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?"

"It varies widely, depending on the source, likely due to impurities and inclusions - I believe the fundamental operation produces a rather stark white light, uniform across the entire visual spectrum.

One of its advantages over conventional light sources is that water does not particularly affect it, other than the usual refraction effects you would naturally expect."

"...well, it's probably not radioactive, then.  ...I really fucking hope it's not radioactive.  Because I am very fucking uncertain why there are graphite inclusions in rod shapes in lightstone, and my best guess is 'I don't know of anything else that uses graphite rods except nuclear fission, because graphite doesn't occur in rods naturally - I'm not sure if it occurs naturally at all, if I remember and understand anything about crystal deposition, I have vague feelings about it coming mixed with clay for some reason - so there must be something fucky going on, and it could be a surprise crashed spaceship that for some godforsaken reason had a fission reactor on it - why the fuck they'd do that I haven't a clue, you want a radiothermal generator for lastingness and fusion for power and also refueling' - but if it was a nuclear fission reactor...

"We'd be kind of turbofucked!

"Well, no, it depends upon the age of the spaceship...

"But the rocks are still glowing...

"...Do they fade, whatsoever?"

"Only if you disrupt the crystal lattice - not just by itself. Sometimes people complain of them going out unexpectedly, but usually it transpires that they have dropped it and are trying to pretend they didn't break it.

The graphite occurs like any other mineral inclusion, it's just that large enough inclusions can be carefully chipped into rods convenient for pencils."

...She very carefully exhales, in relief.

"Okay.  It's Magic Bullshit.  I can work with magic bullshit."

"There is a considerable quantity of Magical Bovine Excrement loose in the world, alas. One simply has to make do around it.

I believe you were going to explicate the secrets of capacitance, before we meandered to talk of magical excreta?" 

"Yeah.  So.  Capacitance.  ...First, we need to talk about resistivity.  Might even need to talk about thermodynamics, but if you'll take as given the idea that - much like objects fall down, there is a sort of gravity to the states of being where everything's mixed together, when the universe is engaged in normal operations.  Even if that's really entirely backwards of the model my world's scientists use.

"...Magic obviously fucks with this, because the probability of a spontaneously appearing off-brand polymath is so close to nil as this entire house jumping three feet in the sky is, but.

"In general, and there's a bunch of equationy shit I'm leaving out because I don't know it very well - things move towards a state where the average energy within the universe is equally distributed, when not perturbed by an outside force.  (Such as magic.)

"Except that sometimes, that is hard.

"Your roof would not break if you dropped a sheet of paper on it, unless something very weird was happening.  ...And the sheet of paper would hardly be recognizable as one, at that point, but I digress.  Your roof probably would break if you dropped an anvil on it.

"That making sense?"

"Spontaneously appearing people are considerably more likely around here than jumping houses, especially if they might in fact be tulpas.

You are referring to entropy, yes? It is harder to unmix pigments than mix them, that kind of thing?"

"...Honestly, that the word for it is tulpas is going to rub me the wrong way the entire time I'm here even if I am one on the merits, which I have no idea how you'd actually go about testing other than seeing if I spontaneously dis-appear later; it's honestly probably closer to the original 'some sort of mental entity that either is in the way of or induces revelation and I've forgotten which actually but probably the former' that I-don't-know-who-came-up-with-the-meditative-practice defined, but I constructed my own dang self and 'the universe' as mostly represented by this planet's collective unconscious as-reified doesn't get to take credit for me.

She nods when he mentions entropy.  "Didn't know if you had the word for that yet, so I figured I'd better explain it from first principles.  Anyway.  Entropy is also - constrained by degrees of freedom; it's possible to construct a system that creates a region of very high energy that is nonetheless not producing entropy in the area under consideration...

"Oh, excuse me, I appear to be getting sidetracked.  We were talking about electrical resistance.  ...I don't think that needs to get into quantum anything...

"...Maybe it's worth explaining anyway, though.

"So!  The thing about those very small individual particles that all substances are presumptively composed of, is that -

"To observe them, you must change them.  Now, maybe magic is magic and lets you do magic bovine excrement - but imagine a world composed of - bouncy balls like so."

She actually has one in one of her pockets, in a garishly neon pink and white swirl; it bounces back to her hand when she throws it at the floor.

"It's actually magnets, mostly - but we'll get to that later.

"Anyway.  You're trying to figure out where one of these bouncy balls is, or how fast it's going, and your only tool for doing so is bouncing a ball off of it.

"That's going to alter your results!  There is a fundamental uncertainty in quantum matters precisely because of the nature of observation.  Don't even get me started on the double-slit experiment, I don't think I know how to reconstruct the requisite 'observer' and if I'm making claims like 'light is a wave and a particle' I want to be able to prove...huh, I wonder if that is also magnets.  ...Probably not.  Photons aren't charge-bearing.

"Anyway.  That weird and fascinating diversion into quantum mechanics aside, there's a relevant concept of...

"...Why am I going off about probability, anyway, wouldn't that mostly only explain leakage and not the underlying principle of capacitance...Well, I don't really know the underlying principle of capacitance, E-E isn't a field I specialized in, which you would think would be pretty stupid considering that everything I did relied on electricity, but it was so far below my level of abstraction.  I worked on things built on things built on things built on electricity, and that's a short stack of mostly the hardware and not anything I'd have to explain in and of itself.  It's like concerning yourself with the mining process of the metal gears you've bought to make clocks with, except that in this case I'm not a clockmaker but someone who assembles functioning clocks into hellaciously complicated musical instruments.

"...Considering some of the hellaciously complicated musical instruments I've seen in my life I think that's giving me undue airs, honestly.  I was hardly capable of assembling a metaphorical one-woman band, let alone the several dozen instruments and autoplaying functionality of - what was the name of the thing - ugh, that's going to haunt me, I'm not sure I even ever knew - anyway, I'd barely consider myself competent to whittle out a metaphorical single-key flute.  ...There are some very complicated flutes, on Earth.  Well.  I say 'very complicated' but children could play them.  Not build them, though, there's gotta be some funky stuff going on with the hole-cover things...I've been a loyal member of my school orchestras for as long as I've been attending - some dozen-plus years, starting from...holy shit I think I could count as having played for almost two entire decades actually - but I only played strings, not winds.  ...Damn, and your violin bows are totally going to suck, the modern shape is - well, modern -"

"...Anyway.  Sidetracked again, good grief, me.  Sorry, that just sorta... ...is.  Known hazard of having my sort of brain, unfortunately.  I get rather wrapped up in whatever comes to my attention, and much falls by the wayside."

"A priest could tell you, I suppose, if you were interested in your precise nature.

The effects of witness are understood by us, although it is more of a Urizeni field of study.

It sounds as though you are acquainted with the shoulders of some considerably taller giants than we stand astride, to have conquered and tamed lightning thus.

I don't suppose you could sketch your idea of a capacitor, such as we humble folk may be able to one day construct?"

He is mostly being exaggeratedly polite, but it does rather shade into sarcasm by the end.

Oh dear gods why is that so desperately funny.  Don't laugh.  It really isn't funny whatsoever.  Okay it is a little - but still!

"Yeah.  That's, well, you got me there."

"Honestly, I bet we could bodge something together from what you have on hand, but the big problem with replicating my world's technology is that - you don't have industry - this pencil looks handmade - and that then because you don't have industry you can't really - the trick to the vast quality of life improvements of my world, is standardization.  Being able to know that there will be hundreds of thousands of the same screw, rather than having everything be custom-ordered.

"Being able to bake a hundred loaves of bread with the push of a button.

"Not having to catch lightning from the sky, but instead harnessing the motion of the world or the light of the stars to make your own."

"I'm not entirely sure what you mean by industry, I imagine you did not intend to insult our Prosperity." While quite a lot of his words sound a bit like they might be pronounced with capital letters, that definitely had one. "We have production lines and highly industrious workers. There are even some machines that build other machine parts with only unskilled operators, although they're more fashionable in Holberg."

