The Work Room is two floors down, in the basement, but otherwise not too far away. The woman unlocks a heavy oak door and then hands Margaret the key, "hang onto this." 

The room itself looks a lot like the Work Room in the guard-house - bare stone, windowless, with an oddly sound-dampened feel. No furnishings at all. 

Key goes in another cargo pants pocket. (She has finally gotten secure enough in her room to let the rune dictionary out of her sight; it's currently under her bed.) "Thanks!"

No furnishings and stone everything is perfect, because it means fewer things to prevent bad things from happening to. She sets the paper and the rocks down on the floor and chants, in French because she hasn't had a chance to test Tantaran incantations yet and she's used to thinking about French with the right kind of precision anyway.

And now she has magic rocks! She checks that they work the way she was envisioning and have decent sound quality; she can't tell from in here if they have sufficient range, but if they don't that should just be a matter of a bigger diagram.

The servant woman left her alone to do her magic work and no one is there to react particularly to her success. 

That's eminently reasonable of her! Hmm, how to get a lower bound on the range without a second person . . . is there a courtyard with a nice long open space around here?

The long one is the length of the crossbar in the 'H' of the building wings, about a hundred yards, though there are some raised flowerbeds in the way rather than it being totally open. 

That's more than long enough for her purposes! She sets one down and walks away talking to the other; she gets out of earshot of the first one before it cuts out. Then she tries putting it near a bigger rock and chucking pebbles at said bigger rock from increasingly long distances, but her aim isn't good enough for this to be much improvement on the first thing. Ironically, if she hadn't specifically exempted sounds that come out of the rock from being transmitted by the rock she could test the range trivially by listening for the feedback, but feedback is really annoying. Eventually she concludes that she's definitely not going to be able to test whether the range is long enough to reach wherever Urtho is so it doesn't matter much, and goes looking for someone who might know the appropriate way to schedule a meeting with Ma'ar or send him inter-office mail or whatever.

The servant she finds in the hall can take a message for Ma'ar, and let him know that she wants to schedule a meeting! She'll probably get a note in a few candlemarks with the time for it. 

Cool. She brings the rocks to the meeting, and also her tech notes, though who knows whether he'll have the time or interest to look at them.

He wants to look at them first, actually, after a very quick initial glance at her rocks. He's visibly fascinated and has lots of questions about how it works. 

That's about how Margaret would feel if someone showed up from a place with higher tech than hers! She can explain sewage systems and internal combustion engines and the telegraph and some of the things electricity is good for. She doesn't have the procedural knowledge of how to build most of the stuff, especially on this tech base, but she knows what general materials and capabilities are needed. Also this is how the germ theory of infectious disease works; is that consistent with local knowledge and observation?

Ma'ar thinks that it is! He suggests that she talk to some of the Healers, though, it's not his area.

She would be happy to talk to the Healers! Is he interested enough in any of the other things to provide materials for them? Also does he have any problems that look amenable to engineering solutions, there might be something she hasn't thought of where she can combine technology and magic for useful results.

He's especially interested in the telegraph and would happily provide materials for it, and electricity sounds very broadly useful. He'll need to sit down and think about which of Predain's current problems are engineering-solution-amenable. 

She'll happily work on inventing the telegraph in the meantime. (And on making the case for better sanitation to the Healers, though she doesn't mention that.)

Ma'ar thanks her for her time and dismisses her to go back to his other work; he asks her to make a list of all the materials she'll need for that project, someone will be by later that day to collect it and schedule a time for her to talk to the Healers. 

Someone is, in fact, by a few hours later. One of the palace Healers will meet with her tomorrow morning, if that's all right? 

She writes up an equipment list. Mostly she needs wire; a few meters for a prototype but eventually kilometers and kilometers of it to make a network between everywhere that will use it.* Also something to make and break a connection between two wires repeatedly very fast, which can be like this or like this or like that depending on what's easiest to make.

Tomorrow morning would be an excellent time to talk to a Healer.

*She gives this in Predain units but also starts outlining a paper on the metric system, because that's good too and doesn't require any materials.

Getting her a prototype length of wire is easy, they can do that by tomorrow; lots of it will be harder but they have time to figure out a system for making it more efficiently. For making-and-breaking connections, they'll send over one of the mages who specializes in fine-detail metalwork and have them work on it with her? 

The next morning, a woman of about forty arrives and knocks on her door. "I'm Healer Norma," she says in fluent Tantaran. "You wanted to consult with the Healers on something from your world?" 

"Yes, hello! People in my world have figured out a lot of stuff about the causes of disease and how to prevent and cure it without magic, and I thought you might find some of it useful."

Norma smiles. "Oh! Fascinating! Does your world have Healers too, then, or something like it?" 

"We have doctors. They don't have magic, but they have lots of different devices for seeing tiny things and the insides of people's bodies, and they've tried a lot of things and learned what works and what doesn't. How to tell similar diseases apart, what treatments work and their side effects, stuff like that. I might be able to reinvent some of the devices and I can tell you what I remember of the rest."

"- Wow. That's - really quite something. How did they even think to invent the devices in the first place, though, if they didn't have Healers?" 

"Just really wanting to know what was going on, I guess. And I think microscopes were originally used for looking at far-away things, but you can use them to see really small things, too. Like the tiny living things that cause some diseases."

"Faraway things... Like what astronomers use, you mean, those eyepiece lens things?" 

"Yes, exactly!" Sounds like she won't have to rederive a bunch of lens math, which is awesome.

"I wonder if Healers could learn to see the same things just with our Othersenses?" The woman looks very thoughtful. "We can train our Sight to some degree - some Healers can go in close and see the tiny blood vessels and such, I just don't think anyone's tried going in even closer than that."