"I've heard of powerful wizards that can cast lightning-spells, sir, but I don't know how someone would make lightning without magic. ...Is it safe?"

The idea that someone would want to spend a lot of time chopping wood also sounds pretty unlikely, but maybe the town mayor doesn't like it when people complain or something? Or maybe he's just really weird, that's also possible.

"It's all contained, in the walls and the light fixtures and whatever else needs it.  The bare wires definitely wouldn't be safe to touch or have around, no.  There are outlets in the walls to plug electrically powered devices into, but they're made safe too, you can touch them, just don't push metal into them.  What else... Don't cut any wires, don't disassemble anything that's powered, don't get anything electrical wet or it might shock you through the water.  If anything electrical catches fire, don't try to put it out with water, either.  ... I've never had anything electrical catch fire, to be clear, it's just the sort of thing that's important to know just in case."

"I can't really explain how electricity's made - they'll go over it in school, I think, maybe it'll make sense then - but for example, you know how rubbing wool cloth against itself will generate little bits of electricity, so it shocks you a little when you touch it, and you can see the spark if you do it in the darkness?  Of course that's not enough be useful, but it's that sort of thing - normal physical processes turning out to generate electricity for some reason, and then people optimizing them and scaling them way up and making sure it's a standard amount of electricity that's going in the wires.  I think the real thing they do involves wire coils and rotating magnets, but it does rather go over my head."

...That sounds like magic, just using wool or wire or magnets, whatever those are, as a component for casting the spell.

"What's a magnet?"

"A sort of weird rock that draws iron to it - I'll show you some, they're interesting.  I think they mine them out of the ground?  I'm not sure."

Magnets are absolutely going to seem like magic to her.  They do seem like magic, children always think so.  So much technology is based on weird things he can't explain and would have never encountered if they weren't technologically useful - which makes sense really, because humanity went looking for the most useful possible materials to do something completely new with, and why would those be commonplace? - but it sure isn't making it easy to explain how they're not magic to someone without any of that context.

...Yeah, those really sound like magic rocks. 

"What makes them different from magic rocks, sir?"

This is really a fascinating exercise in seeing how well he knows how the world works.  What does make magnets different from magic rocks?  How would he know if they were?

"Huh, that's a good question.  Can you just get magic rocks out of the ground without doing anything magic about it?  How do you tell if they're magic or not?  I'm really very sure people on Earth aren't doing any magic on a meaningful scale, but I suppose if the rocks were magic on their own I'm not sure how anyone could tell."

...That seems like the sort of thing that the person she's pretending to be probably knows less about than she does. She... doesn't actually have any idea how much that person should know. ...Though admittedly, neither does Mr. Dąbrowski, so as long as she leaves out anything very specific she can hopefully avoid being too far off?

"I don't know exactly, sir. I've heard that there's magic metal that wizards can use to make magic items, if they're really smart, and as far as I know it just comes out of the ground like that, but it's not like I've ever seen it for myself. I'd expect that a wizard could tell it apart from the regular kind by casting Detect Magic, but I guess that wouldn't work here. I've never specifically heard of magic rocks that can pull iron towards them but it's... a normal sort of thing to exist, if that makes sense? —And sometimes wizards and priests use... objects?... as part of spells, but those aren't magic, or at least not usually."

"Well.  I think it would be strange if there were magic rocks so common that I have a couple in my junk drawer, but I expect you think it would be stranger if magnets weren't magic, and I don't know enough to argue they aren't.  Maybe a physicist would, but I don't think Bobowa has any."  He's pretty sure the physics teacher doesn't count.

"I also think it would be strange for electricity to be magic when steam engines aren't, but that's... not a real argument. So I think we're going to have to leave this question for later.  ... What else did you want to know?  I don't even remember how we got to magnets."  Possibly it's that he likes talking about technology and is doing more of it than Agnieszka really wants to know.

"Uh...." She has kind of a lot of questions and she's losing track! She doesn't really expect to run out anytime soon! "...it seems like the laws about what sorts of things people are allowed to say are very different here, are they... the kind of thing that's possible to explain?" (As opposed to the kind of thing where you're just supposed to guess what the people in power want.)

"You're... generally allowed to say whatever you want?  It might not always be a good idea but it's not illegal."

He's pretty sure this isn't going to turn out to be the full answer to whatever confusing thing she's worrying about, but he's not immediately sure in what direction it'll be wrong.

...Okay, so it's the kind of thing where you're just supposed to guess what the people in power want, but even worse because they're not even bothering to make it clear at all what they'll hurt people over. "What sorts of things aren't a good idea to say, sir?"

"Uh..."  There's something going wrong in this conversation, but unfortunately he still has no idea what it is.  "I'm worried that you don't mean the same sort of thing I mean, but I'm not sure how to figure out what.  But - there's a lot of things that are obviously a bad idea to say, right?  You shouldn't... insult people for no reason, or spread unpleasant lies about them, or point them the wrong way when they ask for directions - all those things are legal but they're still just obviously going to make people dislike you and make everyone unhappy, right?  Are those surprising somehow?"

That's not really the sort of thing she was thinking of but some of those are also confusing!

"...it's surprising for it to be legal to spread lies? Or — back home it would depend on who you were spreading it about, and I know you said that's different here, but... as an example, what would happen to someone who went around saying that the person everyone thought was the town mayor's eldest son was secretly a bastard?"