Including the visitor.

"Augh!"

There's a thump from inside the wagon. Then the sound of something small falling and a child's voice also going 'ahh!'

"- who's there," she says, wobbling unsteadily toward the cart.

Sudden silence. After a moment he rethinks it and says, "Don't go outside!"

"- why?"

"The thing that ate Jervis is probably still close. I'm trying to open his gun box."

"- can I see?"

He pushes the fabric covering of the wagon aside. He hefts the case upright with a grunt of effort- It's thick, solid iron with a very sturdy looking set of latches and locks, about three feet long.

"D'you have the key?"

"No. I know how to use a key. I'm not stupid. He had it on his belt."

He frowns and looks between Pelape and the pile of glowy rocks a few times.

"Anything that'd work as a lockpick, bit of wire or anything?"

She doesn't recognize them?? Or is choosing to ignore them for some reason??

He digs around for what he dropped- An iron nail. "This."

"Might work." Is it bent at all.

It's a little bent. He sets it down on a crate and shuffles backwards rather than allow a close approach.

"I can't know your language for very long by the way."

Pick pick pick. She has no practical experience with this but she watched a video after seeing a lockpick hobbyist on Oddball Blogs. "How long? How do you know it at all?"

"Maybe an hour a day?"

And, blue crystals. Obviously. He used a blue shard, once, a little piece of treasure worth almost as much as hid parents's house, on languages in order to understand a German textbook. Except she doesn't know. What kind of adult doesn't know about the crystals?? Maybe he can keep them all after all... But no, that just leaves him still stranded and unable to eat all of them in time.

He's not even at the limit for absorbing magic right now. He wisely saved some of his tolerance for later.

"Okay. What was it that ate your friend?"

"I think it used to be a mountain lion."

Also: Not his friend. Also also: The nail isn't really cutting it.

It's not like the secret will keep for that long. Better to avoid looking too shifty in front of adults.

"We might have to use a red crystal to open it. I've been trying to think about magic that helps in multiple ways."

"The crystals are - magic?"

"Yeah. I dunno where you're from... You hold them and think about what magic you want and you get an idea if it's possible. And then if you want, no more crystal and you have magic. You can only do so much at once or it makes you sick and kills you. You gotta be smart about it. Also they're worth a fortune."

"There are piles and piles of them here - why a red one, what's different about them -"

"Red is like. Physical things? Sudden things? Green is more... Slow. And blue is like thinking things. I only used a little green one to make myself need less water so far. Until I could think of a plan."

"How many can someone absorb over how much time?"

"I dunno. I read about it in a book once. It said it takes a year to fully reset but didn't say how much is too much. You're not going to turn on me once we escape, right?"

Of course she'll say 'no' but people's faces and manners can tell him how sincere they are. Sometimes.

"No? I have no idea what planet I'm on, why would I antagonize literally anyone here."

......Hmmmm. Acceptable.

"So to open the gun case maybe one of us should get the ability to feel and move small things. That are close to us. Instead of magic to open locks generally. So it's useful more than once."

"And it'll have to be small things because general telekinesis would be too much?"

"The more limits you put on a thing the less it costs. There's math but I can't really remember much of it. I got kicked out of the bookstore."

"...what parts of the math can you remember?"

"Um, for telekinesis specifically they had some people do different things with it, and did math... Volume... No, distance outside of you is squared... I mean, proportional to the squared... I think that means multiplied twice? Um... Force amount is linear. Duration and recharge are logarithmic but I don't know what a logarithmic is."

"...well, the language magic must be good if it's translating it anyway. Do you remember it for any other things at all?"

"I'm THINKING... I think it said you need about five cubic [inches*] of red to be twice as strong as an average man but only three to lift twice as much. Because you're also lifting yourself... I can't really remember much and I hate it. I wish I could have-"

Stolen that book. Adults HATE stealing, don't mention it. 

"It said that it's smarter for soldiers to get magic that makes them better at using guns than just being strong or tough. Good eyes and steady hands and a power to make the bullets magic. It said... There was a long list of different kinds of powers but I can't remember any of the numbers. You can ask the crystals though. It doesn't actually happen unless you go, yes I definitely want this."

*Not translated

...okay. She picks up a red crystal.