"Right.  I stand corrected, then.  So the question becomes, why the heck is what's going on in Holberg not spreading like wildfire?  Historically speaking it rather ought to!  It's just straight-up more effective for most things!

"...Surely someone's automated spinning and weaving..."

"There's the spinning wheel and any number of varieties of loom. The Dawnish have an entire magical tradition based around it, presumably because they go through so much cloth because not a single one of them has heard of 'less is more'."

"Have they made any powered ones?"

"I'm sure I heard of a clockwork one over in Holberg, and the Urizeni obviously have their Ushabti do it? Clockwork is rather finicky, though, and it's not hard work on the modern lightweight varieties. And at this rate it's not as if the Empire is going to run out of orphans."

She winces, at the "orphans" line.

"...The Ushabti-powered ones don't count, that's just using magic to replicate man-hours.

"As for clockwork, that's also rather not my field, though it is in a sense my field's great-great-ancestor.  Wish I knew more about the first programmable looms...I know they did use punchcards, but not how.  Bah."

He appears to be completely oblivious to her facial expressions.

"Here in Temeschwar we primarily focus on fundamental advances in the control and utilisation of natural forces. When we're not busy running tawdry mining and forestry concerns, in any case."

"Watermills?  Windmills?"

"Oh, yes - not up here, mostly, a little bit in some of the mines now, mostly you'll see donkey mills instead, the wind and the water aren't predictable enough.

But the Marchers love their windmills and the Dawnish adore water wheels, and the Brass Coast do both here and there."

"Alright, then.  I'll hope you know how to convert rotary motion to back-and-forth motion, and then I'll tell you that you ought to get a big magnet, stick it on one of those, and push it back and forth through tightly coiled conductive wire to generate electricity more reliably than hoping lightning shows up.

"And the inverse is also true; electricity can be converted to motion in magnetic or magnetizeable objects.  I saw someone spin iron like that so hard it melted, once.

"...There's other ways that you can get the magnet to shove the electrons around, but I forget the precise details of them."

"...Ooh, do you have the telegraph yet?"

"Yes, we can do cog wheels and such. How big a magnet? The largest lodestone I've seen is about the size of my fist, although I have not gone specifically hunting larger specimens.

The sight lines aren't clear enough up here, but Urizen has the Heliopticon? It's only really practical in those big clear mountain ranges, or if you happen to already have a lot of widely spaced tall towers around."

"It's not really 'how big a magnet' by itself so much as how strong the magnet is and how fast you can get it moving.

"...And no, the telegraph is not the clacks.  ...'scuse me, literary reference you wouldn't get.  But - no, not a light-based system.  ...Well, maybe one of those later, but that's once we can actually do radio...Man, I wish I knew how those old crystal radios worked.  Anyway.  The Heliopticon is indubitably impressive - but it sounds like you have to actually have someone looking at the signal?  We can do better than that.

"With, of course, magnets!

"Well, actually, electromagnetism.  I don't believe there's permanent magnets involved.  Do you have some copper wire I can test with?"

"Certainly, what thickness do you need? There's the heavy duty conductive strips, the binding wire, and some very delicate wire for connecting very precise areas."

"Let me see what you've got; probably not very thick, though.  And a dowel to wrap it around?"

Leonardo rummages around and produces a box of somewhat haphazard long flat copper scraps, a neat coil of somewhat lumpy wire varying around a millimeter thickness, and a small reel of thinner wire.

"Does the dowel need to be perfectly round? There are small square cross section supporting struts, that we use to space out pieces of equipment. That's the closest I have on hand."

"I'll make do; honestly I may as well use my fingers.  ...Do you have a lodestone or any other magnetized object..."

...Right.  Now if she just...

Coil the millimeter-thickness wire tight for the magnet, a long tube...

An antenna - she'll just do - A Jacob's ladder, maybe, there's hardly lightbulbs or anything, she just needs visible evidence -

"...y'all can do better than this at drawing wire, how do you even get something this lumpy, the lumps are supposed to be smoothed out by the process of drawing it through the dies...

"Anyway.  I have almost no idea what I'm doing.  But if I'm right, we'll see some better-behaved lightning in here soonish."

...She just needs to get the experimental setup standing up.  Can't rely on gravity without vertical orientation...

"To get enough length we had the medium wire re-melted and hammered."

He hands her a tiny scrap of lodestone on a stick. "Mostly we just use this for fishing iron scraps out of awkward places, I wasn't aware it had electrical applications."

"Electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin!"

...What happens once she drops the magnet down the tube?

(Please do something, please do something, please do something, please do something!)

It does something!

It crackles ominously and gives her a nasty shock, probably to be accompanied by some blistering if she doesn't do something urgent about that. 

"What in the absolute hell is fucking with - that is ILLEGAL!  BAD experimental apparatus!  The sparks go that way!"

She then sticks her fingers in her mouth because ow, and, after a minute or two, declares the following:

"We are being fucked with.  There is no mechanism by which this should have shocked me.  And yet it did.  Something very strange is happening here, even beyond my spontaneous existence."

"Well, yes, that does tend to be the price of progress. Would you like me to take a look at that? While the arts of the physick are no longer my primary profession, it behooves one in my position to keep a little knowledge regarding interesting wounds."

"No, it's not - 'the price of progress' - this is literally not how physics works.  The induction coil cannot spark like that.  Not 'shouldn't' - can't.  Literally physically impossible according to my best model of how electrons function, and with how it was so specifically vengeful?  There were better places to ground to, even if I was wrong.  I made sure of that as best I could!  No, this result has to be some sort of magic at work or I'll eat my fucking hat.  Notwithstanding that I don't have one.  ...That said, something for my fingers would be great, actually."

He reaches into a pouch and pulls out a little pot of bright green salve and a roll of light, gauzy bandage. "Let me see... yes, it should only take a tiny bit. Other than the superficial burns, you are feeling all right in yourself, yes? No unexpected torso pain, sudden aches, dizziness?"

"I'm not having a heart attack, no.  I appreciate your concern.  There's no way that should have produced enough current to cause one, and fucking yet, with what just happened, I can't blame you for checking!"

Leonardo slices off an appropriate length of bandage with a small knife, uses a tiny silver spoon to measure out a portion of salve, and then distributes that onto the bandage with what looks like a tiny palette knife.

"This might sting a little at first, but it should clear it right up," he says, wrapping it carefully around the affected area. "Best to keep it on for the next couple of hours to keep the new skin safe, it can still be a touch delicate."

It feels like Sophia's fingers are going through pretty much the entire process of healing the burn in a few seconds, which is in fact what is happening.

"...wow, that feels really weird -- how does it do that?  What is it doing, actually?"

"It's your natural healing process, just sped up a bit. As for how, I'm afraid herbalism is definitely out of my area of expertise. I expect it has a little Spring magic in it, although now that I say that I can fondly imagine the college's herbalists having a several hour discourse about how that is reductive and magic-centric of me."

"Gotta wonder how that impacts aging.  Anyway - I think we need to investigate what the heck is happening magically when we do electrical experiments, if we ever want to actually do any without this...interference."

"Unfortunately frequency of True Vervain use is already heavily correlated with not reaching one's natural lifespan for a large number of reasons, which makes study of this topic rather challenging.

Elena can do a little magic, certainly enough to see if there is an active effect. Naturally produced lightning does not have a Realmic alignment, nor does the friction based version, but we had not previously introduced a lodestone - they also aren't Realm-aligned in and of themselves, but the Winterfolk tend to claim they are a manifestation of hearth magic, and there might be an astronomantic connection."

"...Of course you have adventurers.  Why am I not surprised.

"...I doubt you'll find whatever's fucking with us in the materials.  And I bet it'll replicate if I use an artificial magnet."

"...you can construct an artificial lodestone?"

"Yeah, just drag a magnet along some iron.  In the same direction, repeatedly.  Oh, and if you have iron filings...

"...Damn, I should have gone for that."

"For what? We likely have a box of iron filings here somewhere, the ironmonger presents us with a discount if we return the filings and offcuts. It is sounding as if we may need a better lodestone?"

