"I'm good at mathematics and physics, I was a good Explorer for the Explorer's Guild, I found several artefacts..."

"What do you mean by artefact?"

"Magical artefacts left by the ancient civilisation that existed before the Three Kingdoms were formed."

"Did you bring any to Fairyland?"

"No ancient ones. There are newer ones in my backpack."

"What do they do?"

"One of them is a tent that is larger on the inside; another heats up food and water; another is an identification token used by the Explorers' Guild; the backpack itself is an artefact of the same kind as the tent."

"Are any of them potentially dangerous to handle?"

"If one does not know how to use the one that heats things up they may get burnt, but it is easy to learn."

"How are they made?"

...he doesn't know about enchanters?

"Certain humans are born with the ability to create artefacts, and then they can turn mundane objects into them by spending some of a form of magical energy they produce from birth called mana."

"Can you do that?"

"No."

"How difficult is it to acquire these things?"

"It depends on the specific effect you want, Master. Artefacts can be purchased, and the more complex ones are luxury items or owned by nobility, and many of the ancient ones are impossible to reproduce and are also typically impossible to legally acquire and would need to be stolen."

"What sorts of things do those do?"

How the fuck does this guy even know what humans are and not that.

"A great many things, Master, from the absurd and useless to the inimitable. There are giant stone spheres that roll from one place to another for no discernible reason, there are huge floating cities, there are extremely complex golems, there are information management systems..."

He can go on for a while.

Thorn is interested.

Eventually: "What are you afraid I'll ask?"

"The names of various nobles and people of royal blood."

"Why?"

"Because the way the government is set up controlling certain key people would allow you pretty arbitrary control over the Three Kingdoms."

"What else are you hoping I won't ask?"

"About the other types of magic humans have access to."

Smile. "Tell me all about them."

There's some leeway in that order. ...The whimpering fairy girl who has regained some vocalization capacity a few doors down the hall may speak to how wise it would be to use it.

...

"There are three other kinds: arcanism, elementalism, and metamancy.

"Arcanists work like enchanters in that they start producing mana from birth and can bind magical effects to things, but not like enchanters in that the things they bind these effects to are actions rather than objects. When an arcanist has bound an effect to a certain action or set of actions the effect is called a spell and the actions are the incantation, and they can use the incantation to make the effect happen. Arcanists can also make magic scrolls that can be used by nonmagical people to reproduce the effects of spells they have bound. Making a scroll always costs more mana than just casting the spell that scroll contains.

"Elementalists can apply magical effects, called blessings, to themselves. Unlike arcanists and enchanters, they do not have an infinite amount of mana that they recharge constantly, but rather each individual blessing has a finite quantity of mana which is recharged only while that blessing is active.

"Metamancers cannot generate any magic but they can perceive and manipulate it directly, steal other mages' mana or absorb the mana in scrolls and artefacts, and convert one mana type to another. It's believed they can do more than that but there aren't many records or studies about it as performing metamancy is a sin."