"Yeah. Maybe there's something in conjuration or evocation that could do it. Are you familiar with lasers? They might be more doable than lenses and there are lots of things you can do with them, or at least with combinations of technology that include them."

"Your tongues didn't translate it at all, which means it's something Taldane doesn't have a word for. Hmm, from the context presumably it's something about light... not focused light, considering it's not related to lenses. I think I don't know what lasers are!"

Brenda launches into an explanation of lasers! 

The one inconvenient thing about Nenio hanging out in kitsune form is that some corner of Brenda's brain keeps being distracted by how soft and fluffy she looks. But this will not be allowed to get in the way of engineering!

Lasers are incredibly cool! Nenio starts absentmindedly doodling ideas for an spell to generate them while she listens; it'd probably be easier with evocation than illusion, actually, but probably still at least 6th circle for the first castings. When Brenda gets into talking about wavelengths though she gets even more excited.

"Oh, we already use some of that! A couple of spells like sunbeam and sunburst seemed less bright than they should be for how much energy was being put into them, but all the changes that fixed that ended up making the spells less powerful, particularly against fungi. It took a while, but eventually the Acadamae hall of Induction managed to figure out that some of the light just wasn't being measured because we couldn't see it!"

That's delightful! What's the state of the art on measuring how much energy is going into a spell more precisely than just what circle it is?

You can get a bit more precise than what circle it is with arcane sight instead, and greater arcane sight is a better than that, but if you really want to be precise you have to have a go at the diagrams and break out the math. It's possible some archmage figured out an easier method, but if so they're being extremely rude and not sharing.

Yeah, that's the downside of wizards being able to accomplish so much as individuals. On Earth, if you want to win fame and fortune and see great things come of your discoveries you need to collaborate and publish everything, but that comes with its own problems. Still, it's cool that their theoretical models are good enough to notice discrepancies like the one with Sunburst! Reminds her of an anecdote about how Earth discovered the existence of Neptune . . .

“It’s just the worst,” Nenio agrees glumly. “Aroden at least used to have a library he made in Absalom, and the starry-eyed conservatorium has some of Nex’s, but most archmages barely leave anything behind. Arazni’s been in charge of Geb for almost a millennia and somehow the best sources we have are still the memoirs of people she taught a few tricks during the shining crusade. It’s hard to imagine what magic would look like if everyone shared their findings; earth science sounds amazing.”

The bit about Neptune is one of the coolest things she’s ever heard and now Nenio is dying to interview the people who did it.

They're super dead, but that might actually make them more accessible than if they were alive, if they went to the same set of afterlives. Though she does want to find a way back to Earth someday too. She and Nenio could go there together, maybe, and see the Smithsonian and the Grand Canyon and the Amazon rainforest and things.

Brenda does have some good ideas. Unfortunately she doesn't think Golarion has anything like the Smithsonian unless you count magical academies, which are almost as bad as archmages about not letting Nenio learn all their secrets, but they do have interesting locations and maybe they can make a star chart of all the planets in Golarion's system, see if any are missing, and then eventually go visit them.

That sounds awesome!

At some indeterminate point on their subjective timeline - but a bit before noon objectively - Ember will also show up, though she sits by Wenduag and Seelah rather than interrupt the two of them. Her new sweater is already a little dusty, but she hasn't ditched it yet, and Soot is occasionally still glancing at her ornamentation in the windows.

"Hi Ember! How was your morning? I've been learning magic!"

“I think it went pretty well; I’m pretty sure I got to almost everyone who was injured and willing to get my help. I thought you already had magic, though; do you mean learning new kinds?”

"I'm glad to hear it! And yeah, I already had a bit of sorcery; Nenio was helping me pick up the basics of wizardry and integrate the two. And I expect it will be a good long time before I run out of wizardry to learn."

"You both seem really happy."

"You should have seen them just a bit ago; I couldn't even follow half of it, but they were excited enough to be practically finishing each other's sentences."

"What about you two, then?"

"It's still strange to me; I'm not totally used to the sun yet, and the food is all unfamiliar. It's not bad though."

"I guess I don't have anything as big as the sun to talk about, but we've clearly been doing something right because the goddess decided to give me spells today."

"Oh, congratulations! I don't know very much about how divine spellcasting works; do you pick how many of which ones you want every morning or pick a set once and stick with it or one of those but the god picks?"

“I talked with one of the other paladins this morning, and it turns out I pick spells every day but on rare occasions the goddess might give me a spell I didn’t know I would need. The example they used was getting detect charm if someone was secretly running around using enchantments.”

"Handy! Is that easier on the goddess's end than communicating in words?" She knows Iomedae used to be human but isn't clear on exactly what capabilities she lost in the transition.

“It’s definitely easier than a vision - almost nobody gets those - but I’m not sure how it compares to a commune or sending an angel.”

"Well, I guess if it's easier to tweak someone's spell list than send an angel, she can unexpectedly give someone that spell for summoning angels and then make sure the right one answers, right? Except then I guess there's no way to say 'you're going to need to summon an angel at some point today, not because of a message but because of an emergency it will be good to have an angel around for'."