"Nah, this ought to be plenty of magnet - although it'd be better if it wasn't on a stick, for this, really -"

"It's only slotted in and held by rabbit glue, it wouldn't be difficult to do again if you'd like to break it apart."

Oof, the poor rabbits.

"I think I'd like to."

She'll just...create the exact same experimental setup, now with some iron filings spread carefully on the table as well - but she'll activate it from a much greater distance, thanks to having broken off the magnet and worked up a place to leave the magnet (with the supporting struts' assistance).  Then she'll poke it down the tube with a stick.

Sure, that demonstrates some Vigilance, iron filing patterns are pretty harmless.

Less ominous crackling, more iron filings lining up in approximately the expected fashion.

"...Yeah, we're being fucked with."

"Could you be so kind as to inform me of your hypotheses, and how the results differed therefrom?"

"Simply put, the way the sparking didn't happen now, is evidence that something was up with it the first time."

And what happens, if she repeats this without iron filings?

Little bit of crackling. Nothing exciting.

"...See?  It's still not supposed to do that!"

"What is it supposed to do?"

"So I never did get around to explaining resistivity properly, but - under precisely no circumstances should there be intra-coil discharge, on account of how it's so much easier for the electrons to flow through the copper, like water in a pipe, and there's not any interruptions in the connection either."

"What would you have expected to observe, then?"

"This bit I set up in a way that should've been conducive to electrical discharges, if things work like I think they do.

"...And even if the electrical discharge was supposed to happen - There should not have been such variability.  I dropped the magnet from the same height; it should have produced the same results."

"Perhaps your manufacturing simply has greater precision than we have achieved; while the results of the same actions are often similar, we find that ordering effects and subtle variability are rather common."

"...No.  Same action, same result.  That's not even physics it's math!"

"I hear mathematics does indeed work like that, although it's never been directly my field of study. For everything else, well, things go awry."

That definitely sounds like some kind of standard aphorism at the end there.

"Oh, sure, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, but -

"You can't get more energy out of a system than you have in it!  And yet!"  Dramatically-timed magnet drop!

Such flair! Such pizazz! A big fat zap obediently issues from the discharge point. There is now another scorch mark on the ceiling rafters, although it is slightly hard to make that out amongst all the others.

"Like magic!"

...She turns to face the apparatus properly again, and thusly observes the scorch mark.

"...Oh, bloody hell, we're operating on Spark rules?  I don't know how you've gotten this far!"

"I continue to have very little idea what you are talking about. We have got this far through diligent Wisdom and Vigilance, and no little Prosperity on the part of the Provost."

"Unfortunately memes are the DNA of the soul, and I may or may not be a creature entirely composed of such!"

Beat.

"Which is to say, I'm steeped in the culture and ideas of things even my homeworld would consider vaguely niche; just - ask me to explain, it's what I'm here for.  ...Or at least I'm choosing to believe that; it's not like I know.

"Anyway!  Sparks.  With a capital S.  They put the exclamation points in," she does a voice, and cues the lightning, "!!SCIENCE!!!!!, and reality and its piddly little rules bend to their will, because they're just a little bit mad!"  And, honestly, so is she, with the way this world is.  It's kind of terrifying.  But she carries on, with an aside sweeping her own terror-mania beneath the rug:

"Which is to say, completely fucking bugnuts, ninety percent of the time.

"They're not a real Earthly thing - but they're a semi-prominent archetype of mad scientist in our fiction.  And there's rules to how they work - or more like guidelines."  This is also clearly a reference to something.  "And the biggest thing about them, is that they're just a little bit creatures of narrative, as much as they are only creatures found in a narrative.

"Notice the difference between the stories you could tell of these experiments.  And, while I think I already know that our divinations won't find anything - think about the stories this world is telling you, with how and why the lightning fails and succeeds.

"It wants something, and if we seek to advance scientific knowledge, we must find it.

"I wasn't expecting my encyclopedic knowledge of literary tropes to be so useful as my kenning of the sciences, but I think I've found a good little niche to settle in, to help you shape the world.  How's that sound?"

"...yes, if you call the attention of the stars, this is the kind of thing that does start happening.

I suppose we are here now, so we may as well make the best of it."

"...No, no, no.  Absolutely not.  Not like this, this is entirely narratively flat.  I mean yes, you may as well - but the thing is, you need to commit to it.  You need to feel it in your bones.  Like it's inevitable.  Because it is.  You might not have sought the stars' attention, but it's been on you all your life, for as long as you've had one.  ...I'm not going to even start about world-of-fiction multiverse theory or the simulation hypothesis, though.  Let alone Last-Tuesdayism.  That's too many earth-shattering revelations for one day and I've been having a very long one.  I think I need a nap.  And you should sleep!  Probably!  I don't know what your schedule's like, actually, are you just - on a permanent night shift?  But if you're up as late as I was, hypothetically...  We both need to get some fucking sleep.  Pardon my language."

"I really think you should talk to Elena.

And most likely the Provost, at this rate.

If you wish to avoid having to extensively explain yourself at this late hour, you could take the bed here and I could return with breakfast and some of the others at a more civilised juncture?"

"That sounds like a wonderful idea.  I'm honestly rather a night owl - or at least a late afternoon cat - but I could definitely do with some rest.  ...I don't want to put you out, though."

"No, no, I'd want to be in place to rally the troops on this anyhow. Assuming you are not going to mysteriously disappear in the night, but I don't suppose either of us have a way to determine that one way or the other, and at least I can show them the interactions with the lodestone if you do."

"Indeed you can!"  She grins.  "So I've definitely accomplished something other than yelling at the world for being annoying and changing the rules out from under me.  If that's all I get, I think I can take it.  ...You'd probably best get around to rallying the troops, so...  I wish you good luck in that endeavor - and good skill.  And I think I haven't given my name yet, so - you can call me Alicia Nye."

"Leonardo von Temeschwar, of the College of Engineering, Department of Experimentalists."

He essays a moderate bow. "There are some pretzels in the third drawer down if you get peckish, the well out the back does usually function, chamber pot is under the bed, I'll arrange a servant to come by tomorrow so don't worry about dragging it out to the sump."

Chaaaaamber....pot.

"...oh dear, you don't have indoor plumbing.  I don't know why I'd have thought otherwise...Well.  Magic existing might have been a factor, but I hardly have any idea what it does, in practice..."

"We have indoor plumbing in the College! Just not out here in the hills yet, I'm afraid."

"Oh, that makes sense," she murmurs in faint, distracted response.  "Can't wait to get back to civilization, then."

...there was something else - ah, shit, bowing!  Etiquette!  She visibly starts, and sort of gets stunlocked between a bow and a curtsey and a handshake for a moment.  "Oh, and - Um.  Please don't stand on ceremony on my account.  America, the United States - my home country, it basically doesn't have formality to speak of, unless you're a lawyer - or I suppose a big-money businessperson, though I'd argue the point - and I'm neither of those things.  Oh and I suppose there's priests and such, but - well.  I'm not religious - anymore at least, because if the sort of monotheistic god whose faith I was raised in exists, he's a dick - and the government constitutionally sha'n't meddle with things like that.  So even if it existed I wouldn't know, let alone feel like I should receive it.  ...It's rather a point of pride that we don't have the hereditary nobility that generates fancy etiquette."

"Oh, I do apologise, I shall inform the others they should think of you as a Marcher and they should get the idea.

We do have a religion, but it certainly has nothing to do with gods, and... I should take my leave or we will be discussing comparative philosophy all night."

"I thought I heard Capital Letters around some of those virtue-words.  And I have to admit that I'm certainly no better at keeping my mouth shut!  So - do go do your thing!  Before the theology conversation catches up to us!"

Leonardo hastily exits the building. And absent mindedly locks the door behind him.

Right.  She's going to...take a nap.  Hopefully.  If the amenities are sufficient.  ...She's glad she doesn't need to pee.

It's actually a pretty good bed, assuming the user isn't allergic to feathers.

She's not allergic to feathers, at least, though she's actually used to firmer mattresses, overall.  Probably.

(Oh, and not sleeping in her clothes, that's...probably not helping.)

