"Some things boil at a higher temperature than water. If they are in liquid, you can separate them out by boiling the water off. Some things boil at a lower temperature than water. If they are in liquid, you can separate them by trapping the - " will Maurabel help her out with the word 'gas' or 'vapor'? - "that forms when you boil it. Purifying liquids is useful for many purposes."

Closest thing Maurabel has is "unbreathable air". "I don't think we have much of that going on besides wine sauce but it's not hard to make artifacts that'll cook things."

Right, her word gas refers to breathable air, unbreathable air, water-after-it-has-been-boiled, and other things in that general category.

So, what all can you do with artifacts?

"Lights, heating, air circulation, water purification. Amulets for enslaving elementals, of course..."

She may have to step up her game. "Apply pressure in arbitrary directions? Concentrate heat how precisely?" She may need to reinvent metalworking, if she wants to end up making everyone immortal.

"Pressure isn't an element, I'm not sure what things qualify as what you have in mind. I can't say I've ever had a reason to make something hot very precisely?"

"But can you, say, make a wind spell that sends wind blowing in a certain direction with a lot of force, or a water spell that makes water do the same? If so, you can use that to power a mill if you don't have a river." She keeps walking.

"And - heat is important for a lot of different chemical reactions, which are important for making substances with rare and valuable characteristics. Often things change shape with heat - the way water freezes and boils - or change composition, like the way boiling wine makes it weaker."

She pauses. "... Also, if you concentrate too much heat too precisely very very bad destructive things can happen, but if you haven't noticed it fire-magic probably can't do it. I hope."

"Interesting!" Maurabel is taking diligent notes about this. "Oh, I wonder if you could do something along these lines with sticky-metals."

"Sticky-metals?"

"Do you need magic for those - you can make metals that will pull other metals toward them and stick together? Or push apart, but we still say sticky-metals for the category."

"You do not! Our word is magnets." She grins fiercely. "They're very useful!"

"Magnets! How do you make them if you don't use magic?"

"Some are naturally-occurring and you can use those to make more. Or you can make made lightning, but then you have to make made lightning."

"Is that different from... making... lightning...?"

"It is different from making lightning bolts, which are very powerful and hard to control. But it is the same basic sort of thing, so no, not really."

"That's one I don't have, so I'd need an elemental."

Jinye nods. "Or to recruit another mage, I suppose. How do you make sticky-metals with magic?"

"I can't teach you, you're not a mage. Can you be more specific about what you want to know?"

"... Is it a fundamentally basic technique, or are you doing some specific thing with magical-control-of lightning which can be replicated by non-mages if that ends up being cheaper? Really, is it complicated-and-expensive or cheap-and-simple is a much more urgent question."

"I have no idea if non-mages can stickify metals. I have never seen one do it. It's easy as magic goes."

"Then it's probably worth focusing on things magic can't do, especially if most of the next generation will have magic."

JINYE WANTS MAGIC. She has largely managed to stop thinking about it but it is still true.

"Most of them, yeah. It's not a hundred percent success rate if you eat seaweed while pregnant but it's like, ninety, most families can get at least one kid magical and that'll just go up."

This is a cruel joke, isn't it. All of this is just a virtual reality created by one of her enemies to mock her.

... Predictions predicted by this hypothesis: Her printing press experiment will fail disastrously, as will all non-humiliating ways of making money.

Predictions antipredicted by this hypothesis: Her printing press experiment will go great and she'll make lots of money and take over the world.

You know what to do to preserve my belief that what I perceived is reality, evil simulators.

"Understood," she says. "So. The printing press..."

"Printing press!" she agrees. And when they have arrived at a good place to have a printing press in the woods she calls Balsa down and has a very careful conversation with her about compensation again and gets started on magically building a shed to go over and the wooden component parts of a printing press.