"...Yeah, I'm sure I'll panic about this whole thing later.  Right now, though, there's things to do.  ....Gaming things out....  I'd hardly know where to begin.  I know too little to suspect what sort of interactions I might need to undertake.  Perhaps starting with anything I might want to know about the researchers, but...what's your society like?  Just, generally?"

Redweld smiles a little awkwardly and rubs the back his head. "They're...nice people, I suppose? Academics? The stereotype is that people who get into echoics tend to embed themselves very strongly in their community, but how that manifests varies a lot and honestly I don't know if it's more than the slightest tendency anyway. As for what society is like, that's a bit broad? Do you still have nobles where you come from? We-- err, that's Dalenmercia, we got rid of ours twenty two years ago, right when we pulled out of the Great War. I don't know if you know about any of that, if you're from real far away?"

"Nobles are very gone, where I'm from; there's a couple ceremonial figureheads that hung on in other nations, but - what, a couple hundred years of democratic rule, for values of 'democratic' that are less than I'd have liked for a while...but it was non-noble, even if I fear they only traded nobles for oligarchs."

"A couple hundred--" Redweld repeats with some astonishment. He's quiet for a moment as he considers. "Sorry. I had been assuming that when you said that you wouldn't be able to draw a line to your home, that you meant you were from some far off colony or the like. I understand now you meant another world entirely." He leans back in the carriage's seat as he processes that a bit more, before a smile creeps back onto his lips. "Well! The researchers are going to be even more excited than I thought."

"That was remarkably perceptive.

"Judging by the fact that you've had a Great War...I'd say my world's probably a good half-century ahead of yours, techwise, considering what I've seen - but, depending upon how the magic works here, I imagine there's fields within which your prowess would astound me.

"We didn't exactly have any, back home."

"Thank you! I'm glad that someone appreciates my talents." He bonks his head against the driver window, and Welkonn taps the window twice, prompting a laugh from Redweld. "And, you didn't have any? How do you-- That's a stupid question. This must all seem like some kind of fantasy to you, I imagine, if you've only heard of magic in stories?"

"It's certainly something!  And I've always wanted to live in a world with magic, so like, I suppose it is.

"...How do we what?"

"Oh, just, how do you know what magic is, if you don't have it? But I know lots of stories where magic is different, so it's no huge leap to think a world without magic will still imagine stories that have it."

"There is so much fantasy fiction, yeah."

Redweld nods to that. "If you're a fan of it, I could show you around the fantasy section of the volunteer library, whenever you head back into town? It might be a reasonably safe place to dip your toes into Swarthwallsian society. It's pretty hard for things to go too wrong in a library as long as you keep quiet."

"Books are good.  ...I wonder if there's magic e-readers...Erm, that doesn't translate very well.  Some sort of magic device you can load arbitrary books onto for portability and convenience."

"Oh, yeah, we have tablets that can do that sort of thing, though they're moderately expensive." Redweld replies.

This brushes against Maria's linguistic download, which elucidates that 'tablet' here refers to a magical item, a plate of solid metal with a magical inscription that allows it to possess many functions similar to those of the electronic sort of tablet that she is familiar with.

"Eee!  You do have something I'm incredibly impressed with!  Do you have networking?  -- of course you do, what sort of echoic anything wouldn't do networking?"

Redweld smiles. "Exactly right. It's been something of a revolution. I know among the wealthier circles, people are saying it's going to be even bigger than automation was." He sighs a bit darkly. "Hopefully it doesn't bring another Great War with it this time, though."

"I should hope it won't, based off of historical precedent - what causes wars is the opposite of interconnectivity, in most cases, and I have a vague impression that you're not actually resource-constrained in a way that leads to the sort of imperialistic bullshit my homeland or the British Empire got up to.  If everyone's just...getting along fine in their own space, and then you add the means to talk to people a world away?  Assuming there's no crazy dictatorships out there...Boom, war's gone; people don't want to hurt their friends.  ...I wonder if your magic can into space..."

Redweld grimaces. "Dalmerc got up to, uh, quite a bit of imperialism before the war, actually. The colonies were all granted political independence after we abolished the nobility, but in practice there's still a lot of...economic entanglement left to sort out, if you know what I mean? Regardless, I'm hopeful that you're right, and if your world is that much more advanced than ours, in most areas at least, I don't think I'm being unreasonably optimistic to do so."