Still, it isn't actually horrible.

Leonardo heads back to the College, manages to restrain Elena from rushing over immediately, and is woken up somewhat earlier than he'd like to explain himself to Provost Sienna.

All in all, it's no more than a couple of hours before noon when he and Elena will get back to the outbuilding.

And she will...maybe be awake then!  If a bit bleary-eyed.

There is still definitely a person in there, though!

When the door opens, she looks rather like she's been through some shit, overnight.  Sleeping is not her friend, and she is consequently rather rumpled.  "...Good morning?  Glad to see I haven't vanished overnight, at least."

"Leonardo is very sorry for locking you in all night, aren't you Leonardo."

"Uh, yes, I do hope you were not too inconvenienced," apologises Leonardo awkwardly.

"I hadn't actually noticed yet, so - no harm, no foul.  I think I actually woke up, like...just nowish?  I am not a morning person, and time is an illusion anyway.  You should fix the door, though; it's a fire hazard.  Doors that can't be opened from the inside, I mean.  There's a pretty famous example of that killing people, back home; I'd rather not repeat it.

"...And, uh, I'm pretty sure there's something you can describe as the linear passage of time, it's just, my brain's not very good at it.  Sorry for the confusion.  ...Though I suppose that if you go for the quantum-probability models...  Anyway!  Ah...thank you, miss...  Um, I don't believe I know your name?  Yet?  And I'd like to, you seem nice."

"It can be opened from the inside if you have a key," insists Leonardo. "It's just that someone gets quite aggrieved when I forget to lock it, you see."

Elena ignores his peevish whinging. 

"Hi there! I'm Elena, and I'm flattered, I rarely get accused of being nice.

I hear you've brought us a new way to generate tame lightning, and 'quantum probability models' sound delightfully intriguing...

But we were sent to see if you needed some breakfast and whether you'd be amenable to lunch with the Provost. She'd quite like to meet you, but we do like to keep her away from the shed, it tends to make her ask us awkward questions, like 'where did all the frogs go' and 'have you been exhuming cadavers again'."

"What you should have on the inside of a lockable door is a simpler 'slide the deadbolt in or out' or 'engage or disengage the thingamajig that keeps the handle from turning', sort of thing, not anything requiring a key, though.  ...Hm, how even do locks work around here, anyway?  I might know some useful things; wasn't my field of study but I'm rather a generalist."

Elena's quips, afterwards, get her to laugh.  "Breakfast would be much appreciated, please.

"...I think I would be amenable to lunch, if a bit terrified because I don't believe I've ever spoken to a university's provost before and I don't want to mess something up."

"Would you like to come up with us to the dining hall, or would you rather we brought you something here? I wasn't sure of your tastes, or I'd have brought you a basket down. The bacon will probably all be gone, but there's several kinds of porridge, eggs, a considerable variety of breads and preserves, and almost certainly there will be sausage.

We can arrange lunch in a smaller room if you think the high table would be a bit much."

"I'll be quite happy to go somewhere with actual plumbing.

"...Speaking of which, don't put lead in a human body.  ...That's hopefully unrelated, but, can't be too sure.  Apparently lead somethingate was a common sweetener, let alone the lead in the water pipes.  And even traces of lead, a single part per million or billion or something, a single bit of chipped-off lead paint that someone inhales as dust, can fuck you over, because it just accumulates and disrupts the function of the human organism.  Especially the brain."

"I'm pretty sure we don't use lead sweeteners up here, there's no shortage of honey. Don't go to Sarvos, though.

Clearly that's why they're the most vapid Leaguish city and always obsessed with fashion and building giant statues of themselves rather than anything important.

The pipes are lead, though, maybe stick to the fruit juices if you're worried - they're well maintained and shouldn't be flaking off into the water, but you can never be sure. What else do you make pipes out of?"

"Copper, I believe.  Maybe alloyed?  Not sure.  ...Some types of plastic, once you've invented that, but who knows if you've even got the right raw materials; they came about under pretty specific circumstances, back home, and I don't know your geological history.  ...What does PVC stand for anyway...Polyvinyl chloride?  I think that's right but I have no idea how to figure out vinyl.  I mean it's all fractional-distillation, probably, but that's not...enough to go on."

"Anyway, I'll stick to the fruit juices and avoid pewter.  Hopefully.  Damn I wish I knew the process for aluminum that made it not insanely difficult to refine.  My guess is that it's electric, somehow, but fuck if I know."

"We have little enough copper that sounds quite expensive, and I have no idea what a plastic is as a material itself, it sounds like the kind of deformation you can't return a material from?

Or a vinyl, for that matter, although the apothecary department can probably react you up a chloride of it if you do figure it out. Alum we have, I don't know aluminum.

But I recognise this conversational pattern and it's one that means no-one gets breakfast. Do you want to come to breakfast or should we pick up a basket for you?"

"That's a homonym of the material.  I'd rather go to breakfast."

"Oh and while I'm talking about tiny things that can kill you: Diseases!  Those are - mostly, some are deficiencies, like scurvy, or having too much of something-or-other which is, I think, exemplified by gout - tiny things that can kill you!  By hijacking the normal processes of cells - I am told you actually have microscopy good enough to see things that are that small, which is really quite impressive with your tech base and the general circumstances hampering experiments - to replicate themselves.  So you should wash your hands, ideally with soap, before you put them on or in or near anything that could get inside of people.  And, uh, not put your literal actual shit in water that anyone might drink, because that's full of bad bacteria.  And viruses.  And such.  Hopefully you already know this sort of thing.  ...Oh, here's a good one you might not have.  You can derive certain chemicals from molds and whatnot that actually fuck up bacteria.  And there's other stuff that will usually not ruin a human's day but makes bacteria metaphorically shrivel up and die, but penicillin was what came to mind first."

"Yes, yes, we're not Marchers, we know what soap is. I admit it's a bit rough and ready out here but all of our actual toilets have nice hand basins and plenty of soap.

Roseweald or bladeroot can normally mop things up infection wise, but something cheaper to do that would be nice, it does sometimes get a bit grotty in winter when nobody wants to be outdoors.

Do you need to pick anything up before we head off? Run a comb through your hair or anything? I wouldn't worry too much, we do have a number of people who wouldn't know what sheveled looked like if it bit them."

"Oh, good, that's very good to know."

"...Winter is the best season, though!  Admittedly I say this from a position of having electric heaters but I'm right.  And I'm ready to go."  She runs her hands through her hair a bit, detangles a bit that got tangled.  "Breakfast awaits!"

Breakfast awaits down the muddy track that turns into a road someone has at least attempted to put gravel down on, which turns into a cobbled street, and suddenly buildings everywhere rising out of the morning mist, and they are in the outskirts of Temeschwar proper.

Through a great gate in a somewhat out of place white wall - some buildings so far have been whitewashed but 'dingy grey stone' is the primary aesthetic - and now they are in a place which has had Architecture occur, mostly fairly austere architecture but certainly planned and carefully executed and then repeatedly improved.

Heading through an archway into a quadrangle, they pass through a small door set in large impressive double doors and finally obtain the promised Dining Hall.

It is high ceilinged, with vaulted plaster work, and well equipped with dour paintings of mildly disapproving patrons, long dark wood tables and benches, and a servery at one end which smells really rather enticing, if you like pork products and potato scones.

It is FOOD.  That is sufficient.

Also there's jams and such.  That helps.  "So, I know Leonardo is studying electricity; what's your field, Elena?"

"Oh, also electricity, but Leonardo is mostly interested in its effects on metals, whereas I am more interested in its effects on... organic substances."

"Mm!  I presume you've noticed that shocking a muscle makes it contract?  I don't know a lot about the biochemical uses of electricity but I can certainly tell you that electrical potential is a key element of human thought.  Hmm.  What else...

