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Sarun, Appointee of Rixo, is pacing back and forth in his garden, lost in thought. Around him, the serfs are working the estate; inside, the servants are keeping up the house; his wife is around here somewhere, sitting outside in the cool of the evening with the kids, but he can't hear them, they probably went down to the stream. He is thinking about currency issues; they just keep coming up.
Silda in Cosel
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And yet they've accomplished so much stuff, it sounds like! Maybe she should get a mage with a Shadow to take her there and back? Set up a trade route?
the-golden-years
(Silda is thinking very very quickly.
From her selfish point of view, she wants to stay here. She can take over a world and fix everything right by herself and it will end up wonderful and amazing without introducing any of the things about the Attani empire she dislikes.
But, in actual fact, the ethically correct thing to do is to give the Attani Empire magic so it can make everyone immortal and take over the universe. She has no idea if magic even follows the laws of thermodynamics, but whether it does or doesn't, giving the most functional human state tremendously more resources would be worth her death, which would happen if her secret identity became known to the rest of her classmates. Which it almost certainly would.
So, is Silda an ethical person? At all? Even in the slightest?)
They can probably find a mage with a Shadow around somewhere within a few days.
What should they expect once there's a way to and from her country?
the-golden-years
The obvious thing to expect is that lots of people will show up wanting to trade, and teach classes, and see about hiring mages to do things mages can do cheaply and that can't be done without magic. Some people will want to move in, either because they don't like living under the Attani or because they want to buy land or because they want to avoid high taxes or just because they think living in a world with magic is cool.
The Attani might want to take over but since they don't have any mages and they don't have any Shadows they would have some problems just getting here, let alone doing anything once they do.
That does seem like it would make it hard for them to invade! Even a Shadow can't take more than a handful of passengers anywhere per day.
It's inconvenient.
the-golden-years
This is very true, but under the circumstances it's also very useful for not being invaded.
Yup, even if they suborned a few mages who happened to have Shadows they'd be able to land troops only very slowly. But people are always hoping to find a way to replenish magical energy.
There is not! It means a lot of magic-intensive work takes longer than it seems like it should if you watch mages working.
the-golden-years
She doubts she can solve this problem, since her world doesn't have magic, but if they want technological and/or economic assistance, she's very qualified to help!
Is there a way technology or economics can be used to refill mages?
the-golden-years
She has no idea, since her world doesn't have magic. It's clearly worth investigating, though.
How exciting! What would her research avenue there be?
the-golden-years
There are individual techniques they have to make doing research better (she'll want to get into the math later, it can be tricky to follow,) but basically she'd want to try to sort mages by how much energy they can store or how quickly they refill it, then see what things mages with very high capacity or regeneration rate do, then see if, if other mages start doing them, they get more capacity or more regeneration rate.
Oooh, that sounds like such an obvious idea in retrospect! It's a pity they don't have a way to precisely measure that.
the-golden-years
Are there any spells that all mages can do, that drain a small fixed amount of magic regardless of how well you cast them? If so, you could use the-amount-of-energy-that-spell-costs as a source for your unit-of-measure.
Not really. You can get more efficient at casting a spell.
the-golden-years
Oh. In that case you're trying to measure something imprecise with something imprecise and that's much harder. Is there... a rate at which mages can recover magic, or take magic from elementals, that's fixed?
They can take from elementals as much as they want but the elementals run out. Mages seem to recover magic steadily at all times unless they're full up but different ones take different amounts of time to fill up.