"You can leave your suitcase in my workrooms for now."

"That'd be fine.  ...Also I should warn you that I too have what I'd guess is Aeslin's flavor of quirky brain stuff, unless I miss my mark, so...apologies in advance for getting caught up in discussing magic and probably fumbling get-lunch?"

Tilda throws up her hands, laughing.  "Two of you!  Well, all right.  I guess I'll just head on to Court and leave you to talk magic and computers.  Aeslin, I'll tell the Queen that your report's going to be delayed a lot."

"Sure, but I might have to rethink my plans given what else we'll be able to do with metals now!  Come on, Mira!"

And on she goes!  "So tell me about magic!"

"To start on the theoretical level - Magic energy flows out from the Earth itself.  I can diagram the flow for you if you want, but there're still a dozen theories on why that we can't distinguish.  If only we could fly to the Moon, that'd tell apart half of them, which means that the Days of Wonder probably knew...

"But anyway.  Most things can't sense magic.  Or maybe the human body does instinctively and that's why we're living people; I haven't bothered to look into that.  Though I suppose your coming from a non-magical world would pretty much settle that!  Assuming your body does work the same way as ours!  Either way, to actually do anything with magic, you need to catch it and conduct it, and for that you need - well, if you don't have an Elf or a dragon or something like that, in practice you need wood or leaves from one of a few plants."  She taps her wand.  "Even crystals can't catch it, though they can store it.  And you also need your own living mind behind it to direct the wand, of course.  You envision it with your mind and direct it through the wand."

"...Why of all the bloody things would it be sapient thought?  I mean yes of course it would be, given the premises, but there has to be a reason even so - can you do it with live plants?  What happens if you do a graft?  Why can't crystals store magic?  The center of the planet is just a bunch of highly pressurized metal!  Unless magic, but it's not like I exploded because iron stopped existing, or maybe iron started existing and that's why I haven't exploded, or a bunch of variations on the simulation hypothesis that basically mean nothing actionable - why is it thought that you need to shape magic, can you tell if my computer has the magic-shaping quality, do you have an instrument to test whether I can do magic - oh, bloody hell, I need a voice recorder or some other way of taking notes - okay, cuing that up and - " she reiterates most of her questions - "okay, hypothesis, whatever ended the Age of Wonders was or involved a magical ritual to make all the crystals we can't readily find, magic sinks.  How could we disprove that..."

Aeslin stops abruptly by the corner of a flowerbed.  "Magic sinks, as in they naturally take in more and more magic?  That would actually explain some of the weirder stories about the Crystal Mountains... but if so we'd expect to hear a lot more weirder stories, and we could go to the Crystal Mountains to test it out... or more broadly, with other crystals around the world, we could trace the large-scale trends in the magic field, which we somehow haven't been tracking because nobody thinks it's important enough!

"- oh, and I've got a few spare wands in my workroom; you can try one of those, and how can we connect one with your computer?"

"Science is the art of failing to prove yourself wrong, I should probably remind you, but that really does sound like a good idea!"

"We would need to have a wholeass project to engineer 'connecting magic to my computer directly', probably; there's layers upon layers of specifications I don't have handy and we would thus need to rederive from the example.  Unless magic is very do-what-I-mean, which, I don't trust near an irreplaceable item anyway."

"It is on the elementary level, like the simple light and motion spells.  But things more complicated aren't, and even there it's easy to move something too fast and hit your friend.  - Oh, and you were asking 'why sapient thought' - well, I think the best guess was the one about how being a person is itself using magic, but your being here disproves that... assuming you're a person in the same way as the rest of us are, which it'd be some level of evidence for if you can do magic... come on, let's try that!"

She starts off again a little faster than before.

A moment later, she adds more softly, "... and a broader test tonight, though I still can't be sure to distingush..."

"A broader test tonight...?"

Yes she does want to do magic though!

