"You understand I'm not a theoretician; most of what I tell you will be half-remembered overheard concepts and basic intuition. So--more power means you can do more, or do the same thing faster, or more effectively. Basically. If I were trying to, say, decorate a stone hall by carving reliefs via Sympathy, then the stronger I get the more mass I can move around and the more detailed I can make the inscriptions and the faster I can do it and from farther away. Skill is also a confounding factor, granted, but if you took ten identical versions of me and had each one do the job for the first time at a different power level it would have the result I describe."

"Skill is relevant insofar as you can be a more delicate wielder of magic? Or have better aesthetic sensibilities for the decoration? Power affects precision and speed? Do they trade off?"

"When you have a given level of power, you can put a given amount of oomph into a spell, and since putting oomph into a spell is an action that requires effort, the more focused you are the more of the available oomph you can put in. Oomph can be spent on any of the characteristics I listed. Knowing what you're doing makes a spell use oomph more efficiently. Also, I used Sympathy for a reason; it's much better for--independent data handling, for lack of a better term."

"In our system music is better for that, artifacts do very directed data handling."

"Considering the level of complexity I saw in that rock and the fact that your brother has a biologically possible larynx I'm not surprised."

"When Maglor sings does he give you more power? Or does it do something else?"

"It gives me more focus."

"Interesting. What sort of thing is a challenge that expands your capabilities? Doing hard magic? Doing a lot of magic? Doing novel magic?"

"Expending more oomph increases my power level. Challenging myself mentally separately from magically improves my focus. And, hmm, there's--the amount of oomph you have for each of the three kinds of magic are separate but related? If I do a lot of Sympathy magic my Sympathy power levels will be much higher and my Effort and Conquest levels will be a little higher. Doing novel magic usually helps with focus, and there have been some papers published back home arguing whether or not it improves power levels above and beyond the normal oomph expenditure, but nothing conclusive."

"Replicating minor magic items, that's challenging mentally but not in terms of oomph? Or both?"

"Both, because it was Sympathy, so a lot of the informational stuff got handled by oomph instead of my own brain."

"Is Sympathy the one you'll need for resurrections?"

"Yes. Theoretically I could probably do at least parts of it with Effort or Conquest, but by default I don't use Effort or Conquest if I can figure out how to make Sympathy do."

"So we should be providing you with novel tasks that are both focus- and power-demanding, and done with Sympathy, as often as possible."

"Not necessarily as often as possible, depending on how often that is. There are, after all, a lot of things I can be doing with my time and magic that are less novel but highly useful in themselves. Which reminds me, would it be difficult to design an earthquake-resistant glass dome with holes to let air and rain through?"

"Glass isn't what you'd want to be using. If you can do any material maybe you can develop one that does suit, though. Can you design something from specifications about tensile strength and hardness and compressibility, or do you need to have handled it?"

"I need something as transparent as glass, to not kill the plant life. I...might be able to use specs, but handling the material would help."

"You can't make the inside of the thing you create emit light?"

"I...guess I could cover the inside in lights, but I'd have to come by every now and then to renew them, and the artificial lights I'm familiar with and would know how to make don't have all the same wavelengths as sunlight and aren't as good for plants."

"Glass ceiling, walls of something else more resilient to earthquakes?"

"Hm. Could do. I made it a dome on purpose, I'm pretty sure opaque walls would cast shadows that wouldn't be very good for the trees in the immediate vicinity, but that might be better than the alternatives."

"The spiders end up killing all the trees anyway, I think, gradually. It's some kind of magical blight. Or - something transparent and sufficiently flexible should in principle be possible - if I asked your magic for materials with very high plasticity - that means they can irreversibly deform without breaking - could it give me anything just off that?"

"No, because the information about what materials have this trait isn't meaningfully available. I could copy the light stone without knowing how it worked because it was right there to be consulted on its physical structure. Sympathy does independent data handling, not spontaneous data generation."

"In that case give me an hour."

"Sure."