She's just pulled out her calculator for something - look, sometimes you really do want to play a simple and stupid game on LCD instead of some grand graphical monstrosity - when there is a yank from somewhere behind her gut and a sensation of motion in ways humans are not designed to be moved.

And now it is the middle of the night and she is in a swamp.  Lit by torches?

"Excuse me.  What the actual fuck is happening here.  Is this some sort of - absurd hallucination?"

She - stands up from what should by all rights be her desk chair, and notes that her proprioception has failed to report banging her knees on the table when she takes a couple steps forward.  "...Regrettably, probably not.  What the fuck, wizard dude."

"...I must admit I am also at somewhat of a loss! Let me just check the galvanic couplings... perhaps you might be a Tulpa? I hear they don't generally understand their own nature, though..."

He is busying himself with some rickety constructions of twisted metal, which look like they may have just been struck by lightning, and have melted and fused together in awkward ways.

"...if I was a magician it would be much easier to determine your nature immediately, but I am afraid I am merely a humble experimentalist."

"...Galvanic couplings -- what the hell were you doing, I don't even know electricity beyond the lies-to-children versions and I can tell you that ain't gonna do shit except start a bloody fire.  Especially if you pump a wholeass lightning strike through it!  Use a bloody generator!  I don't care if it's hand-crank!"

"The fuck is a Tulpa?  Like I know what Earth thinks those are, assuming I'm not some whole-cloth invention of whatever bullshit just happened - my reference points directly to 'a deliberately constructed thoughtform in someone's head' - but clearly you have different understandings!"

"Hand-cranked generators are all very well for making someone's hair stand on end, or creating an impressive looking spark for the layman, but they have availed us nothing in the science of," he yanks open a box which contains some submerged metal ingots, "the combination of metals!"

While she is no doubt marvelling at the successful electroplating, he adds as an afterthought, "oh, a Tulpa is a manifestation of the stars, generally in the form of a confused individual who wants something very specific, or to impart some kind of gnomic wisdom."

...She peers at it closely.  She even seems somewhat dubiously impressed thereby.

"...Wow, you actually figured out - is that an electroplating setup? - while not knowing jack and shit about what you're doing.  Do you even have batteries?  Wish I had a chemistry textbook, I was never that good at remembering which thing reacts with what, how..."

"My esteemed colleague keeps having theories about batteries, but lightning is not, regrettably, a substance which can be stored, by any means we have yet discovered... unless you have come from the stars to tell us how it is done?"

"Well, no, you can't store lightning, lightning isn't a substance to begin with, it's the consequence of a charge equalizing between the upper atmosphere and the ground!  But what you can do, with specific setups I don't believe I know the details of, is create larger charge differentials over time.  ...Capacitors shouldn't be too difficult to start off with, actually, I think that's just two conductive plates with an airgap in between..."

"One can create a little tame lightning with friction, but it soon dissipates.

...should we retire to my office? We must needs keep this a little away from the city, but at least I could provide you with a sketching table, if you are the kind of thing that can produce diagrams..."

"...No, no, the lightning is not a thing, it is a loss to entropy --"

"Yes, paper and pencil would be greatly appreciated, though I can't say I'm a draftswoman of any skill.  And speaking of which, I am, to the best of my knowledge, a fully realized person, such as you are, so please do not call me a thing."

"A Tulpa would say that," he replies, distractedly, harvesting a couple more boxes from his contraption to take with him. "I suppose, as the Provost keeps telling me, it doesn't do any harm to have a little courtesy, though - I apologise."

Near the experimental site is a little stone cottage, which turns out to be haphazardly supplied with workbenches with various metallic objects, writing surfaces, stools, chairs, ink bottles, quill pens and oil lamps. There is what looks like a bed over at the other end like an afterthought, covered in papers.

She nods.  "It doesn't matter if I am a Tulpa if I still have feelings of my own, is the way I'd put it.  Still - apology accepted."

And then, they arrive at the office.

"...Oh dear.  I have never written with a quill before and I'm informed they're rather finicky.  Not to mention dipping the quill in the ink every other word is going to be a hassle.  Fuck, this is going to suck.  ...Suppose I probably ought to introduce y'all to ballpoint pens while I'm at it.  Then again, I'd put money on your machining being equally as bad as your knowledge of electrons, so it might be completely useless.  Maybe at least fountain pens...Have no idea how the fuck those work, but I bet I can take a running guess at it and not be too far wrong in the results..."

