"Yes, I lost focus - I don't have a memory palace, but I could try thinking of it as my dream-house?  That's inside my mind too, even though it doesn't look like it when I'm in the dream."

"A what now?  But - possibly?  I don't know what that is, but if it's some sort of lucid dreaming construct, it should very probably work?"

"'Lucid' dreaming... you mean, magic dreaming?  Yes!  Or not just magic dreaming; it's normal dreaming too but - well, I mentioned my dreamwalking magic?  I've gotten pretty familiar with how my dreams work!"

Aeslin weaves her wand in the air, more intricately this time, casting a variant of the first set-spell that would normally enable her to dreamwalk once she falls asleep.  But instead of that, she ties up in it the simple light spell...  which would probably make her glow while asleep?  Maybe she'll try that sometime... except that she instead triggers it, and casts it on the light-square.

It works!

Magic flows from the light-square and lights a new light!

... and then about ten seconds later, Aeslin gets distracted and the red light-square evaporates, and the new light with it.

"Woo!  We did it!"

A knock sounds on the door

Aeslin, ignoring the knock, exclaims, "Let's see how efficient we can get the power run through it!"

Another knock sounds, and someone slips a note under the door.

Aeslin angrily flicks her wand, and the note flies over to them:

"Miss Mira,

"Her Majesty Queen Elethy Ever-True most urgently invites you to her royal court.  All formalities will be waived; come as you are without delay."

"...aaaaaaaaaah?  Okay then um can you come with me please."

And, erm.  Off she goes!  Kind of terrified about this!

"Oh - sure, I guess I can wait these experiments.  Don't worry; she's just curious about you and how you came here... and probably what you have to say about a world without magic too."

Aeslin glances around the room, shrugs, shoves her wand into her belt, and opens the door outside again.

"Over there in the old palace," she says, pointing at a building taller than the rest, with two towers on it and stones more ornately carved.

"Thank you.  Authority figures I don't know the rules about, they spook me.  And, uh, you've ever interacted with Her Majesty before and I've interacted with you before, so, uh, cultural translation?  I guess?  Is how I'd put it?  I dunno, I'm just...it's scary!  ...and it smells like plot...which is not a rational thing to believe, but my entire worldview is shot, so I don't know how much I should."

Anyway!  Walking now!

And she's keeping that wand in her quick-access pocket, just in case she needs it.

"Authority figures... but she's different; she's the Queen!"

"Yes well I'm not from, a culture that's grown up with her?  And most of my referents for Queens and Kings...could be assholes."

Aeslin stops and stands still for a moment.  "Wow.  That... must feel strange.  Or, I mean, different.  Even if you get a good ruler at some point, if they're humans, they'll die, and then who comes next?  No wonder you don't trust your rulers."

"Even a single immortal ruler can get run over by a stagecoach, and then where are you?  Let alone if there's something they fuck up about consistently.  Uh.  Anyway.  Less morbid, more meeting, probably."

And not-being-late-to-the-meeting, aaaaaaah, off she goes!

Aeslin, visibly deep in thought, leads the way.

The attendants at the door to the Old Palace building (wearing the same dress uniforms as the ones outside, but without swords) nod to Aeslin as they enter.  She leads them through some halls without talking to anyone or pausing anywhere, until a reception room even more ornately carved than the rest, where one man in a differently-ruffled uniform throws open a silver-paneled door with an engraved crown on it, intoning "Mage-Researcher Aeslin and guest." 

(Aeslin walks in without bowing or curtseying.)

There is something of a rictus grin upon her face, plastered there because she can hardly let the internal screaming out.

Queen Elethy looks like she could just maybe be human.  Her eyes look sort of tilted toward a cat's - but it's not clearly inhuman; there could be a human somewhere with those eyes.  Similarly, the proportions of her face are nothing you could put your finger on as not human... but she's clearly several standard deviations away from any human you'd expect to meet.  She's standing in front of her throne, and looks up from talking to a man at their announcement.

She's wearing a glimmering green dress and a silver circlet with her black hair braided around it.  Another silver circlet appears to be floating over her head like a halo.

"May it be well met, Miss Mira.  I hope you have not been disappointed in your time in Suinel?"

Mira strangles a squeak before it passes her lips, and, after a few moments of collecting herself, decides to fix her gaze on The Hat.  It is a very good distraction from speaking to the most important person in the country if not the world.

"I have been positively impressed, to speak the truth of it.  Your people have welcomed a lost stranger with kindness, your science and industry stands within a stone's throw of a thousand years' effort of mine, and also there's magic, which my people don't have."

"Thank you."  She smiles.  "I do not know how far we could have gotten without magic - but then, we do not have a thousand years of effort without it, and five hundred already feel too long to meet my dreaming and visions - are you sure there is no magic in your world?  Or are there merely no beings or plants that let you interact with it?"

"If there was magic beyond that which our authors dreamed of in their stories, I knew of it not, and while I am no polymath, I do consider myself well-read.  If magic existed, I would think there would be some evidence to find, in our delving to the subatomic and piecing together of history til moments after the beginning of it all.  And yet, here I am, so to quote a playwright of some renown - there are more things in heav'n and earth, than are dreamt of by our philosophy."

Queen Elethy steps forward in interest.  "Tell me about how you have done all this without magic?  And what else have you done?"

"Let's see...landed a man on the moon and brought him back, several times, with less weight of computer technology than I have in my pocket right now in terms of space available...a network of geosynchronous communications satellites...the entire Internet for that matter, whereby you could consult a million libraries from the comfort of your home...built mile-high structures...turned flight from a thing man merely dreamed of to a routine business annoyance...delved to the bottom of the deepest sea, where no light shines save what the creatures down there make, and seen the strange creatures of the sulfurous geothermal vents where the continents crash together or break away...sequenced the blueprints of humanity.

"Made one truly terrible weapon, whose production I will not speak of - but it felled cities, even as we later turned the technology to peaceful ends."

"Oh, and, Aeslin, do the thing, please?"

"We've discovered how to hang an invocation in a construct of pure magic!  And put a repeating loop in it to make it do the same thing again!  I've only gotten it once so far, but..."

She focuses her mind again on the act of making the light as a single object, and twirls her wand in a slow spiral again to build up the square buffer...

And again, above it, one light blinks with magic from the buffer.

Queen Elethy doesn't have a wand out, but she stares at the demonstration with growing smile and wider and wider eyes.

"Amazing!  The very idea never came to my mind - even the simplest golems require material components!  The magic looked somewhat strange to me... but you do it freeform, with a standard wand?    Are there limits in principle to how long it could last, or how complicated the instructions?"