He gets a bit of confused look for a moment at that last bit. "'Can into space'? You might be showing just the hint of an accent there. I'm not sure exactly what you mean?"

"Sorry, our version of the echonet has developed a whole dialect from its text-basedness and ubiquity - and the fact that it encodes messages in specific ways.  I'm practically more a native speaker of that than garden-variety English - which is what I'm composing my thoughts in before I speak them, as of yet."

"Economic entanglement...

"Given the historical precedent of the British from my world, one would want to be extremely careful that such a relationship does not become a loop of resource extraction to Dalmerc fuelling lack of manufacturing in local economies fuelling poverty across said nations fuelling resentment in said ex-colonies fuelling radical actions such as terrorism, but some level of economic entanglement, especially for specialty goods, is actually quite desirable from a war-avoidance standpoint - if politicians can be trusted to be rational-ish actors instead of jingoistic demagouges with a superiority complex.

"...Excuse me; I have some opinions about certain public figures back home."

The way Redweld sighs with some dejection tells Maria that, unfortunately, the situation is much more like the former than the latter. "I think you'd find many like-minds at the volunteer corps, certainly I think my brother and I would be two. Unfortunately, the industrialists played a large part in helping overthrow the nobles and have gained a great deal of popular support for it, and they're naturally not very interested in stemming the flow of lucre into their purses, no matter whence it flows."

"Sell them on it being cheaper to have factories local and upsell finished work as exotic," she almost instananeously suggests.

"...But yes, fuck the capitalist overlords just as much as the feudal ones; at least nobles theoretically had a responsibility to the people whose lives they could ruin on a whim.  Ugh.  Not that industrialization itself is an inherent evil, but concentrating the profits into the hands of a couple dozen men who won't bear the costs of the externalities industry imposes...That way lies the ruin of the species."

Redweld nods. "We-- our colleagues in Wallermoth, mostly, are working on something like that, I believe, and yes, it's remarkable not only how selfish but also how short-sighted they can be, and how that stands in stark contrast with the picture of forethought and wisdom they paint of themselves." He gets a fierce, almost angry look in his eyes. "The amount of time and effort it took to get the limits on poetic inscriptions act passed through parliament was unbelievable, considering the sort of chaos that might have been caused if we didn't."

"The limits on poetic inscriptions act, you say?  I have no idea what those consequences would be, but...I imagine they're quite real, if you say so.  What sort of inscriptions are there, and what's the problem with poetics?

"But yes, single-minded pursuit of a bigger number in their bank account...that's how 'industrialists' just are, most of the time."

"Oh there are inscriptions for--" He slaps his forehead. "You don't have magic. Uh. There are four 'winds' of magic, as we call them. The poetic, the metabolic, the echoic, and the chorismic. Put simply, the poetic creates things, the metabolic changes things, the echoic connects things, and the chorismic destroys things. They all have rituals and they all have inscriptions. And, it's well-understood, common knowledge really, that poetic, metabolic, and chorismic effects have sort of, cycle of dominance? A poetic effect will overpower a metabolic one, metabolic overpowering chorismic, and chorismic overpowering poetic, but just a few years ago there was some new research that there's more to it than that. Every time we perform a ritual, or more importantly, every instant that an inscription is active, it sort of weighs on the winds, suppressing the wind it dominates and feeding the wind that dominates it. There was already a slight upward trend in reports of spontaneous chorismic activity around that time, and projections indicated that if the production of poetic inscriptions continued increasing at the current pace there would be mass spontaneous chorismics, globally, within fifty years. Basically an end to the world, at least for human habitation."

"...oh, wow, that's...huh.

"I wonder..."

"...So there's a way to harvest energy from just, like, heat differentials; I wonder if I could dust off the old 'these aren't actually perpetual motion machines' blueprints and stick some mixed poetic-chorismic inscriptions on 'em.  Maybe even a metabolic one, just to be sure the balance is maintained..."

Redweld grimaces slightly. "Maybe? I'm not an engineer of any sort, I don't know whether such a design would be feasible. Off the top of my head, if the poetic and chorismic inscriptions are equally powerful on their own, the influence of chorismic might overwhelm the poetic, but you could probably account for that by increasing the baseline power of the poetic, or by factoring in a metabolic influence. I'll mention it to some of the tech people at the corps, or you can if you come visit."