"Oh, of course, water.  As you may or may not know, humans are mostly made of water.  And as you probably don't yet know, water - while not in any sense magnetic on its own - reacts to electromagnetic excitation in specific ways.  ...I forget if microwaves-the-devices are...oh, no, they definitely have to be magnetic fields, I mean, the relevant part is a 'magnetron' and you wouldn't have 'don't stick metal in them' warnings for any other reason...  And those produce the desired effect of reheating cold food by wibbling the water molecules so they heat up, because of the diamagnetism.  ...Speaking of which, on a molecular level motion is heat and heat is motion, or close enough."

"...Wibbling is not a technical term it's just a noise."

"I had certainly noticed the contraction of muscles," replies Elena, "and that a sufficient shock can interrupt the mechanisms of the heart; I had assumed any effect on the mind was due to scarring of the brain.

Humans are mostly made of blood, especially if you count plasm, which I suppose has a considerable portion of water?

Lightning can start fires, but the mechanism is unclear as yet - it does seem to catch dry wood, though, which would suggest water was not directly involved, although I suppose the air does contain water itself..."

"Oh, no, lightning starting fires is just because everything combusts - or melts - when you put enough energy in.  And brain damage...yes, it is mostly lesions.  But the proper functioning of the brain involves little teeny tiny micro- lightning-bolts jumping from cell to cell.  ...There's, like, chemicals that mediate that, but the lightningbolts are the cool shit.  Pardon my language."

"Humans are not mostly made of blood, though, blood, being a circulatory fluid, is just the easiest thing to extract from a human.  The internals of most cells?  Water.  There was a funny little story about that actually, however did it go...

"The beginning of the evolutionary record was all water-breathing creatures, for values of 'breathing' that include 'the ocean just goes along however it likes'.

"And then, evolution, the process of - traits that are more fit to survive the stresses of an environment being statistically - not individually, you can be the best example of your species ever and still get struck by lightning - more likely to be present in future generations of an organism -

"Well, I'm unduly personifying it, to say it 'came up with' anything, because it's a blind idiot god - er, well, not even a god at all, nobody worships it, but like, philosophically speaking - but - it came up with this glorious idea of keeping the fluid it used to move nutrients and signals from point A to point B, inside a sealed system, so it was harder to fuck up the homeostasis - er, the...not dying of heatstroke or poison or suchlike -

"Anyway.  The primitive analogues of blood vessels are still pumping saltwater around, because this is the ocean and that's what you have on hand.  ...I'm not even going to think about plants.  Anyway.  Blood vessels."

"Next, the many-many-times-removed ancestors of today's life start venturing out of their saltwatery homes into freshwater ones, and dying because they exploded.  ...That's a real thing; I think I could probably rig up a demonstration of osmotic pressure from relatively common supplies.  Also to do with why your fingers prune if you're too long in a bath, I believe.

"Anyway - where was I going with that...

"Evolution, presumably.

"Right.  Anyway.  It invents 'pumping extra water out of the cell'.  ...Which is why urination exists, but I'm not going to get into actual discussion of the mechanics there because I hardly know them.

"And then these horrible dumbass creatures stop being satisfied with being in water at all and start flopping around on land, fins into limbs and whatnot - you can see the similarities in skeletal structure - but at no point in this process has it been easier to stop using water anywhere.  It's called the universal solvent for a reason.

"Er.  Might not be called that here.  Still does take most things into solution.  There's no true universal solvent, though.  Not without magic bullshit.

"...Pardon my language again.

"Anyway!

"...What was the point of this even -

"Ah, right.  Water, and how prevalent it is.

"...Actually, y'know what, let's start from the opposite end - a survivalist's adage.

"I think it was once said that you can go three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food - as a rule of thumb, exceptions apply, etcetera etcetera.

"Now consider how much fluid the average human needs to replenish per day.

"It's a significant fraction of their body mass!

"...So yeah.  Water.  It's everywhere."

"We know what homeostasis is," replies Leonardo gruffly, "and osmosis, and we call the watery substance within the cell membrane 'plasm'.

Not so sure on the origin of species, and beggar's lye is our universal solvant but I suppose artifice is sometimes considered a branch of magic."

"You come from somewhere that does worship gods, then?" asks a passer-by who had heard the impassioned lecture and paused with his tray for a moment.

Leonardo gets a yielding sort of nod at the note on 'plasm'.

"I can't know what you know, so I'm explaining all the things.  Even the really basic ones.  Anyway - "

She pauses, mid-thought, as she turns to the newcomer.

"...Hm.

"I think it would be wrong to say that my homeland worships gods in the same way people here might worship gods if there is tangible proof of things that fit in the 'god' bucket existing, and then on top of that my homeland is officially in the practice of trying to maintain strict separation of church and state - but there is a dominant strain of religion, nonetheless, and I probably shouldn't start off by telling you about the dickishness people get up to in its name because a lot of the denominations just end up being people who show up at church on Sundays for the community of it and don't really think about whether there's a capital-G singular God like the tenets of the faith say exists.

"Hell, I was raised Catholic - er, that's one of the denominations.  I figured it for an entire crock of shit around the time I was introduced to the institutional weight thrown behind declaring people evil for existing, but I gave up on actually trying to believe in the - y'know what, I'm not even going to try to explain the Holy Trinity, it's the sort of thing even the priests will get wrong if they're trying to explain off the top of their heads - anyway.  I gave up on believing in the omnipotent creative force and his minions - that are also him somehow - sometime around the time I realized that life sucks.  The problem of trying to cram omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience into a nominally singular figure, that.

"...Wow, splitting those three traits across the Holy Trinity is probably some sort of new and exciting heresy, kind of wish I could see if someone's come up with it before.  Would explain all the Old-Testament-vintage smiting.

"Anyway.

"There's a few big monotheistic strains - Roman Catholicism, Protestantism which, uh, this one guy had Some Complaints and then the schisms started coming and they didn't stop coming so now there's a bajillion sects under that umbrella and some are great and some are awful - and then there's the Eastern Orthodox flavor of Christianity that I know surprisingly little about - and then, you have Judaism, which...I think I could not do justice explaining, because they've been through some shit just because they were there and the faith that turned into Christianity and took over most of the English-speaking world - well, no, I tell a lie, it was the Latin-speaking world then and some two-thousand years later English usurped it like the cancerous admixture of language bits that it is," she says with a surprising fondness, "but anyway - I do keep getting sidetracked, sorry about that -

"Anyway, Judaism preceded Christianity as a faith and there has been a veritable ocean of blood shed about that and that really fucking sucks.

"And then there's Islam, as the other Big Monotheistic Faith that I know to exist and be monotheistic; I don't know overmuch about them either except that they yoinked the 'having Jesus Christ' from Christianity - I believe he's officially a prophet of Islam, but not their the prophet - and they've also got a boatload of rules, which rhymes with Jewish practice.  Though as far as I know they don't have the mostly uniquely Jewish trait of taking those rules and rules-lawyering the shit out of them; I really have to admire the people who invented the proverb of a wise man invoking signs from God Himself to try and win an argument, only to have the other side of the debate go 'Well, now it is three against two.'

"You don't get that out of the doctrine of papal infallibility," she...quips?

"Uh.  Right.  And then there's the poly-theistic faiths, like, Hinduism, or Shintō, which I can do even less justice, and the Satanists who are a middle finger given unto Christianity, and the literal parody religion of Pastafarianism, and the two percent of Australians who wrote in their religion as Jedi, which is from a work of fiction - oh, and I completely forgot the Buddhists!  I have a vague feeling that whatever it is you're doing is most akin to them; they do a lot of - meditation and cultivating virtue, and there's a side-branch of - brain-teasers that are meant to make you think about stuff, like 'what is the sound of one hand clapping', or whatnot -

"Anyway.  There's.  A lot of religions, I just named the ones that I'd expect a reasonably sized town anywhere in the world to probably have at least one of - there's a lot of more-local faiths and I haven't even gotten into the revivals of historical mythology - but none of them have an observable supernal force involved.

"So the answer to 'Do you come from somewhere that does worship gods' is 'Well, that really depends on what you mean by "gods"'!  And if you mean 'the faith asks a seemingly higher power for moral guidance or intercession', yeah, that's most of them - but there's none of them who've ever proven they can, despite the fact that we're pretty sure we know who this 'Jesus' guy was, archaeologically speaking!"

