"...Okay. I think my ancestral environment left me rather impoverished to think in more spatial dimensions than three."

"What is an ancestral environment?"

Shrug.

"...Is this a good moment to dispel whatever creation myths you grew up with? At least the ones relating to the origin of sapient beings?"

"I mean, it's not like I believe them, but I don't have very good competing hypotheses."

"I meant that we were trying to work our way through the space-distortion. The ultra-condensed explanation is that lifeforms change over time and the changes that allow the continuation of the individual's line, causing a gradual process. Now give that process a billion of years and super-small organisms can become," he waves at them.

"And that has what to do with the ancestral environment?"

"Oh, right. Basically... the place where the evolutionary process happens influences the species even after they've long left it. Humans, at least in my world, evolved without the need to think in terms of four dimensions, so there is no reason we would be good at it."

"...huh. That... is a very elegant idea."

"Yeah, it explains all sort of things. The fact that humans evolved in multiple worlds confounds some of it, but in the case of Elsewhere and annexed worlds it can be explained by the magic having some sort of bias towards humans."

"Yeah. Anyway, back to the problem at hand," she says, looking at Temperance, "you were saying it's more likely to be an artefact than a spell, in which case... if we could find it and break it..."

"Well, the key problem is finding it and breaking it? I suppose it's protected?"

"Mostly finding it, we have lotsa oomph to break it with. If it's not just, you know, enveloping the place or something."

"Do you think it's a single artifact doing the entire thing?"

"I think it'd be very, hmm, expensive to make more than one so we should assume so until proven wrong."

"I was thinking that it would be safer to have more than one, but they could be that sure of their capabilities and we didn't find a second source of storm."

"It's safer in the redundancy sense, but that trades off against expense and difficulty—two artefacts like this would interfere with each other and it'd be exponentially harder to make them."

"I know, but I can't say I would've thought that the magic storm was possible before I saw it and I don't want to underestimate the ancients."

"Fair enough."

"Okay, if it's an artifact how do we find it and break it?"

"It doesn't necessarily need to be findable from this side," she sighs. "...but our magic sense isn't exactly constrained by space the same way our sight is."

"Okay, I feel rather extraneous to this task. Do you think there is anything useful to do while you two try that?"

"...maybe investigate the spire?"

"Sounds like a plan."

So Kaede and Temperance go off to stare at empty space.