The Sunlit Man

Let’s say there are three items A, B, and C. You can combine A with B in five different ways, and B with C in six ways. And let’s say there are thousands of people who use items every day. It would be very unusual if these people would not go through all possible ways to combine these three items and figure out which of these ways are useful.

If you introduce these items in a fast-paced novel, a reader might not do this by themselves (they don’t have direct access to this universe to test their hypotheses), and they might accept that a discovery is surprising. But now, when you think about the state of the world before this discovery, something seems wrong about it. How come nobody bothered to check this? Isn’t it your main problem? Why is nobody really studying it?

(That is to say, somebody on Canticle would have discovered how to recharge sunhearts long ago without any outside help.)