"So, yes, but you're a bit smarter than that? Good to hear.

That doesn't sound like any of the faith systems I've heard of though - it's a little bit Asavean round the edges but they are definitely the polytheistic kind. I suppose the Commonwealth officially doesn't have a religious opinion..."

"We were trying to have a nice conversation about blood and fire and other not at all heretical topics."

"I don't think it's about 'smartness', because the only sort of faith my homeworld could have in higher powers was an entirely ephemeral, intangible, unprovable thing, and that's not what I feel is likely to be the case here.  So I think the entire question of whether my homeland worships any gods must really be premised on your definition of 'god'; I've certainly got the language I'd need to talk about the concept, but there's quite a difference between the average priest and, say, the fantasy cleric that calls power from gods to smite - infidels, or whatever.  Or to draw back to Christianity, there's a series of books set in a modern age with wizards and belief making power and whatnot - and one of the three Super Specialest Swordsmen, whose powers were observably backed by angels - figures of relevant mythical significance and omnibenevolence, if that doesn't translate - was nonetheless agnostic or atheist himself, because he rejected the premise that he should worship this powerful being just because all these other guys thought of it as a god.  Could've just been aliens, for all he knows.  And I'm...mmmm, getting the vibe here that y'all have some Very Important People coming down on the 'gods are just Sufficiently Powerful Aliens and you really shouldn't fucking encourage them', side?  Because if that's the sort of god you mean, then my homeworld couldn't have worshipped any - because as far as we have been able to experimentally determine, despite some accounts of sufficiently improbable, and well-documented, events that some churches have claimed them miraculous - well, there simply are no entities matching that description.  There's not verifiable evidence of supernatural meddling, unlike, for example, the ongoing fuckery with lightning-related experiments.  I half think I could make a grenade by dropping - copper and zinc, I think it was - into citric fucking acid, you know, the stuff from lemons - just because that's not not a battery.  Though of course now that I've said that, it won't work.  Unless it's dramatic."

"...you also have explosives which produce more useful force than a little colour and light and a loud noise?"

"'Gods' don't have actual power, no. It's a pernicious belief system that they do, however, and other entities that absolutely do exist will regularly take advantage of such credulity."

"...Oh, for fuck's sake.  It's in the chemistry too, is it?  Are you even allowed oil?  But surely you must or we wouldn't --"

She pales.

"I think I may have to mark off that line of inquiry as too dangerous, given that to investigate organic chemistry too closely could cause people to start collapsing into mush because they're the material under study.  Fuck, I do not want to create infohazards.  Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!  Um.  I'm going to turn the topic back to heresy because that'll at least only get me killed if I fuck it up, how's that sound.  Here, try this one - the idea that a being with power is not isomorphic to a god is fundamentally absurd from a linguistic perspective; the being that answers when someone calls, no matter what else it is, is a god to that someone."

"It's a matter of cultivating the correct attitude. Can Eternals pose as gods, absolutely, that's the problem. Should anyone worship them, or cry out to them in an undisciplined and unprepared fashion, absolutely not. Which is why subsuming your agency as a human being to any inhuman force is rightly criminalised by this Empire. If you want to make a well-conceived deal with one, and haven't been banned from doing so for past misdeeds, that's quite a different matter."

"Um, it's 'Will and Destiny', not agency."

"Same thing."

"You know, on the one hand, that makes ever so much sense, on the other hand, I feel like it may be too far on the side of 'not letting people make their own stupid mistakes', from a - hm -

"The consequence of criminalizing things is that the people who do it become criminals.  And that's a harm to society of its own; it's the sort of thing a society should try to prevent.

"Then again, cults are bad enough when they're not having mystical powers about it.  Especially when they're - unaligned.  Like somehow I don't imagine you have - I don't know, even something as dubiously aligned to the values of civilization-as-a-whole as an entity that really wants all trades to be fairly valued.  To take a - fictional - example that has its own pitfalls but is generally prosocial in practice.

"On the other hand I should hope you also didn't get stuck with any entities that terminally value Making Everything The Most Worst For Everybody, as another equally-fictional example.  ...Right?"

"You see, thinking Ephisis is 'generally prosocial in practice' is how you get damaging cults in the first place. As a Prosperous citizen of the Empire I am of course all for fairly valued trade - but there have to be, in practice, some limits - it was a Herald of Ephisis we killed at the heart of the international slave trade.

And yes, Agramant also exists - don't look at me like that, Leonardo, being superstitious about the name just confirms your lack of fundamentals on the laws of magic - and sufficiently desperate people will turn to that abomination, too, especially as his values make him very keen to offer survival and superficial comfort, before the other shoe drops."

"Ah."

She sighs.  "Yeah, that's one of the failure modes I had in mind, when I mentioned the fictional analogue.  Though not quite like that!  I wouldn't write Abadar allowing a cleric of his to facilitate international trade of slaves in any but very - specific circumstances; debt slavery basically but with - strict welfare concerns - but even then, you couldn't pay them enough to go facilitating slavers that touch a single country where it was illegal.  They'd get smote if they tried."

And then, she turns to Agramant.  "...Just, bloody hell.  Why is this my life.  You don't even have any Good gods, do you, but noooo, you have fucking Zon-Kuthon analogues and even your pale emulation of Abadar is pretty much shit, because slavery is pretty much never a fair trade.  Especially when it's completely illegal in a lot of markets!  Ugh, this is such bullshit.  You need better gods.  ...Excuse me.  You don't need any such thing, but - the evident lack of any grand-scale entities concerned with sapient flourishing is just - whoever came up with this world, I have words to have with them!  Needs some fucking Aroden.

"...Anyway.  ...Out of vaguely relevant curiosity, are there any - ascended mortals?"

"Yes, we have the Paragons. They're not at all the same thing as Eternals, but that's really all to the good."

"There was that Flint fellow who took over Basilisus Kade's portfolio."

"That is not at all the same thing. At best Flint left an imprint of himself on the Eternal, while his soul went off for a good old stint in the Labyrinth. More likely it was just another trick and the Eternal was wearing his form like a puppet."

"...Well has anyone found his soul since?

"That said, a), what is a Paragon, then, and b), which Eternal with what portfolio, anyway?  Depends on the portfolio, whether they're likely to try wearing a human meat-suit, y'know?  ...And c), more along the line of philosophy, what is a person except the way they are and act?  Souls, evidently, exist, but I wouldn't say I consider a reincarnation of whatever my soul is to be more than kin to myself, whereas a copy of my thoughts and memories would be me at the point it was made, no matter the underlying substrate."

"Nobody has found his soul since, but we wouldn't expect to just yet. I suppose it did show some modicum of Ambition, but generally subsuming yourself into the Realms is not considered a particularly Virtuous action.

A Paragon is a human who has sufficiently understood and embodied Virtue to be capable of miraculous actions, displayed a number of signs of the Paragon such as leaving a great Legacy, and who then transcends the Labyrinth and escapes from the cycle of reincarnation. Some of them are held to have provided miracles from wherever they go after that, especially Vardas of Vigilance, but it's not at all clear whether that is actually the case or whether people inspired by their example attribute their own miracles to the Paragon. Certainly they are usable as a focus of magical power, the Highborn do it all the time, although it's not very fashionable elsewhere; I think that's just because nobody other than the Highborn bothers to study them in sufficient detail, though.

In general you'll find people here identify with their souls; what is your deal anyway, have you crawled out of a regio or something?"

"Appeared mysteriously like a Tulpa, although doesn't identify that way."

"From my perspective, at one moment I was on an entirely different planet, where nobody and nothing was fucking with the physics, living a normal, unadventurous life, and then boom, I was suddenly teleported or translated here in a flash of lightning.  Right in the middle of one of Leonardo's experiments.  ...I feel like it was more 'translated' than 'teleported'; I felt like a fish on a hook, felt like a fish on a hook - which rules out a disassembly-reassembly sort of process, most likely - and didn't experience my inner ear going all wiggy, which contraindicates spatial fuckery other than the whole thing where I'm in another universe."

