"Some things are blind and rely on other senses, a lot of fish are like that. ...when you say you can illusion light sources does this mean the plant farm plan could work after all, I don't immediately have reason to think that wouldn't work. Admittedly the ones they use normally are evocations, so it might matter to a plant. My ray will go about -" She points in a direction that doesn't have anybody in it. "Ray of Frost - thirty-five feet ish. It just fizzles out past that."

"The illusions don't work like objects that reflect ambient light, they capture all incoming light, that's why you can't see through them. And they emit light to be able to be seen. A perfectly black object and an object that emits light are the two simplest illusions. I can't leave one in a farm, the same way I can't leave any of my spell effects very far from me. My magic is fundamentally short range (*). Everything that goes farther than that is a physical effect created by the magic, such as light." 

"I don't know how your spell works but I can see that it remains magical for the entire duration, it's not creating a physical effect that disappears after thirty five feet. Which makes sense, but it's more useful to use magic to propel a bullet or produce a ray of intense light or heat, since those have much greater effective ranges. ...admittedly I don't have a spell that cools things."

(*) Tanya's concept of 'short range' is appropriate for aerial dogfights, not for melee combat.

"There's fire combat spells, I'm not sure about light ones - or, like, there's certainly spells intended to blind people, perhaps with light, but I don't think it'd do any damage? Even the gentle kind of damage that doesn't usually kill anyone."

"I'm not sure what you mean? Either the spells produce ordinary light, which can blind and in sufficient intensity can permanently impair vision. Or burn or kill someone, if there's enough of it. Or else the magic directly affects the target at short range, in which case I don't know what your spells are doing and they could be blinding people some other way entirely. By fire spells do you mean ones that produce heat, or that catalyze fire as in the chemical reaction, or something else?"

"Maybe a light blast spell of some kind would do that to a normal person but people with a few circles are tougher, and equivalently experienced weapons-y people moreso. By fire spells I mean things like Fireball which is a ball of fire and bad to be in because of how it is fire."

What is even 'fire'. Tanya's magical (?!) understanding of this language is unhelpfully insisting that fire is fire, other things can also be fire but fire itself is just that.

"I suspect a translation difficulty. Light and heat are the same kind of thing, we can see light of certain - 'frequencies', like the colors you get if you split white light with a prism?" No, Belmarniss has never seen sunlight, she thinks the sun is a 'fireball in the sky' - the girl really deserves a proper library - "I'm not sure if you've ever seen that?" Tanya can demonstrate a rainbow-prism with an illusion! "Heat is off to the red side of that. We can't see it, although some animals can see a little farther than humans in one or both directions. Anyway, that's heat radiation, what you can feel at a distance. Fire itself is a chemical reaction, things burning to smoke and ash, which produces heat. The two tend to go together but the reason I care about the distinction, here, is that I can reflect light and heat with a mirror but I can't shield against magic that directly induces a fire reaction. If I can see the magic I'll know which one it is."

"As for a 'light blast', one of the properties of light - and heat - is that there's no physical limit to how much of it can be in one place at once, unlike matter. I can put a lot of energy into a single spell. I can -" what's an analogy that would be obvious to a cave-dweller - water and steel both have very high heat capacities but does Belmarniss know that? "...if I refer to the amount of energy to heat a 'liter' - uh." What the hell, magic language knowledge? "Would it help to talk in terms of the amount of energy needed to heat some unit volume of water from freezing to boiling, or to take it from boiling to complete evaporation, or to melt a given weight of steel? ...Steel heat capacity varies, so that would be only approximate. In any case, I can - if I'm not worrying about the resulting steam explosion or collapsing a tunnel - boil all the water in a human body in well under a second. It's not the kind of thing being tough and experienced lets you survive, if you can't dodge it and don't have a magical shield or a very thick physical one. Does that work as a frame of reference?"

"I think my conclusion from listening to all that is that when I summon something for you to squash as a test exercise it should be a fire elemental. To be clear what you say is very interesting and it may have some applications for some situations, perhaps including many or most monsters that have water in their bodies at all and would be better exploded, but I think you'll make a really interesting facial expression about a fire elemental."

"What is a fire elemental? - If you want the surprise to be part of the test that makes sense."

"Elementals are creatures from an elemental plane - Air, Water, Fire, Earth - which are composed of that element."

...

Golarion has humans and also Aristotle? (*)

Her sense of the language seems to say that... air, water, fire and earth are exactly that, or maybe the Platonic ineffable concepts of that or something... and a 'plane' is a place you need magic to get to. And some creatures from the plane-of-elemental-fire got over here and Belmarniss can 'summon' (lure?) them to be killed. Presumably they're not dangerous or they wouldn't be so easy to find and Belmarniss wouldn't be so blase about it before seeing Tanya kill one?

Anyway. Belmarniss seems to think that an 'elemental' is largely or wholly composed of that element. That might make sense for the other three, even though Tanya doesn't see how a living body can avoid having all three of solid, liquid and gas, but it makes no sense for fire? "If it's made out of fire, what is it burning?"

