Selen left town with more mail to carry, and the guilt that her family might worry about her for extending the eastbound trip by most of a day.

The kind wizard had given her a lot to think about. The Knowledge Society generally treated magic and technology as separate fields and seemed not to understand when she proposed doing more. She'd run the idea of a steam engine by Ralator because of his strange mirror setup, and she knew he was open to the idea of using alchemy products to modify spells. But even he showed just mild interest, saying it "seems like more of an Engineer job".

Selen hiked and flew enough that she regained a second Flight skill point and was probably close on Hiking. To get the Flight point she'd been slightly daring, seeing how high she could go while carrying these mail bags. Pushing both her Mana and Stamina. Once the extra power showed up she was at a new peak of flying skill, and could stay up a bit longer. Maybe Aves were the natural people to push for a combination of physical effort and magic. Then again she'd heard of Humans doing the magical kung fu thing in this world, and she knew their kind was capable of amazing progress.

Sometimes. In some cultures.

She headed home, dutifully practicing all the way. The System told her, [Skill gain: Elemental Magic 2 (Learning).] It was nice to have tangible rewards for that sort of work, but the points themselves didn't get her the status and respect she needed.

#

She had hardly gotten home to check in with Dad and drop off the latest incoming packages, when it was time to wash up and prepare for a Knowledge Society meeting.

The mansion was crowded tonight. Selen walked into a ground-level hall with a demonstration being set up. An Elven man in the grey and black livery of the Duke's own servants was watching quietly. "What's the occasion?" Selen asked Zahar.

"Him," said Zahar, nodding.

A Centaur man in long leather aprons was fussing about with something under a blanketed table. His assistant was a scrawny long-limbed colt who looked too young to use the System and had the same wild red mane. The hidden showpiece began to make clanking noises.

At last the inventor bowed and said, "Thanks for your invitation. I am Firefern and this is Steamflower, studying to follow in my hoofsteps. It's good to finally see the Grandbridge scholars in person. Unfortunately I wasn't able to bring the Molten Dream all the way upriver, but I shepherded a smaller model. Behold!"

His son whipped off the blanket, revealing a toy boat. To Selen's eyes it was a tugboat, with most of its deck taken up by a metal contraption. A wisp of smoke now trickled up from a stovepipe as something spun within. "Is that a steamboat?"

The inventor said, "I'd been calling it a fire-harness paddle boat, but that's a good name too. It's just starting to boil, so we should see it move."

The boy also pulled aside part of the tablecloth, revealing that the underside of the table held most of the device's bulk. A tiny stove was burning charcoal and sending its heat up through pipes to the toy boat.

Selen said, "We may want to open some windows."

"Yes, good idea."

Zahar nodded toward his Elf servant, who hurried to ventilate the room better. He said, "So, the fire energy of the wood turns it?"

Firefern nudged his boy to do the talking. The son said, "Um, yes. The steam wants to rise, so it pushes past a wheel. And it's like a little waterwheel or windmill that makes this bit wiggle." A rudder began to slowly flick back and forth on the toy, like a fish's tail.

The father opened a compartment to show that three red crystals were there, too. "In this demonstration unit I'm using lesser shards of magicite to provide extra heat. On the real boat, we use a greater shard."

Which wasn't easy to get, Selen knew; they were legally the local lord's property, and "mining" them meant dungeon-delving.

The Mage that Selen had been working with said, "But you'd just have the crystals sitting there, shedding heat. It's not a spell."

"Yes. Heat is a form of energy, and we can harness it just as we do the flow of water or the pull of muscle."

Zahar didn't have the intimidated look of the Mage, but his tail still lashed uneasily as the machine grew louder and emitted smoke as well as steam. "All this rumbling to move a toy?"

"It can move a real boat already. A similar device could move your drawbridge, or lift heavy things."

"It seems like it relies on resisting all this boiling heat, this vibration; I half expect it to shake itself apart."

The boy muttered, "Wouldn't be the first time."

Selen felt upstaged. What did this world need her for, when this sort of thing was already happening? From the skeptical tone of the speakers she felt the need to step in, anyway. She said, "This device is going to depend on getting reliable parts carefully made to the right shape. Alchemy might help with that, for better seals and heat resistance. But I'm sure you're onto something important, sir. 'What use is a newborn baby', right?"

"Alchemy!" said one of the Society members. "Are we going to just throw every academic discipline at the thing to make one device work correctly? Maybe we can tighten the bolts by throwing your math equations at it too."

Selen faced the scholarly Elf who'd spoken, and told him, "Yes. Yes, a rigorous study of the math might make it more reliable. Isn't that what we're here for? Alchemy and magic and mechanisms aren't completely separate languages. What if we could make, oh, a steam-powered saw to cut trees, or a wagon that rolls along without horses?"

Firefern said, "I'd been wanting to try the wagon as well."

"But we have horses," said the Mage.

"I can pull a plow myself if need be, but even I would love to have one that hauls its own weight. It's just a matter of time and funding." He grinned viciously. "Would anyone like to bet that in one year's time, I can't show you a more reliable model?"

Selen wouldn't take that bet; in fact nobody did.