"Standard wand - Mira did it with my spare tayrilee, just a couple minutes after she touched it for the first time.  I imagine we'd need to hold the instructions in our heads, unless we can delegate that part to a crystal... Mira?"

"Aside from - being able to hold enough of the relevant instructions in your head to use the intent-capturing trick on them to begin with?  And I mean you can probably get reasonably complex with that, or rather, the thing is that rather a lot of things are surprisingly simple when magic lets you 'do what I mean' at them.  I think the only external limit I can think of is, uh, magic and the availability thereof, but that's Aeslin's field of expertise.  It was - I figured it out mostly because I could tell magic to 'hold this effect for this long', and that's still data - is still memory, when freeform magic is 'supposed' to not have any such thing.  The rest was mostly bashing my head on metaphors until magic gave up on trying to stop me.  ...which reminds me that I probably ought to follow up on why GOTOs felt different from attempting a regular loop, despite the fact that it didn't work as intended.  A lot of science starts with 'huh, that's funny'."

"You would still need the magic itself, yes, to keep the construct alive... but perhaps it could be connected to a live tree, or perhaps even the light of the stars themselves..."  She stares off into the air for a moment before shaking her head, and the coronet hovering over her head twirls with it.  "Ah, I was remembering the Age of Wonders."

"...the sun is a star, too, if your cosmology is anything like mine - which I have very little idea about but do suspect to probably be true enough.  Incidentally.  Not sure if you'd know.

"...and I should probably see if you can make dynamos...really need to learn how magic here upends the physics I know.

"...What other things did the Age of Wonders have, that you miss, if I might ask?"

"The sun itself a star?  Then it would be a very unusual star - either larger or smaller than the others, depending on which theories you follow, and with much less of a magic field.  But ah!  Would that I had time to study physics with you.  Perhaps together we could rebuild the flying carpets and everlasting fountains and wells of transformation and oracle-bones of the Days of Wonder, even if we could not bring back the lost Fay, let alone the lost Elves..."

She stares off into the distance again, a haunted look on her face.

"It's just much closer than any other, actually; astronomy's not my best field, but I know that much.  It's...if this sun is the same sort, if the sun was the size of my fist, the planet we stand upon would be as dust.  There are bigger and smaller types of stars, though, funnily enough; color's a decent guideline.  Blue is a hotter 'flame' - which isn't really what stars do - and reds are usually biggest or second-smallest, depending upon whether they've exploded yet.  Yellow 'main sequence' stars are firmly middle-of-the-pack."

She shakes her head again and frowns.  "The stars are not my focus either, but we can see how big they appear, and thus how big they must be if we knew how far they were.  And if the sun were an average size, then the stars would be close enough that they would seem to move over the year.  Is this another difference between our worlds?"

"Or the sun is regular-size, but the stars are incredibly far away; so far away that their precession takes aeons, and all we observe are the brightest and closest.  I could probably do some trigonometry to check, one way or the other - really, anyone with some straight rods and standardized units of measurement ought to be able to replicate Eratosthenes' experiment, it's just trigonometry plus facts of geography.

"It goes like this: The curvature of the planet is such that there is some point, on some day, where the sun will not cast a visible shadow from an upright pole.

"You find that point, and then take another measurement of the shadow cast by a pole of the same height, a reasonably large distance away to the north or south, and preferably at the same elevation.  You should observe, if my model of the world is at all accurate, that there is a shadow cast.

"This allows you to calculate the circumference of the earth reasonably well, despite the fact that it's not quite right since the planet's spinning squishes it a bit and, uh, elevation is a factor.

"Then, using those numbers, you can construct a triangle with those rods as two points and the sun as another; the rest is just plugging it into a squared plus b squared minus two a b cosine C-the-angle, slash otherwise exploiting the fact that triangles are pretty easy to pin down if you know enough about them - and I'm pretty sure we would, in this case.

"But actually...have you ever tested that 'the sun is less magical than other stars' hypothesis?  It seems eminently measureable."

"Yes, we have tested the sun's magic and the stars', and the stars give us more, for all their small apparent size.  But I do not recall anyone measuring the distance to the sun or the stars... Aeslin?"

"I don't remember anyone doing that either, Your Majesty.  But I might've missed it.  I'm still wondering if we can tell for sure whether her world really doesn't have any magic...  Do you know of any way to measure the influence of ambient magic?  Preferably in a human body... or presumed-human; I still haven't checked."

"...or the sun is already giving us magic, or it's something about the magnetosphere, or there's something else influencing input..."

Elethy stares off again.  "I remember that in the Days of Wonder, there was someone who could detect signs in humans' bodies of their having been near more magic than normal, even after some time had passed, so presumably there is some way to tell that a human body has been near less magic than normal, even though she is now here in normal magic..."

She doesn't shake her head now, but nods.  "Yet I do not know it.  And yes, perhaps the sun is already giving us magic.  If it is a star - and if, somehow, it is really the same size as the other stars - then that would make sense."

"...or you're drawing from a whole crapton of a lot of stars and only one sun!  Because there's stars you can't observe behind the stars you can - how do y'all normally specify, when you're doing that?"

"We normally don't...  Do we know any higher-magic areas where we could test people for figuring out how to tell if her world really has no magic..."

Queen Elethy's face instantly looks grave.  "The Crystal Mountains."

"And that would allow testing the 'whatever the fuck happened, it might have just started pumping the world's magic into crystals' hypothesis while we're there - but.  Uh.  Why do I feel a sense of impending plot?"

"Speaking of which, maybe you should hear about some of the other ideas Mira had...  We haven't tested them; they were just stories in her world; I don't know if they'd work here, but if they do..."

Elethy had been giving Mira an appraising look, but she turns to Aeslin.  "How bad?"

"Er, not as bad as the Last War.  Not urgent, though."

"A lot of them do depend on the idea of magic being finite.  I don't know how Elves work, but I'm told you just produce magic, internally?"

She shakes her head.

"No - as far as we know, magic is produced by the earth and sun and stars - perhaps I should specify, both the fixed and moving stars.  I can manipulate the magic directly, without needing a wand or other intermediary tools."

"...those 'moving stars' are proooobably other planets, actually, like the one we're standing on.  By the way.

"Anyway, I could have sworn...but if you say it's not so, well, you're the primary source on elves.  Do you have any idea what the heck kind of process creates magic?"

Queen Elethy and Aeslin both shake their heads.

Her breath hisses between her teeth.  "Don't like that.  ...Does the moon create magic."

"No."