systematic structural crack in your lifeforce. But you can create artifacts with nearly any sorcery effect? Though, they are most useful for things that technology can't replicate. Oh, what is your technology level?"

"Meaning, what non-magical things can be done with your world's knowledge? What non-magical objects have been invented recently?"

Interesting. It looks more and more reasonable that Opero's held back on information about Calorism, these people have a distinctly outsized interest in its capabilities and he is not prepared to barter about it. "Non-magical, hm. That's a a tough one, Humorism is very common, it's relatively easy to teach, compared to Spiritism at least, and the nature of soul-dew means it tends to be quite a bit more advanced than purely lifeless material devices. I'm actually not sure what the most recent lifeless invention is? Maybe, hm...I think I heard about a new way of forging lifeless steel that can achieve better strength and flexion? Maybe something about mundane ship-building? I think I heard something about that on my way to the facility I was sent here from."

"Oooh. Are you medieval? Or maybe Bronze Age given the whole Greco-Roman sounding name?"

"Huh... Steel, I am sure there ought to be some improvement on how to make steel in the past few years. But that wouldn't be the first thing I would comment."

"Just say that we went to the moon half a century ago to plant a flag and collect a few rocks. Your nerdy types love that story, despite not getting us any moon cities."

Opero actually stops in sheer surprise for a moment, before quickly recovering. The Moon is a place you can go to, apparently. In this world-- He looks up and notes a lack of moon-- in another world connected to this one, at least. "Wow, yes, that's certainly more advanced than anywhere I've heard of. The possibility of such a feat didn't even occur to me. As for the steel, that may be biased by my own interests. I keep up with various sorts of material developments since it's relevant to advancing my own humorism. And, I have no idea when 'medieval' refers to, there have been lots of 'middle ages' and I suppose you could call the present time a middle age of sorts, just since it's between the past and the future. I'm not totally clear on when 'the Bronze Age' would be either, but outside of clocks and I think maybe nails for ship hulls it's much less common than steel."

"Bronze and Middle Ages were just periods in our words, and it's... sort of easy to think of them when trying to guess technology levels."

Felix does notice the pause and smiles. "That does sound Middle Ages to me. Relatedly, do you think your world is up for an Industrial Revolution?"

Opero shrugs again. "Fair enough, and I imagine that having another couldn't hurt? But at a guess I'm not sure that having, say, lifeless manufactories for example would be much of a game-changer economically. I could be wrong about that, though, it's not really my area of expertise."

"Oh, I guess we don't know how much your kind scales. Though, there are probably still benefits."

Opero nods. "I'm sure there will be some, I just am not in a strong position to speculate what they'll be. Regardless, even if magical artifacts aren't especially common, it sounds like mundane devices make up a much greater deal of your day to day fare, so to speak, evidently in a way which has allowed you to industrialize without industrializing magic at the same time. It will be interesting to see how the path following from that diverges from what I'm familiar with."

"Oh, yeah. Most of our non-magical industrialization came from a particular world."

"For a sense of scale. How many... nails do you expect a worker to make in a day of work? Can be something else if you are more comfortable giving that as an example."

"How many nails, hm."  Opero pauses for a moment, bringing his hand back to his chin as he does some quick estimates. "Maybe a million? Assuming they work three quarters of the daylight and aren't making anything else. That might be off by a bit though, I don't have productivity statistics committed to memory."