Professor Larsen listens raptly. Daphne leaves after a minute citing a mage friend to talk to about translation spells.

The professor knows her theory as well as Nick does! Wonderful! Here are some books, here's Nick's vague speculations on how to get manufacturing kickstarted...

Well, for manufacturing he'll have to talk to the Engineering professor. Conveniently, Professor Larsen knows which one and where that is!

He continues to explain more advanced and elegant forms of internet architecture along the way. Sketches and notes are telekinetically deployed.

This is intensely fascinating and possibly a bit over her head but she manages to keep up anyways.

He's definitely not a teacher. But teaching is a lot easier when your student is so fascinated. He shows off the extremely convenient features of his tablet's programming language by walking her through programming a simple game in the time it takes to find the engineering professor.

Excellent. And then the engineering professor ("Martin Banks, how d'you do) is located and drawn into nerding.

Nerding could continue for quite a while. He is such a nerd. Critical mass of nerdiness causes a chain reaction of fascinated discussion. Unfortuantely for the engineering prof, he doesn't have advanced tools on him nor can he get them easily. There's a thing that might help for that but it's secret.

Can they improvise? Not all the way, of course, but they are in the engineering department of a fair-sized university, and there's a metalworking shop nearby.

Hm, maybe. A lot of this stuff takes rare metals or dangerous chemicals catalysts and so on, they'd have to secure permission from the chemistry department.

Perhaps that could be accomplished by showing them 150 years of chemistry advances?

The chemistry department gets involved. The chemistry department is enthusiastic!

At this rate they're going to form a nerdiness singularity. This is exactly what Nick hoped would happen.

He doesn't let go of the tablet at any point, though. Information security: Is a thing.

Well, that's reasonable. And if anyone doubts this Professor Larsen can discuss data security until they decide to drop it.

Yeah, literally nothing in this world is currently capable of communicating with the tablet by a method other than looking at the screen. Nick makes sure to only show the things he's not planning to sell, and nothing about summoning.

Where'd Daphne get to? Various people want transcriptions of books, some of them have almost written books' worth of notes.

Daphne is over there in that corner talking to a biologist one of the chemists brought in, and also a young man with rather thick glasses. She waves when she sees him looking for her.

He flits over and says, deadpan, "You've been sucked into the nerdiness amalgam, there is no escape now." To the glasses guy, "Hello, I'm Nick, the guy having lots of fun distributing future knowledge."

"Hello, I'm Cecil," glasses guy says, pushing his glasses slightly higher up his nose. "I'm a magician."

"And a biology student, and highly appreciative of the nerdiness amalgam," Daphne assures him.

"Aha, a magician. Any ideas for the fabled transcription spell?"

"Transcription's easy," he asserts. "Translating information from one data format to another would be much harder, if you wanted to do that, but just copying text onto a page from the screen is quite straightforward."

"It'd be nice if you could grab a whole book, diagrams and all. I can set it into latin alphabet plaintext with a nice simple dot kay tee eye format for the images if that makes it easier."

"If you could get the entire book to scroll past extremely quickly while a spell is cast on the device, that would work, but if I have to retrieve anything that doesn't physically exist as an image at any point during the process then I have to convince the magic to read the device's programming regardless of how it's designed to render visually."

"I can set up a scroll that displays images along the way, just a bit of fiddling."

Tap tap tap, tinker tinker. He fetches paper. "Let's try it, this is the data structures book Gail wanted. Tell me when to have it run."

"Alright then..." he arranges the paper in a certain way on a flat surface, and says some seemingly-random nonsense words. "Okay, go."

Scrollscrollscrollscroll. It takes several seconds.

And the paper flips over rapidly, like the fluttering pages of a book in the wind. They take longer than the scrolling to complete, but only a few minutes.