"...The faith of your polity...

"The Buddhism parallels intensify.  Although generally the virtues they followed were hardly anything like Prosperity.  Attachment to material things was really quite anti-virtuous, as far as I understand their teachings.  ...When you say miracles, how do you mean?  Are they comparable to the sorts of things Eternals do in either power, reach, or scope?  What other explanations exist, and is there anything that would dis-prove 'Paragons did it'?""

"People often get Prosperity wrong, yes. It's much more about rewarding hard work, and ensuring things are put to use rather than left idle, than simply accumulating things. Despise the grasping miser is an important teaching.

Miracles tend to be quite idiosyncratic; spontaneous generation of powerful auras is the most common, which can't be replicated with magic."

"...huh.  Good on you.

"Spontaneous generation of powerful auras?  Auras of what?"

"Virtue, of course," replies Dante. "Look, do you mind me briefly Insighting your guest? And does your guest mind, for that matter? It's just if you've picked someone up from a regio who actually has a soul, it sounds like I'm going to have to sit down and give them some basic instruction."

She is giving him a look, and the look is approximately communicating "Just because I don't know 'what everyone knows' is hardly a reason to suddenly be talking around me as if I am some tween you are expecting to require a highly-euphemised explanation of the birds and the bees".

That said: "I don't have reason to believe looking will do me any harm.  Or particular objections, if the results are mine alone to disclose."

Leonardo shrugs. "Whisper to her, I guess," he says with somewhat bad grace.

Dante sets his tray down on their table and takes a small wrapped object from a waistcoat object. Inside the wax paper is a violently purple blob of chewy candy, which he consumes.

"If you can just look into my eyes - hold still - contemplate your essential nature for me, please - hmm..."

He stares intently, looking like he is in a mildly psychedelic trance, for about ten seconds.

...Why are the drugs magic.  Why is the magic drugs.

She successfully does not fidget the parts of her that he is staring at, having had enough experience with optometrists to adapt, but if he's expecting her to actually successfully contemplate her essential nature, instead of idly wishing she could stab the universe's stupid with a knife until it stops being that way, no matter the logistical absurdity of such a proposition, he is rather out of luck.

"I have to say, I hadn't expected 'surprise isekai' to be a viable route towards ever testing my idle speculation that targeted application of psychedelic chemicals will jar loose the metaphorical gunk in my brain.  You just walk around with that?  All the time?  Good grief.  Not counting the way it metabolized at how the fuck can anything move that fast rates, but that's, presumably, magic."

"Liao, actually. Mind if I lean in to let you know your result? Or we could go off into the corridor if you actually want to keep it private from these inveterate eavesdroppers." He doesn't seem to be very surprised with what he saw, but he also seems like the kind of person who is not easily ruffled.

"Honestly as long as I don't somehow have the soul of a baby-eating mass murderer stapled to me in a mockery of the normal function of life, you can just say if I have a clean bill of health or whatever.  Just keep anything that's actually personal out of it."

"...but seriously, whatever liao is, nothing moves that fast.  As far as I know.  Even 'instant-release' drugs start later and last longer, and while I don't know much about the nasal insufflation RoA of the medication I'm using as a point of comparison - to speak of routes of administration that kick in the fastest, as far as I know - I think that takes minutes at minimum despite its speediness.  And it certainly wouldn't metabolize in ten seconds!"

"Very well, then. This here is a perfectly ordinary human being. I know, I'm surprised too.

Liao works along similar lines to alchemical potions - I suppose you don't know what those are either?"

She allows herself to go snerk at Dante's quip.

"Alchemy is not a science we had any success with, no; its successor field is where I'm getting a lot of my knowledge of the underlying nature of reality from, but I think it's safe to say that it's not robust to whatever your universe is doing."

"Alchemy isn't much of a science," Elena insists, "despite what some serious-looking alchemists might tell you. Certainly there are combinations of components which get results, which could be studied in a scientific manner, but those who pursue the field tend to insist on all kinds of arcane processing steps which are entirely different from alchemist to alchemist, and yet this seems to bother them not the slightest bit."

"That does seem like it's a study of magic to me, alright."

"Magic as a technical term," replies Dante, "is not at all applicable to alchemy, as it doesn't partake of the Realms."

"Ritual magic, at least, is considerably more scientific than alchemy, at least in the formulation if not in the casting.

And hearth magic does not pertain to the Realms either, so essentially our language is just muddled again."

"Don't mind Elena, she'd have us all speaking Gemeinsamesprache if she had her way."

"I'm just saying, I expect they have distinct words for these things."

"Oh, hey, fantasy German.  ...Wait.  Wait a fucking minute.  Is that.  Literally a fucking bilingual pun.  That is possibly a conlang.  ...Anyway.  The definition I use when I say 'magic', is essentially 'any process that cares about not only the actions performed but the intent of those performing them', and I would like to standardize that definition for this conversation, because it's the most useful thing to filter on."

"Alchemists like to claim the intent doesn't matter, but it rather looks like it does from here."

"As much as I hate to admit it, and strive always to correct for it - hearth magic does rather get everywhere.

It's possible that there is, in fact, nothing that your provided definition of 'magic' does not describe."

"Trees falling in the forest when no-one can hear them still make sounds."

"Do they, though? I certainly know people who would contest that is only because Kimus is listening."

"Kimus is an Eternal of Day known for observing things, and extremely tedious philosophical debates about whether anyone can actually prove they exist.

I still think we should put it under Emnity just to frustrate it. It can't continually threaten to sell all our secrets to our enemies if it can't see them."

"It only threatened that because someone stole its table. Which was folly in the technical despise the fool sense."

"...I have so many questions about how physics as we know it could possibly function given the existence of someone who theoretically collapses all the wavefunctions because of staring directly at them all the time.  Though probably the easy solution is that they don't look at subatomics."

"If anyone can observe something while not observing it, it'd be Kimus."

"...Is it weird that I want to ask them?"

"Not that weird, but I think the Archmage of Day is pretty busy right now, what with the whole series of attacks on the Empire she accidentally set off."

"...Well, that sounds pretty bad."

"I guess it's not great, but they were no match for the city watch; it's worse out in the sticks, I suppose, where they had chance to pull together.

As magical disasters go it's apparently quite a big one, but it's not going to come visit us in Temeschwar."

"Who'd she even piss off?"

"Some new Eternal they're calling the Cold Sun. Split off from - Ylenrith, I think? A pity, Ylenrith's always been one of the more interesting eternals. Cares more about maths than physics, of course, but at least she cared about maths at all."

"If you paid any attention to the news, you'd have heard Ylenwe - the other remnant - has been placed under neutrality, so you're more likely to be able to meet heralds of what's left of Ylenrith than you were before."

"...I am confused by this."

"Sorry, yes. What's your current understanding of what a 'Virtue' is, and for that matter what an 'Eternal' is, and what happens to your soul after you die? It sounds like we need to sort out some baseline understanding before you can possibly not be confused by us sniping at each other as usual."

"'There exist certain philosophical concepts that have quasi-religious primacy and possibly significant metaphysical impact, heck if I know how many or which', 'big honking ball of esoteric utilityfunction doing its esoteric-utilityfunctioning things', and 'absolute fuck if I know, seeing as I didn't really think I had one last Tuesday'.  I think you mentioned the whole Paragons-and-Labyrinth thing, though."

"And the reincarnation, which is presumably evident that you've mentioned as well but, to be sure.  And I went on that whole tangent about Buddhism.  Which is really feeling like the thing to analogize from, theologically speaking.  Except maybe with a dash of Catholic saints thrown in.  ...I forget if the fancy Buddhas are, like, relevantly the same guy or - well actually probably it's not a constant, there's Buddhas-as-aspects-of-this-one-guy-Siddhartha-Gautama -" She makes a credible try of not mangling the pronunciation but it's pretty clear that the name is foreign to her - "and, like, Buddhas as in 'yes this one guy with a cult is totally spiritually enlightened', and who knows what else, really.  Not something I really studied."