This red crystal is full, it helpfully informs her.

He will go over and poke a red one, too.

"We should write everything down before we actually do it. There's only one chance. There's not much water left but plenty of food. Also the donkey." Said animal has gone to sleep in a corner. It doesn't look too healthy.

"Is there a reason we're trying to get something that will open the guns instead of something that will let us directly kill the thing that used to be a mountain lion?"

"I'm worried it won't be enough. Since it has magic too. It was invisible."

...nod.

"What are the other colors?"

"Red, green, blue... White and black... Orange? Yellow. Purple. I haven't counted these yet."

"No, I mean, what do they do?"

"I don't know, they're rare. Red, green, and blue are the most common. I read that white and black together can let you make magic things. Oh, yellow is healing and purple can give you a pocket dimension."

Are there any of those around or just the common ones?

There's a couple dozen of each primary color, four little white ones and three ones that somehow radiate black, as if black was a color, and one lonely yellow.

...Okay, red jewel. Teekay is good but with the constraints in question maybe what she wants is transmutation, will it sell her that?

It can do transmutation! What kind of transmutation!

The more constraints the better, right? What about - identified elements only, so she'll be able to turn the steel in the lock to oxygen, or get water, which she knows to be H2O, out of the presumable silicon in random rocks, but if the rock doesn't have silicon in it she'll have to guess again. Does that make it cheaper - she only needs about half an inch of range away from her fingertips to get through the lock, maybe less, that and speed.

Making it element-to-element is a good start. Half-an-inch range is also a good start. It'll still be pretty darn slow if she wants to be able to do it continuously. Several minutes for a fingernail-sized patch is the most this red crystal could do.

"You're asking it about kinds of magic now, right?"

"Yes." That's not great. More specific, more specific - what if she affects crystal structures in particular, is that small enough, just nudging molecules into or out of alignment -

That is a LOT more efficient. She could do that fairly quickly with a red crystal, if it's not going to be rearranging ionic or subatomic bonds, nearly as fast as she could swipe a finger over things.

(...He grabs a couple of red, green, and blue, and pockets them.)

How much range can she get on that at what tradeoff for speed?

A few inches of range will make it more like a faucet filling a cup in speed. A few feet of range would make it like squeezing a tube of toothpaste in speed. Dozens of feet of range would make it dead slow again. She could get a pool of bond-adjusting magic that will fill at her maximum speed even when she's not actively using it and can be used much faster by trading away a bit of speed or range. The size of the pool depends on how much is traded away.

That sounds good probably and they are in kind of a hurry and she doesn't know if the alien kid can use a gun or if she'll be able to figure it out pronto.

Nomf.

Poof! 

Or really, more like sluuuurp or shiiing. It feels.... Warm. A little straining in some way halfway between a stretch and difficult math.

She has a new mental affordance now! It is empty, and slowly filling.

(Of course she just goes ahead and poofs magic into place instead of planning it out like he suggested. He never expected anything else, really.)

She goes and touches, not the lock, but the place where it's threaded through the crate. Is there enough to, in an atom-thin plane, "melt" the metal?

She has a lot of trouble getting it atom-thin. There's a bit of feedback from the bonds as she shifts them- It sort of feels like they're settling right back in if she tries to go 'as thin as possible'. But applying a bit more oomph and thickness will part the metal, especially where the surface ends up a little rough.

The kid is watching her raptly.

"Did you pick 'metal shaping'?"

"No, crystal-structure manipulation." Box: open. "Do you know how to operate these, I've handled guns but only on another planet."

"I watched Jervis do it. Here, you do it like this- This bag here is full of gunpowder-"

They're low tech by Amentan standards. There's three shotguns, one rifle, and two revolvers.

"Is metal secretly a crystal? Like salt? Is that why some iron is good and some is bad?"

"A lot of solids are secretly crystals. I think I'll be able to freeze water too. Break rocks. Not sure what you mean about iron being good or bad." She has the most practice with rifles, still not a lot but more. She gets it loaded.

"You have to let iron cool the right way or it gets too soft, or too brittle. That's why blacksmiths have barrels of water or oil for dipping hot things into. Water dipping makes them harder but sometimes they just break instead. Oil dipping is safer... Because things expand when they get hot, it must mess up the crystals to cool down too slowly! I love when something finally makes sense."

