Along a long hallway, broken up here and there by classroom and office doors, she can read the latest issues of four different journals and some miscellany.

She doesn't really care what it is. She is just moving her eyes, listening to music, waiting for Page's digest.

There's an article about the probable impact of increasing the diameter of the world two inches, an article on the limitations of optical microscopes that incidentally makes it clear they don't have electron microscopes, speculative neuroscience contributing to a goal of eventually being able to use magic to heal neurological problems, an article on yeast breeding that incidentally implies they don't have cereal grains, and an article on the feasibility of eyes that glow or sparkle that incidentally implies people buy new eye colors sometimes. And other than that, mostly population estimates for plants and insects, life satisfaction research, and fertilizer efficacy data.

Okay. Is anybody lurking hoping to talk to her right now that she could ask questions of?

Yep! The historian from before has caught back up with her, and there's a reporter and several other people.

Okay.

She will answer their questions, but she wants to know more about magic and what it can do.

Several people try to answer that at once.

"Pretty much anything, and all it wants in return is pain."

"It can make things, or probably destroy things - "

"It keeps the world from disappearing."

" - and it's what they use to travel to other worlds, when they do that."

"It's friendly, it just feeds on suffering and rends minds. It can pretty arbitrarily rearrange matter, or make more of it, but it doesn't have human common sense, so it needs very specific requests."

"Is it important," she asks, "that it be blind and deaf people who do it, rather than that it not be seen nor heard?"

"No, not at all."

"Well, not unless you count having to gouge your eyes out before work and shifts being twice as long as important. Seems important to me, I dunno."

"True and I guess you wouldn't want someone out of practice trying to wander around blind in the inner sanctum either but technically."

"- is it important that you not have eyes or just not be able to see. I have a thing that can stop me from seeing."

"Has to be the second thing."

"You don't know that. - That's something to ask a mage. Anyone know if Donna's still here?"

"She left, said it was getting late."

"I have a suggestion," says the reporter. "It is getting late. What if we spend the rest of the evening going over your variously augmented abilities and alien knowledge, figure out which ones would be useful and figure out which people you should talk to about them in what order, and then I offer you a room for the night and tomorrow I show you to either someone who handles mage scheduling or whoever we decide is a higher priority for you to talk to."

"Okay, that's a good idea, thank you."

"Let's borrow one of these classrooms for some privacy and you can start by telling me about the tools you carry inside you."

She she goes and tells them about how Page is software (insofar as she can explain that) and runs all the hardware she has implanted, making her stronger, faster, nimbler, self-repairing, able to see and hear what Page adds (or, relevantly, subtracts) where it's hooked in to her auditory and ocular nerves.

"Is Page itself an intelligent thing with independent access to your senses?"

"It's not a person. It is intelligent without being a person. It has access but it can stop receiving."

"I see. Page might not have to be a person to malfunction if it saw magic, but if it can avoid that, that's promising. And how about your healing?"

"What about it?"

"I imagine it's safe for it to interact with your brain, which magic can't heal. If that's something you could share it'd end aging entirely, I think."

"It's not something I can share right here and now unless magic can copy it, which it might be able to. What I want to do is make a copy of the thing that built Page."

"Magic can copy it, if it's not itself magic. Whether it should is going to depend on whether the copying would involve the magic filling in a lot of... details of mindstate. But what is the thing that built Page?"

"Nothing I have is magic.

The thing that built Page is called Sing." Here she's importing the ASL. "It's like Page, only much, much, much smarter. Page has a copy of the - way to make something that turns into Sing. All magic would need to do would be make a computer that can let Page talk to it. Page knows how those are made, too, and can tell me."

"Do you have an estimate of how long it would take you to describe that well enough for a mage to make it?"

"I don't know! I don't know what mages need to know and I've only had Page learn the kind of sign you see, not the kind you touch! I was thinking I could do it myself, if - me relaying to the magic what Page's instructions are, could do it - and if Page turning off my eyes and ears temporarily would work."

"Huh. Even more reason for you to get in touch with someone who coordinates mage schedules. So you do have the information - I imagine you have a lot of other technical and scientific information we don't, as well. Any examples of that jump out at you?"