She repeats the fuelless-fire-in-the-air demonstration, incantation and wand movement, leaving a little circle drawn in fire floating before her.

"Do you have a small object I could use?"

That does indeed appear to be fuel-less fire. He tosses a finger-sized piece of irregularly-shaped sheet metal to her. "Oh, also, welcome and all that. If you need food or somewhere to rest, I can certainly arrange that for you in a bit."

She catches the metal and is moderately pleased with herself for doing so. Engorgement Charm is applied. The finger-sized piece of metal becomes closer to hand-length, and she offers it back.

"I think I could eat soon, although it's not urgent. Do you happen to know the time?"

He starts turning it over in his hands. He gets a balance and weighs it. "It's about three in the afternoon. The scouts found you at about eleven A.M. if I have the timeline right. And there's basically no reasonable explanation for this except that you do indeed have magic powers. Christ. I think I'll mostly trust you on the extent of them."

"Mmm. Wasn't exactly an average afternoon when I found out, either, but five years takes a bit from the novelty. I promise to be as trustworthy a source as I can manage, but I'm not about to be offended at having to prove my word."

"Well, the thing is, I need to go about extracting maximum usefulness out of you as quickly as possible for the sake of the seven hundred and forty nine - seven fifty flat, now, with you - souls living here. And I do worry that will make me seem like an uncaring autocrat or manipulative politician. Thus, explaining my reasons, that being that people are going to die if things go too badly. Have died."

"Well, you don't come across to me like an uncaring autocrat or manipulative politician, and I've met people I might call either if they were a bit older. I have absolutely no complaints about being maximally useful for stopping people from dying."

"Well, that is good news. Do you think you can heal frostbite? How long will these flames last? Can you improve plant growth in any way? Our greenhouses are small and yet demand lots of steam and advanced components."

"I do know something for minor injuries, but I haven't tried it on frostbite before. These flames won't stick longer than a couple hours and they were really made for writing, not light or heat, but there are other ways to make either or to start fires. I can make a plant at a time have a growth spurt."

"We have a fair number of sick people, we have a lot of cold people, and we only have a few hungry people for now, though food stores are low. I think cold is the first priority. A long-term solution is obviously better than a temporary one, which duplicated coal would be. We're working on better insulation and steam efficiency here in between other projects, but if your... Magic... Can create long-term heat sources, insulation, protection from the wind, or accomplish something similar, that will probably remove much of the urgency there."

"I could make a fire that doesn't consume fuel, and refresh it from time to time, although proper everlasting fire is beyond what I can do. There are some ways to ward an area I can try, but I don't know any I'd call an improvement over actual construction for blocking wind. I'll tell you if I think of something else, not everything that could be useful is coming to mind immediately.

"- I should probably mention that my world is in the early twenty-first century. I'm still very much not an engineer, and this isn't quite the 1887 I remember from history, but I can try describing a century and change's worth of discoveries if you think that might help."

"We should arrange tests - see how long and how hot one everlasting fire is, and how much coal you can make how quickly, and determine which is more efficient. Same with the healing and the plants. Not the specific test, but getting an idea of it. Hmm. Talking about technological advances could quite plausibly help. Though there is a significant gap between knowing something is possible and knowing how to do it, and giving no offense, you do not seem to be a specialized engineer."

"No offence taken. What would you say is the - general state of technology, currently? I have the impression that steampower is common?"

"Steam power is common. We have... Power tools, engines, airships, medicinal techniques like antibiotics and vitamin supplements. Electrical lights, speakers, and motors, and a few crude other devices - I know there's a lot of potential there, but the stuff is the devil to work with. The Generator is about high pressure and efficient heat distribution... We have telescopes, barometers, and such scientific instruments... There's the Automatons. We don't have any, but we have the plans for them. They'll be mostly-automated steam powered machines that can work as hard as ten men, around the clock, though we'll have to feed them coal and they can only perform simple tasks that you would call manual labor. Sawing trees, gathering coal, that sort of thing."

"I'm familiar with airships gradually being replaced by airplanes after a series of attention-grabbing disasters. Electricity can be very useful but I don't know that I can help you very much with it - what makes it difficult to work with right now? In non-magical world where I'm from, machines - you could call them automatons - can perform more complex sorts of tasks, process more complicated information. I don't know much of how that works either but I think it's based in - being able to perform math very quickly, being able to receive and store and spit out numbers and turn them into actions."

"Mathematical calculation is not exactly how automatons work. As for electricity, it's phenomenally dangerous, mostly. Hmm. What is an airplane?"

"For electricity, is the problem - people being shocked, fires? An airplane is a sort of flying vehicle. Usually it has engine-powered - propellers, turbines - to push it forward, and wings - fixed wings - that are shaped so that they push the plane up when air flows past them, enough to let it fly if it's light and fast enough."

"People being shocked, it's hard to predict when electricity will short or create dangerous voltages, it's hard to safely insulate wiring, it's overall hard and we don't understand it too well yet. Honestly airplanes sound about five times more dangerous than airships."

"They're generally faster and very safe when made to be, but I think the early ones did have a habit of crashing, and I don't think I can tell you enough to get you past that awkward stage. I would really like help you with electricity, but I'm not sure how... how are you generating it, what are you using for insulation?"

"Steam driving magnets inside wire coils. We've tried lots of things - silk works reasonably well but we kind of don't have any up here. Glass, ceramics, and wax, too, and they all have their own disadvantages."

"We use - plastic, it's called, a sort of thing refined from oil, and rubber for a while too, but it doesn't seem like you could get any up here that you don't have already. I'd offer to try Transfiguring some of what you're missing, but I've been warned very direly to never experiment with Transfiguration... if you have an excess of any junk objects or, I don't know, beetles, I can practice some of what I already know and pick out whatever's useful from the results. That reminds me I can turn things to stone or glue them very securely, if it helps anything, but that's a bit less directly related to electricity."

"Stone and strong fastening could be useful, I will keep it in mind! I will also keep in mind transfiguration for any definitely useless junk we acquire. Would you mind if we get to it and organize tests of lasting fire and coal-duplicating and do some math now?"

"I don't mind, it sounds very interesting. I had a friend who tried to do something like that but I don't think he had enough - background - to get much out of it."

"Well, I can explain what I'm thinking and what we're testing as I go. That often helps when I start thinking in circles, anyway."

And they can go do science to magic! Focusing on the immediately useful, not basic principles, for now though. It turns out that duplicating and enlarging chunks of coal is more efficient in terms of Mabel's time and energy than magical fires.

"Not as good for air pollution, but that is about a hundred items down the list of priorities right now. How do you feel about a half-shift of this as work, tomorrow? That will be enough coal that I can slosh around the shifts some, take people out of the coal mines and put them in greenhouses and infirmaries and help deal with the other looming resource issues."

If only they could miraculously greenhouse-effect their way into not being frozen.

"I'm perfectly all right with that - I don't actually know how long your shifts are but I assume it's not an absolutely ridiculous amount of time."