He pauses.

"We should get as much magic as we think we can before going out. And work together."

"Sure. While we can still talk what's the most important stuff to communicate?"

"Are you a doctor? I think healing magic probably works better if you know doctor things. And we need to have it in case we het hurt. After we get the animal we'll need water and to know where to go and maybe I'm forgetting something... I really hope we can get the mountain lion. Jarvis was kind of stupid but he mostly wasn't evil."

"I'm not a doctor. I know a little stuff. How did you get here, where were you going?"

"He bought me from the sheriff in Colorado Springs and was going to California. So I could talk to the Chinese people."

"- he bought you?"

"Well... He paid them a bunch of money and then they let me out of the jail and said to go with him."

"Are you not a child of your species, you look like a child but I don't think I'm your species, what were they doing putting you in jail?"

"...I stole a book. And food. And I accidentally let someone's horse run away."

"And they didn't send you home to your parents?"

-Nope, shutting up now.

"- sorry. That's not important right now. Repeat which things all the colors do so I can write it down this time."

He focuses deep to try and remember all the stories.

"...Red does sudden things. Changes. Fast things. Heat and motion and cutting and changing. Green does... Endurance things, like make you not need as much water, or make you tough, or make you need less sleep or get tired less. It also can make other magic last longer? Blue does thinking and sensing things. Like language. Or seeing better. And also stuff that's hard to categorize, I think it can make you harder to poison? But not get sick? White does... Things to other magic mostly. Or math things? And talking to people far away. And black does being tough and sturdy and helping make magic things. Yellow does healing. Orange does... Attacking, I think? Purple does pocket dimensions. There's another kind of blue but I have no idea what it does. I guess orange and purple don't matter, there aren't any here."

"Math things? And what do you remember about how many it's safe to use, how many have you had..."

"There was a newspaper story about a guy who could multiply and divide and add up any numbers in his head really really fast after using a white crystal. He was a banker, I think? ...I only used one. I think probably about ten is safe?"

....Pelape checks the condition of her pocket everything.

It's in her pocket. It's not broken. It's got 84% charge.

"Does this look like anything you have on this planet?" she asks, holding it up, pressing her finger to the reader to go from splash screen to apps.

"It looks like magic."

"Okay."

...white gem and a red gem. Can she get one or both of them to keep her pocket everything working and connect it to the internet. Can she aim her whole planet at finding this place.

"...What is it instead of magic?"

A decent chunk of red and a teeny tiny bit of white can totally give her the ability to charge her pocket everything!

This much white definitely cannot give her the ability to make the pocket everything connect to her internet!

"It's electricity and - advanced technology, like, the guns had to be invented, this also had to be invented. I didn't invent it, everyone has them where I'm from. What happens if you use only part of a gem?"

"I want to learn about it when we're not trying to not die! ...It gets dimmer and you can use it later."

"I don't know that much, unfortunately, but I'm hoping I can keep it working and I can show you stuff. How does partly using a gem work with the limit on how many you can have? Do all colors count the same?"

"...Dunno but I'd guess they count partially to the limit? It's not like, poof, you touched the wire and you're dead now. It's 'progressive'. And dunno but I'd guess they count the same?"

"Are there symptoms as you take more?"

"It hurts."

"So if it doesn't hurt I probably have room for more? What's our - destination, now that your - purchaser - is dead, is there somewhere you want to go, what are we likely to run into on the way."

"...Dunno. California is west. And Mexico is south. And I think Salt Lake City is north? There's desert and mountains."

"What do you know about those places? You'd - have work translating, in California, right? Do you want to continue that way?"

"I don't know. I'm scared. ...Jervis got these crystals from a hiding spot and maybe someone will come looking for them. Lots of people are moving to California because it's big and empty and the government said you can have five acres if you're going to farm. Salt Lake City has Mormons. I don't know much about Mexico. There was a war? I don't want to go east."

"What's a Mormon?"

"Some kind of religion? People don't like them much in the East. I think because they say you can get married twice...? They seemed stuffy but not evil to me."

"People usually can't get -? Not important.

"There are - two general approaches I could try here. One is that I could load up on powers that should help us get to California or Salt Lake City, whichever, and focus on - living out the rest of my life here, getting you set up safe somewhere with or without me along.