Putting out a fire really isn't within Tanya's capabilities. She has no direct way to cool something down or to block the flow of oxygen, unless it's a very small fire that fits inside the farthest reach of her shield. She can blow apart the thing that's burning, and try to move it somewhere where it won't do more damage and will burn out, but she's really the opposite of a firefighter.

(*) Tanya has not had a classical education.

"That question does not, in this case, have or require a well-defined answer."

"Then the only thing I can conclude from that is that we do not mean the same thing when we say 'fire' and the translation spell is wrong. ...do you want to tell me more about the 'fire elementals' or do you want it to be a surprise test?" A blind test would be entirely legitimate but mostly as a way for Belmarniss to learn about Tanya, not for Tanya herself.

"I haven't extensively studied fire elementals! I'm a transmuter more than a conjurer. I can answer basic questions about them but I can only answer... correct... basic questions about them, not questions that are like 'so is this fire north-facing or south-facing, which is of course a property all fires have one of'."

"Fire - as I understand the word - is a process, not a thing. It has the properties of burning various materials, turning them into for example char or ash and smoke, while giving off some light and a lot of heat and spreading to other flammable objects nearby. It can be extinguished either by cooling it enough, for example by dumping water on it, or by smothering it, that is, preventing fresh air from reaching it. It needs air to go on burning. Without doing one of these two, or removing the substance that's burning, it's almost impossible to stop a fire. Does that at all describes this 'fire elemental'? If not, could you describe it from scratch?" Tanya can provide convenient illusions as she speaks, to avoid any misunderstandings.

"The thing you describe sounds like most normal fire of the sort we cook with," says Belmarniss agreeably. "It bears some... thematic resemblance to fire elementals, which can't go underwater and which catch flammable things that touch them on fire. But you can keep a fire elemental in a sealed box - they don't, in fact, need to breathe - and you do not have to give them any fuel - they also don't need to eat. They are vulnerable to cold damage - that is to say, a fire elemental that would stand up to the same number of arrows as me would tolerate fewer Rays of Frost than I would - and they're immune to fire damage. Anyway, the one I summon will not be really physically present, it'll be a construct body the spell maintains for a few rounds and then it'll go home, which is also what will happen if you kill it before the spell runs out, but in most other respects it will be just like it was really here."

Oh, it's a magical construct. (That Belmarniss thinks is animated by a spirit of the 'real' Platonic essence of fire elementals from the plane of fire elementals? Or something?) Magical constructs can simulate some very complex things; Tanya's orb can't make any of them besides her decoys but she's heard of some impressive experimental research.

"If it's vulnerable to arrows, that means it has a physical body that can be affected by pushing on it and puncturing it and tearing it apart and so on, right? And in addition to that it sets nearby things on fire - because it heats them or some other way? And it's not vulnerable to being heated up further itself, as far as you know. And not fed by it, an ordinary fire heated up would spread. Is that correct?"

"It has a physical body which can be damaged by physical means; fire and air elementals are very light but they still have substance and you can shoot them. I believe fire elementals touching things and setting them on fire this way works the same as touching the things with a torch would, with the caveat that anything that has magic involved can - bend its efficacy and probability around the power of whoever's doing it. I think if you heat up a fire elemental this does not power it up in any way although it wouldn't astonish me to hear about a weird elemental that was like that."

"I can shoot physical projectiles. I would probably need to calibrate over several shots to adjust for a very lightweight body so I'm doing damage where I mean to and not just leaving a small hole. As I mentioned, I have a limited quantity of bullets and want to conserve them, but of course it's important to prepare if this is a kind of danger we might face on our way and not just the one maximally inconvenient to me. ...for completeness' sake I should mention that I can make the bullet explode at a given point and not only on contact, if an explosion just outside the target is better than one inside it for some reason." She also has her mage blades as a holdout weapon and should test them but only if she can do so without undue risk, or ideally any risk at all.

"I can't immediately think of a situation where you want to explode outside rather than inside a single target if you can do either."

"For example, to affect several targets, or to push some large object."

"Yes, if you have several targets then you want to catch lots of them in a blast."

"When did you plan to run the test?"

"Probably after I teach the kiddos their Message lesson, I can send them to scatter around the edges of the school to practice it and then the big space will be free and you can paste a fire elemental."

She wants to do it here? In that case Tanya will inspect the space more attentively. At least one wall of it will be providing her backstop! "Drilling somewhere you'd rather I not accidentally damage the walls will make using explosives difficult," she remarks. Of course one should be able to operate in such conditions or any conditions as required; reality isn't conveniently arranged for your purposes. At least this place doesn't have polished marble or wall paint.

"There... aren't really good places to damage walls? Because we're underground. Even if I took you to a mineshaft where they're damaging walls on purpose that doesn't make it a particularly safe thing to do. You don't have to show off any specific technique, I just want you to see the elemental and check if your damage output is in some form like what you've described against Golarion-style opponents."