"List of things to research or invent."

"What else is on your list?"

"Oh, figure out what the heck channeling capacity is, develop the theory of Lialen, that kind of thing."

"What the heck is channeling capacity?" he asks, giggling.

"Nobody knows! We can use it and we can count it but we can't figure out what it is. That's why I want to find out."

"Sounds hard. Any ideas so far?"

"Not really. I'm trying to be thorough about checking preexisting research, of which there is a great deal, all of which leads nowhere."

"Well, that sounds tremendously boring."

"It really is, but if I skip to the fun part there's always the chance someone will go 'a-ha, you have been operating in ignorance of Obscure Study #945', which would be less fun."

"Gotcha. Hmm," he says.

Kaylo shrugs and eats his sandwich.

"I'm wondering if there could be a spell - my kind of spell - to save you some of the boring," he says. "I've never tried, so I don't know for sure."

"I'm not sure how that would work, unless your magic is capable of lots of independent information sorting."

"Well, yeah, that's just it - I know my magic can handle information, I just don't know what the limits are," he says. "Could be interesting to find out."

"...I am intrigued. What do you currently know about its ability to handle information?"

"Not a whole lot! And a lot of it's kind of in 'vague guesses' format - my vague guesses are pretty solid, I'm a Device and all, but they're not exactly specific or easy to articulate. Probably the fastest way to start figuring out the details is to sit me in front of a problem and see if I can solve it. Makes the difference between 'I think it can probably handle stuff that's written down pretty well' and, I dunno, 'yes, I can invent a spell to alphabetize books'. That was a random example, but I actually can invent a spell to alphabetize books, the matter manipulation part's almost harder than the sorting."

"Okay, so - I can get ahold of books that mention channeling capacity while excluding those that just mention it offhand because they're spellbooks, with standard library spells. What I can't do with standard library spells is distinguish the ones that have interesting results."

"Hmm," he says. "Well, what makes results interesting? What kinds of books have you gone through so far?"

"So far no results are interesting, so I don't have any positive examples for your magic to take as training data. Kinds of books are generally going to be research anthologies or theory essays."

"Hmmm... I wonder how well my magic can summarize," he says. "Might have to try it to see. Summarize and compare - pick out stuff like different research that did basically the same things and got basically the same answers."

"That sounds very interesting. Wizardry does not currently have affordances for that."

"Wanna go show me some books?"

"Yeah, sure." Kaylo swallows the last bite of his sandwich and heads for the lift.

Brilliance is not quite done his ice cream. Omnomnomnomnomnomnom now he is done his ice cream! He does a quick teleport to catch up to Kaylo.