"May as well be now," he says, as he finishes the writing around his circle. "Remember to do all the writing before finishing the circle. And not to summon anyone else until I can go through a good book on bindings."

"Yes. I'll let the child know that you'd like to be dismissed."

That happens! Nick has about a minute before he returns to whatever place he was summoned from.

He patiently waits out the minute scanning interesting desert landscape from high above.

And he calls in favors and downloads a lot of books and even acquires an honest-to-Raezenoth printer.

In four hours, he gets a summon.

Which he takes, of course.

"Hi!" says the woman who summoned him, brightly. "Welcome back, I'm Rae's acolyte, nice to meet you."

"Hello, and likewise." He takes a curious look around at this new person and location, then floats out of the circle. "I'm Nick, if you hadn't heard."

Their surroundings seem to be a cave of some kind, and the person seems to be a twenty-something woman in practical put nice looking clothing, well-worn shoes, and a vial of sand around her neck.

"Idania. So! I hear you have books?" She looks at him, and his visible lack-of-books, and raises an eyebrow.

Out comes a tablet computer - a flat metal square with a lighted screen on one side, he floats forward a bit to hand it off. It is displaying something in a foreign language. "Getting it to translate them takes some time, alas. I could try and figure out what books would be most useful while it's working, unless you can think of something more fun to do."

Idania inspects the tablet with fascination, then looks at Nick and grins.

"Probably! But - how does this work, am I correct in assuming that it contains all of the books ever...?"

"Not all the books ever. A lot, certainly, but according to some estimates there are over ten billion books in existence in my world. The library I put on this has a few million."

"You know what, I'm feeling generous, just a few million can count as all of the books ever for our purposes," says Idania lightly. "So how does it work - it seems kind of like magic, but I bet it has something to do with the light and how the light's changing, does it keep a, a tiny library of some kind inside that it displays? How does it make light? Is its mechanism for making light infinite, does it need to be wound or fed with coal or something?"

"Now that is a couple weeks' worth of explanation. Hmm, short version... It's not magic, it does have a tiny library, which can hold words and pictures and instructions for how to display things or whatever else just as easily. It knows what to display because of a thing called a processor, which is basically reading instructions someone wrote, called programming, that would take up several shelves of a library by themselves, and doing ridiculous amounts of math very very quickly to carry them out. It makes light with tiny machines that use tiny amounts of tame lightning, electricity, pulled from a battery. Same mechanism as the flashlight, just smaller. It does need to be charged up again sooner or later, but I brought a generator which catches motion and turns it into the same tame-lightning."

"That sounds really, really complicated, and I want to know all of it yesterday."

"Computer engineering and programming books are first on the list, then. It'll speed up the translation if I load up the right program and repeat everything we say in a couple other languages, do you mind? I can try to explain things while it works."

"No, go ahead. How many languages do you speak - how do you speak this language, Rae can't have taught you all of it and he didn't mention you having language powers - let me know if I ask too many questions, I can stop if they're annoying and just hover over your book-thing for months instead."

"Daeva learn their summoners' languages, presumably to help with negotiation. Let me count, I've been doing this for a while......... About 300 if you count different dialects, more like 100 if you don't. I know what it feels like to meet new tech, ask away."

He tap-tap-taps on the tablet to bring up a screen with a bunch of little pictures, then a slightly less book-like thing that has written down their conversation so far on one side. Nick touches the first sentence and starts jabbering away in what doesn't seem like just one other language. The other side accumulates words, color-coded to link up to the ones on the left.

"Okay so you said it was powered by 'catching motion,' what motion is caught, is it built specifically for your awesome magic powers?"

"Magnetism does more than just lodestones. There's proper books to explain it properly but the short version is when a magnet is pushed around in the right way, it pushes on electrons without needing to actually touch them, and gets pushed back as expected. I'm not explaining this very well, am I? Well, it's complicated. Lightning and electricity are just different kinds of moving electrons. The traditional generator is a spinning thing inside a long coil of metal wire. It doesn't actually matter where the spinning comes from - you can boil water and have the steam spin the thing instead, if you're not a fairy. I'm not sure if humans or fairies invented it first, but I'd bet on it being humans."

"What are electrons, do they have characteristics besides being pushed by things? Are they just in lightning and electricity, or are they in more things?"

"Hm, this involves chemistry and I never was very good at chemistry. Thinking..." He investigates the language, does this language have a word for 'atoms'? Or at least some of the elements?

It has names for a lot of the elements, or to be more specific, Idania knows names for lots of the elements, and not all of them are in this language. She probably doesn't realize they're elements.

It does not have a name for atoms, however.

"Wait, this is chemistry?" Idania giggles a bit. "So guess what I'm good at!"

"How lucky. So, an atom is one of the simplest possible materials. Atoms are made of smaller things, but that's not relevant yet. All physical things are atoms, mostly chains and blocks of them. There is a list of substances that are made of atoms called elements. To name a few: Hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, sodium, iron. Atoms are made of protons and neutrons, which are themselves made of quarks but let's save that for later, with a shell of electrons around them. Because of how the electrons are arranged, energy levels or something I'll have to find the book, the most stable thing for an atom to be is sharing some of its electrons with other atoms. Water is two hydrogen atoms sharing electrons with an oxygen atom."

Idania is going to interrogate him about science for a while. How much will Nick tolerate her science-related questions?

Reasonably well, though he gets frustrated if she keeps pursuing things he claims not to know much about. He does call for pauses to help the computer learn the language. And occasionally throws in some sarcastic jokes, when he thinks of a good one.