"I think we have some pens somewhere, the quills are just a little more disposable." He opens a few drawers full of haphazardly arranged objects. "Ah, here," he says, triumphantly brandishing a dip pen with a finely crafted metal nib. "I hear in Sarvos they've come up with some elegant mechanism to keep a reservoir of ink in one, but we do go through a lot of pens here, so we make do.

Or I could fish out a pencil, if you'd rather?"

"I think I'd prefer a pencil, as long as it isn't writing with actual lead; lead is bad for your health.  Like.  Incredibly bad, do not even touch it bad, most certainly do not ingest even a single speck of dust bad because it builds up and fucks up your thinking and doesn't go away bad.

"There's a type of battery that uses it, clearly as punishment for my sins.  ...That's a joke.  What even is religion like, around here?"

"And - I rather don't think the trick to upgrade from dip pens to fountain pens ought to be that hard, it's just..."

"Oh, a precise tiny hole, right, no fucking manufacturing.  What was I thinking.  That this would be easy?  Haaa.  No.  It is not.  And that's not even getting into the unknown interactions of magic with what little physics I can confidently restate!"

"Fancy Sarvosi coloured pencils use lead, but ours are graphite, it stands up to hard use better; it's a byproduct of lightstone, the processing to get the veins out whole enough is a bit finicky but Holberg has it down to a fine art."

"Oh thank goodness, graphite is a lovely material.  Lightstone?"

Leonardo unearths a graphite pencil; it is somewhat more uneven than the modern variety, but serviceable.

"Yes, lightstone, it's what Urizeni and fancy types use for light - we could have afforded some if we hadn't put all we had into the experiments, of course, but it's hardly essential, especially with the Thule selling lamp oil cheaper these days now they don't feed their slaves on it."

"...Of course there's slavers.  Why the fuck wouldn't there be.  Augh.  Alright, pencil, thank you.  Fun fact: Graphite is a collection of little tiny single-layered sheets of the exact same material that is a primary component and catalyst of all organic life.

"...Well, that's discounting that life is mostly made of water, but aside from that.  Carbon is the king of o-chem.  ...Organic chemistry.  I know very little about that, really, other than it being stupendously complex, but I do know that.  And I believe there's something to do with graphite and the orderly transfer of electrons, for that matter.  ...Or was it...no, it's not strictly resistive, there was that thing about carbon nanotube 3D batteries that one time...Er, as contrasted with '2-D' pile batteries.  Obviously all of them are three-dimensional in their actual dimensions, we're not in Flatland.  And Flatland doesn't really make sense as a place anyway, it's just an analogy of how to think about four-space spacetimes rather than a fully reified physics..."

"Oh, the Thule emancipated all their slaves when the Senate demanded it as a condition of free trade, or something. There are still plenty of Grendel and Druj slavers to be getting on with, though."

He looks increasingly lost at the explanation, starting at 'organic life' and not really improving from there, almost going cross eyed with the effort of trying to piece it together.

"I'm not sure I quite follow there, I'm afraid?" he admits, eventually. "Organic material is more Elena's field, I'm sure she'll be fascinated."

"If you did understand all that I'd have been very surprised; I'm just throwing everything I know or think I know at the wall and seeing what sticks.  Do you have a theory of atoms?"

"There are a number of theories of atoms, but so far nobody has satisfactorily proven that everyday substances such as iron and copper are not simply continuous?"

"They're very small, but eventually you run into something that can't be broken down further without - some very exotic conditions, which is what my people called atoms because at the time we figured it out nobody knew why electricity worked.  Electricity is the movement of electrons, which are sub-atomic particles, which are themselves made up of even smaller exotic stuff...We haven't figured out precisely what's at the bottom of the chain yet, but there are theories, and I believe there's a smallest possible length, too, so there's some ultimate limit.  Assuming that your universe works the same way as mine, which I really shouldn't!"

"Right. Well, we do have a very good microscope, Elena insisted she needed it to work out what was happening to the frogs, but if it's smaller than a blood cell we probably can't resolve it with what we have on hand."

"You can't; atoms are a thousand times smaller than even cells.  Which is a conservative wild-ass guess.  I believe it wasn't until the electron microscope that we actually imaged atoms, and that's...A long way from where your deviciery stands.  You need electrical computers, first, and then developments I don't even know.

"...Oh boy.  Question, what color does lightstone glow, especially if submerged in water?"