"Oh - my dreamwalking spell.  I've seen some animals' dreams before, and different sorts of people's - humans and Elf and Dragon - and there're clear differences, though I can't say I can be sure to distinguish any differences."

"Oh wow, that sounds interesting!"

"It is!  I wish other people would actually learn it - I figured it out years ago, but I'm still the only human who knows how to do it!  It is really difficult, though, but it can't be much more difficult than some of the ward work I've seen - say, that right there."  She points with her wand at a large stone building with a bas-relief of a dragon carved over the door.

"Bad portrait, by the way.  I can only guess it was trying to be symbolic, but I've no idea what symbolism."

"Hm, sorry, what about the ward-work?"

"The wards on that hall - they protect from decay in a dozen different ways without stopping intentional expansions, let alone the conditional lockdown wards -"

She suddenly blinks and shakes her head.  "Oh, excuse me, I forgot you don't even have a wand yet.  But look how well the wards have worked; you'd never guess it was more than three hundred years old.  Or, well, what does your world do with buildings?"

"I'm pretty sure we've got some thousands-odd years old castles still around somewhere, not to mention the cave paintings, but, eventually, to dust everything returns, y'know?  Still, we can keep stuff in pretty good shape if we try.

"And modern architecture?  Well, they're skyscrapers for a reason, when they're not endless duplicates of the same suburban house churned out almost factory-like.  There's a couple four-digit-height-in-meters buildings, I think, though I don't know that for sure."

"Skyscrapers..."

Aeslin stares into the sky, off toward a few clouds in the distance.

She shakes her head.  "I don't think everything returns to dust here, though I'm not sure if we've rediscovered any really lasting preservation spells... and for that matter, I wouldn't know for sure if the Age of Wonders' spells would've decayed anyway after a few thousand years; we don't have an inventory from back then..."

She shakes her head again and starts walking again.

"I have no idea if magic produces a net increase in entropy over time, yet!"

"And I have no idea what entropy is!  But here's my Workroom."

She taps her wand at a closed metal door in the stone wall ahead of them, about twice as wide as a house door on Earth, and then pushes the door open.

The Workroom is walled with bare stone, with shelves on one wall holding blocks or beams of several different materials, and a wider top of some (closed) cabinets bearing several things that look sort of like gyroscopes.  On one of several tables (their tops marked like graph paper) in the middle of the room, a phosphorescently-glowing piece of what looks maybe like copper, as big as a forearm, is sitting in the middle of four crystals.

Aeslin waves her arm around the room, and then goes to one cabinet.  "There're spare wands in here... let's see, yew or gopher or tayrilee..."

"Entropy is the tendency of a closed system's disorder to increase over time, ultimately trending towards, somewhat ironically, homogeneity in temperature and the sum of motion vectors of particles and...so on and so forth.  The pattern of breakage spontaneously happening, rather than not that spontaneously happening.

"...note to self, see how hard it is to make a Maxwell's daemon."

Aeslin whirls abruptly, a curious look on her face, two wands in her hand.  "A daemon?  Is that some sort of golem?"

"Maxwell's daemon is a thought experiment someone had; the original concept involved a tiny demon watching particles of a gas bounce around between two chambers and opening or shutting a door depending upon how fast they moved.  There was something I heard about information-theoretic entropy still increasing, though, so it might not actually be negentropic even with magic involved, but I still want to see how hard it is to do with magic.  Oh, hm, while I'm on the subject of thought experiments, another potential way a hypothetical someone could've messed with the ambient magic is probably something like a Warlock's Wheel, which is - well, a science fiction author's device that consumed magic to, mostly uselessly, Spin Really Fast and hold itself together under the strain of Spinning Really Fast.  I doubt it's actually the thing that happened, but I did have the idea, so, I figured I'd mention it."

She's still staring at Mira.

"I don't think a golem could do that... I hope... but that might be simple enough for a spell... though why wouldn't we have seen it already... we'd need several counterspells just in case..."

"...hmm?"