He tosses her a rock that looks ordinary except that it's glowing brightly as a lamp. "Can you try replicating that?"

"Sure." She stares at the glowing rock, concentrating.

Her first attempt--naively telling it to copy--produces a single tiny shard of non-glowing rock before she halts it. Too much power, not enough finesse...she tries again, weaving her perceptions into her persuasion, reveal your nature, what are you made of, what do I need to make you?

It's dizzyingly complex, in a way; nowhere near as intricate as a biological system, but less familiar, and without the hard-coded ability to reproduce, of course. That's fine. She doesn't need to understand why the bits are doing what they're doing, like she would if she were going to change it at all, just--have the information handy.

Slowly--

ever so slowly--

after several hours of nothing but staring and furrowing brows--

another shining stone appears.

"Congratulations. If that sort of work is interesting to you there's no shortage of it, but it seems like it might be wiser to have you copy metal which we can then enchant and forge. Sadly you can't enchant it after it's finished."

"Making glowing rocks a lot doesn't seem like a very efficient use of my time and energy, considering what else I can do, but I might want to every now and then; that was a challenge, and those are much better for increasing my magic."

"Not glowing ones, no; we have rocks for which the enchantment is comparably difficult, or a little harder, and I could probably get you projects ordered by what I expect would be the difficulty of replicating them. Perhaps someday you'll be able to reproduce a palantir."

"What's a palantir?"

"Teach me to count in your language while we go upstairs? It's in the tower." And he stands and starts walking.

She follows him. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, one hundred, one hundred and one, two hundred, three hundred, one thousand, two thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, one million, one billion, one trillion, one quadrillion, one quintillion."

"Do those larger ones come up much?"

"For everyday use? No. For science and engineering things? Maybe. I'm not sure. I'd have to ask Illia. More than for everyday use, though, that's for sure."

He dismisses three guards, opens a locked door with a key around his neck, opens another only when Celegorm joins him with a different key. "Palantir."

It's perfectly circular, mostly opaque.

"It's a crystal ball?" It is presumably not just a crystal ball.

"Can see anywhere on the continent to a precision like you're flying directly overhead, can communicate mind-to-mind with anyone who has another one. They're complicated. My guess is that you can't replicate them, but I take it you get steadily stronger."

"Wow. Yes, I get stronger--and as far as anyone's ever been able to tell, there's no cap."

"So maybe eventually. By then Father will be back and will have suggestions for where to go from there."

"Maybe. I'm going to want to be very, very sure I can pull off resurrection, before I try it again. Duplicating things isn't going to alert a potentially obstructive deity if I fail."

He nods. "The palantiri are the second-most complex project my father ever attempted. They're a few thousand times more complicated than the tampstones and creating one probably modifies existing ones."

"If creating one modifies existing ones...do you mean the act of creating one would modify existing ones, or that in order to create a functional new one you would have to alter the existing ones?"

"The former."

"Okay, then it should still be doable. I'd have to actually figure out how these things worked to change them."

"Most of my father's notes were lost when our home was destroyed."

"Oh, magic does feedback, I'd be able to figure it out eventually, it's just that 'eventually' might mean 'in millions or billions of years.'"

He smiles at that. "It's reassuring to know that there are things our magic does better than yours. And useful; two systems with different strengths might have interesting strengths when combined."

"It does. Your brother Maglor sang, while I was digging the trench on the plains, and boy did it ever help."

"Proof of concept, then. We should be able to do a fair bit more than that." He's frowning. "Helped with what? Along what axes does your power have limitations, along what axes does it get stronger?"