"I haven't really thought about it before. It's just– present and used for specific things and it's limited? I don't know. People have researched things like prosthetic legs, but you can't just lose your ability to do lumen in an accident – unless you get brain damage or something, I suppose – so it's not the same sort of thing and I guess it's possible nobody's actually looked into replicating the ability with technology?"

"The lumen is limited, but how it works, the underlying principles, whetter they are magic or not, have potential to be useful. If all you could do was create a machine that increase its range you could have communication with little infra-structure necessary that works through barriers - it would be very useful during a disaster that damaged landlines, or in case you need emergency signals or..." he shrugs.

"Fenris really hates wasted potential."

"Most people have cell phones, so the landline thing isn't really that much of a problem? And we have a pretty good network as it is, but yeah, it would be useful if we could do something with it technologically."

"Now you are only get him started again."

"If there was a way to transmit heat in the same way, I am certain there would medical benefits, cauterization without the need of invasive surgery, maybe operating tumors that would be too dangerous to remove otherwise. It is possible, maybe likely, that nothing useful would come out of it, but as far I can tell the topic isn't researched enough."

"It doesn't get anywhere near that high in temperature, it's difficult to put lumen near someone else and it's easy for them to remove it, and it's probably difficult to be that precise with it, but I guess if you're using technology then that last thing isn't a problem and if they're unconscious then it shouldn't matter that they could remove it. The temperature thing, though, it'd just cut out if you tried to get it too high."

"The high heat version would involve technology, I understand the standard limits - what I am getting at, is that even those limits hint at several possibilities."

"Yes, but I mean– it is actually impossible for most people to get more than a couple of degrees difference, and I'm pretty sure that if you tried to go higher than approximately twenty, it would stop. I mean, admittedly I haven't actually got some technology to go replicate it so this is all 'well I don't think it would' and whatever, but– like, if you try to get something too bright with people around, it won't go high enough to do permanent damage, people contest it and stop it from going that high, and if you tried to get something really hot for cauterization, that would harm people – even though in the long run it would help – so they'd contest it and it wouldn't work? I'm pretty sure, at least."

"… Do they not need to be conscious to contest it?"

"… I don't actually know if anyone's tested it, but I am reasonably confident that if you tried blinding someone with it while they were unconscious it wouldn't work?"

"Are you sure? That sounds like the obvious kind of thing to try if you want to hurt someone."

"Wow, Fenris, maybe you should try cockblock even more than you already did and talk the many ways your abilities could be turned for evil."

"Well for starters people don't often try to blind people, but it doesn't work if you do it with lumen and they're awake – like I said, they contest it. And then if you've put someone unconscious already, you could blind them by, I don't know, using some sharp implement – there's no need to try to pull their eyelids up and use lumen to blind them with no guarantee it'll even work?"

"I was thinking in the past, at some point in your history when the world was more brutal. It would be likely that at some point someone would be cruel enough and curious enough to try that."

"… Wars were very brutal and result in severe losses and there's basically unanimous agreement that they're terrible and even if we hated each other we should try diplomacy and then spiteful political comments instead of resorting to them." Pause. "Do you still have war?"

"He didn't mean that was a thing people should try, just something people are likely to try. And yeah, we do still have war... You don't?"

"Not on any large scale, no! Are they small-scale wars? Because ours used to be small and ended up resulting in mass casualties to all participants, because it is horrific."

"It definitely is horrific, yeah, and there are lots of casualties, but people still don't seem to stop?"

"Why the hell not?" Pause. "Okay, that's a stupid question because I know people can be really frustratingly obtuse, yeah, but– diplomacy is not that hard, and my world seems to have moved to that fine about as soon as we started doing proper civilization instead of, like, wood huts on the plains or whatever?"

The triplets are astonished and silent.

"Wood huts?"

"I was being facetious – I don't know if we actually lived in wood huts before major civilization or what, I wasn't around then and I haven't studied history much."

"Okay... have you ever heard of a thing called atomic bomb?"

"… I think I have? – Wait, did you guys actually use one of those on each other?"