"Okay, so your Virtues are, Ambition, Courage, Pride, Prosperity, Loyalty... now everyone is going to mock me for which ones I leave to the end... Vigilance, and Wisdom.

Which is in alphabetical order, and not in any kind of priority order.

There are also a variety of concepts with similar metaphysical weight, but that are bad for you rather than good for you, like Vengeance.

Whether you had a soul or not before, you've definitely got one now, so I'm afraid it's probably time to think about what you're doing with it. By default, human souls go to the Labyrinth, wander around lost for anywhere up to several hundred years, then get reborn; being virtuous speeds up the process, as well as eventually building towards understanding the whole process enough to get out of it entirely."

"I wouldn't say they're my Virtues in the sense of my own philosophy urging me to follow them, though that's certainly good to know.  Are there - could you just make one up?  Do they vary not just in presentation but effect by culture?

"...It's hardly going to be me doing any-fucking-thing if I lose all my memories and core values in the doing, similarly - but I do get your meaning.  Apparently the soul verifiably exists."

"You can't just make one up, there are specific things that actually resonate with the soul or don't - the names are pretty arbitrary though, I hear the Faraden call Ambition 'Hubris', they don't like it very much.

The exact effects of anointings are probably culture-bound - only us and Sumaah really use them much, and while we're not extremely similar culturally we mostly agree on the interpretation of the Virtues, so it's hard to test, but anointings have changed over time.

It's generally held that while you do lose your memories - unless you get to call them back with a past life vision, but those are rare and expensive - your core values are exactly the kind of thing that are preserved, which is why it's important to develop a strong, Virtuous set of them."

"Anointings, you say?"

"Ah yes, let's cover Things You Can Do With Liao. You've seen Insight, looking at the state of a soul.

You can also do Anointing, which gives someone a temporary shove towards one of the Virtues, like I could make you more inclined to keep your commitments, and able to draw on that strength to counteract other effects that might make you not do that.

There's also Dedication, which aligns your soul with a Virtue - it's mostly useful in conjunction with the others, you can only have one Dedication at once and it affects what Anointings and so on you can do.

And there's Consecration - like Anointing, but a more limited range of effects and on a place rather than a person - and Hallow - which puts the effect on an item, you then feel it when you're holding or using it, along with a little description if you like.

The others are a bit different: Testimony lets you put a couple of words on the soul, that you can read back off with Insight, and that probably do something to help you retain qualities when going through the Labyrinth but we don't have solid evidence of this, sometimes you get them back from past life visions though.

Exorcism lets you affect spiritual entities - ghosts, possessing entities, souls in jars, sometimes when a soul's been knocked out of place a bit by a past life vision, that can happen if you're not careful in them, some kinds of curse...

And Excommuncation, that doesn't come up much thankfully, it basically cuts you off from your soul - reversibly! - you don't dream, you can't use liao, apparently it feels pretty awful too, everything is muted and it's harder to be virtuous. It occasionally has uses for fixing really weird soul maladies, and sometimes it gets used to stop someone dedicated to one of the malign spiritual presences getting up to anything else with it. And of course sometimes people deploy it politically, or just to hurt people, like everything else.

Sumaah are rather more inclined to use it as a punishment; we're not sure what happens to your soul when you die excommunicate but it's unlikely to be good, so we generally try to stop people from doing that even when they want to."

She nods.  "...I do not like that.  Any of it, really.  Brr.  Potentially nonconsensual mindfuckery is the worst sort of fuckery."

"Your mind is always your own, how you act on the inclinations is always your own choice. The Commonwealth hate all of them, though, it's not an absolutely unusual position - it even has its own name, Lucidianism. As long as you don't go around wiping off miraculous auras - those that are created by Paragons, generally they're very rare and obvious because they're not the standard type or duration - you won't get into trouble for that in the Empire.

I generally think they're useful for showing you what the fundamental action of a Virtue is, and also for picking an effect that actually is something you want and using it to defend against any you don't want."

"My thoughts and feelings are how I choose to do things.  Saying that an inclination to act in a certain way has no effects because I can simply choose not to, is not, actually, coherent, because it's affecting how I weight choices.  Unless there is something I misunderstand, here."

"I guess the question is really whether the internal experience of an Anointing, and so on, is - of an internal or external stimulus, because someone or something telling me to do something just pisses me off most of the time, whereas if it actually flips any switches in my brain, in the - internal symbolic representation of my model of the world - absolutely the fuck not, get it away from me, you know?  Has anyone ever tried an anointing for - accurate metacognition?"

"Depending on what you mean by metacognition, there are a couple of Wisdom ones that might be close? One which, uh, I'm going to have to look these up because I don't do them all the time." He gets out a small notebook and flips to an early page in neat writing. "Clarity of Wisdom helps you express things more clearly and concisely, and Challenge of Wisdom helps you reject conclusions that aren't backed by evidence?"

"That's definitely something, at least."

"You definitely sound like your inclination is to Wisdom, or maybe Courage; Wisdom is mostly about getting to the heart of the truth and acting on it, Courage is mostly about knowing you're right regardless of external pressure and generally Doing It Anyway."

"I do think that those two virtues, as described, would be ones I appreciated cultivating.

"Oh, and - metacognition, in this case, is meant to mean 'being aware of what you're thinking and why you're thinking it'."

"Yes, that definitely sounds like a Wisdom thing."

She nods.  "...So, you were saying something about the Empire placing some Eternal under neutrality?"

"Was I? Oh, yes, Ylenwe. Although I think Roshanwe's the one who's most into - metacognition - at least in a slightly more useful sense, Kimus will break the whole thing down into can you even really prove you're perceiving anything but Roshanwe is more into questioning why people believe what they believe. The one Eternal who claims to have been converted to the Way, too."

"Fool that you are, for you trust the chemicals in your brain to tell you they are chemicals; will you fight, or will you perish like a dog?" spills out of her in a mutter, without the intervention of conscious thought.  "...Anyway, Kimus and that completely inexplicable reference aside - seriously, don't ask me, it's absolutely absurd even in its original form, but boy do I want to try it on Kimus sometime...  ...Roshanwe seems pretty cool.

"...Uh.  Were we going anywhere with this?

"If we were I have completely forgotten.

"...And, hm.  Trees falling in the forest make sounds because sound is just...

"...Okay, actually, that depends on your definition of what sound is, but still probably.  It's just air that's wobbling in a particular way, after all."

"We were working out what Virtue you might like and whether you wanted to try out an Anointing."

"Before you interrupted we were going to find out more about explosives."

"...Now that I'm thinking of it, I don't know most of the actually good ones.  Sulfur-saltpeter-charcoal is all well and good, and I think I remember some of the ratios even, but, hmm.  It makes a huge fucking mess.  Lots of smoke and suchlike.

"...And then there's stuff where I know what the ingredients are but certainly not how to make them, heaven help me if I know what the 'fuel oil' of ANFO is even if I can make an educated guess about the ammonium nitrate...  Then there's stuff I never learned the translation from chemical-engineer to atoms for, the famous trinitrotoluene one of those - its precursor in exploding things, nitroglycerin, practically explodes if you touch it so I'm not inclined to guess about how to make that - although I think it sometimes sweated back out of the more-stabilized successor...  ...And I'm sure you all know about powder explosions in general.  Fine airborne particulate and fire: a bad combination.  Though I suppose that's not even getting into magic.  I bet I could talk some fancily colored water into exploding if I had good enough special effects.  ...Maybe without even doing hydrogen-oxygen separation by electrolysis first.  ...That'd probably explode, actually."

"...okay, so when we mix sulfur-saltpeter-charcoal, which we absolutely have tried, it goes up in a nice little flash of light and is very pretty if you sprinkle some Tempest Jade in, but if you try to propel or destroy something with it, it just gets kind of warm?

And we do not, in fact, know about powder explosions?"

"...Ri-ight.  Fuckery.  I mean, you've got to get the ratio right, I think there was something about five to three to one of...something... being decent, but I bet it's the same force stymieing your lightning experiments that's interfering here.  As for powder explosions...Sufficiently well-suspended aerial particulate, plus fire, equals a big fucking explosion."