"Here to help."

Giggle.

There are some more magic objects, and then a food market - "anything catch your eye particularly?" he asks, gesturing at the selection. Highpoint is a good place to get food from multiple regions of the empire; there are quite a lot of things, with particularly perishable ones kept in cold-stone-lined boxes.

"I'm not picky. Although I don't like meat as much when I can't cook it by magic."

"Okay."

Fruits and grains and cheeses and interesting varieties of bread! He fills a lot of pages, but somehow the book always seems to have more room.

"How exactly does the book do unlimited pages?"

"I'm not totally sure. I mean, it is a big book, but even so I should be more than a quarter of the way in by now. I think it might be shuffling around which things show on each page, and not showing every single thing unless I actively look for it. And when I actively look for something I can just kind of flip around a bit and there it is."

"...can I try or do terrible things happen if it leaves your possession?"

"Nothing terrible happens! If I leave it somewhere or somebody steals it, it'll show up nearby when I'm not looking." He offers Cor the book.

Cor takes the book and starts paging about inquisitively! Can he find things? Can he open the book halfway in? Can he open to the first page? Last page? If he tries to find a thing that is not next to another thing by turning exactly one page from the other thing, can he?

He can find a specific thing if he knows what thing he is looking for! He can open to the first or last page if he pleases; the first page has a nice lamp on it and the last one is blank! He can open the book halfway in and those pages are blank too! It seems to take at least two page flips to find any specific thing, and sometimes more, and the book seems to have some notion of ordering; it takes longer to find something if the book thinks he is looking in the wrong direction from where he started, although if he persists it will show him the thing anyway.

"It's kind of cool watching you do that," Riale comments.

"How so?"

"Trying to figure out what you're testing just by watching you flip pages is an interesting challenge!"

"What're your guesses?"

"I'm pretty sure you're trying to find something out about the conditions under which you can find particular things, but it's kind of hard to know what you're trying to do when all I see is the results - it looks like the book wants to keep things in order, but I don't know if that's what you were looking for or if it's just a result you happened to turn up. Did I catch you trying to find arbitrary things by flipping a single page?"

"You did! I can't do it."

He grins. "Well now I'm very impressed with myself for picking up on that."

"Congratulations." Cor can't pull things out of the book even if he tries, right?

He cannot do that; there does not seem to be a way.

"May I try drawing in this?"

"Huh. Sure."

Cor flips to an empty page and tries drawing a strawberry.

The ink sinks tracelessly into the page.

"Huh," says Riale.

...Cor tries writing hello book.

The same thing happens. Slurp. Ink is delicious.

If he curls up one page so he can write across two at once?