"The other is that I can try to figure out powers that will let me contact my planet. But even if I tell them exactly where we are, with pictures of the stars at night and all, they will not have a great way to get here.

"Or I could just try to work out how to get a power to go between the planets myself."

"...It sounds like you want one of those more than the other."

"I don't love the prospect of spending the rest of my life on a planet where a pocket everything looks like magic and people sell children. My planet has many deficiencies but those aren't among them. But I don't know how likely it is that I can hold enough magic to get in touch, let alone travel there, and - I'll pretty much immediately lose control of the situation, if I bring them in."

...Oh, that doesn't sound good at ALL.

"...I think 'buying' me isn't quite right... The President made slavery illegal when they beat the Greybacks actually, so it was more like a bribe or paying bail..."

"That's... slightly reassuring, sure."

He clutches his forehead and groans in frustration.

"Even if you're the only one with magic? Since your planet doesn't have any? They fall from the sky sometimes and people are always trying really hard to go get them."

"...yeah. I think even if I'm the only one who starts with magic. Unless I handle everything with too much paranoia for it to even be useful."

...Hmmmmm so maybe HE needs to be the one who can go between planets. So he can get away if he has to.

"It could turn out totally fine. I just wouldn't be able to make sure of it. I'm not important on my planet at all. No number of powers can make me immune to everything that would go wrong for me if I got into a power struggle with the governments of the major countries on Amenta."

"There's always someone in charge telling everyone what to do and it's always terrible for whoever's not in charge," he sulks.

"That's a little more cynical than I tend but I can see how you'd have wound up with that attitude."

"I've used up about half of my translating for today. By the way."

"Is it per time or per - sentence - I should maybe get a similar power anyway, nobody else on the planet'll speak Anitami..."

"It seems to be mostly per meaningful information? If I learn part of a language it starts getting cheaper."

"...huh.

"On the assumption that we're going to travel to California, what do we need - was the guy really traveling without any food or water by the time you got stuck here? Is there a place he planned to resupply? - I don't know if I can eat food from this planet, I should maybe leave room to get a power for that if I have to..."

"There's food in this box. Water's too heavy to haul across the desert, he said. He could pull water outta the air, like rain. Even desert air there's not much but some."

"How many people have magic, about?"

"Not too many. Maybe... One twentieth? And most of those have one gem's worth. They're just a little strong or tough, or can start fires, or kinda smarter than before. They got lucky and found one, or bought it off someone who needed money more than magic. They're worth a lot of money. More than a house. Maybe not more than a really BIG house. Who wouldn't want magic?"

"Right, I just didn't know how rare the gems were. There are sure a lot of them in once place here."

"Yeah... I'm really surprised Jervis had so many. He got them from a cave in the grand canyon. They were already in the box. He did say he wandered a lot, and in places other people don't usually go. I'm... I'm really mad at him actually! For being so STUPID! He had so much magic! He should have beat the mountain lion!"

"Did it - sneak up on you guys, or -"

"He went off alone somewhere and told me to stay here. He did that sometimes. And then I heard a scream a while later and I looked and I saw him running and fighting the thing, it turned visible when it bit, and then, and then I hid."

"Maybe he got all these gems by swiping them from animal dens, if some animals collect them and don't necessarily use them on turning invisible."

"Maybe." Sniff. "Ummmm. I forgot what we were talking about."

"What we need to get to California. He was relying on magic for water? How many days' worth of food do we have assuming I can eat it?"

Thinking face.......

"I think twenty four days. And yeah, he used magic for water."

"Do you know if he was planning to stop anywhere?"

Headshake.

"Dunno. ...There might be a few people near Lake Mead? And I heard they're building railroad tracks to California, but I'm not sure where..."

Actually, if he digs around a bit... Yep, here's a paper map.

"We're here, near the Grand Canyon..."

"And... how long is a mile."

"...It takes about twenty minutes to walk?"

"I'm probably going to need a gem to be able to... walk. I'm not very good at it."

"Oh, I knew someone whose lungs didn't work right. Or at least I knew of them. A green gem fixed them."

"Yeah." She rummages for a green gem.

She knows actually kind of a lot about her balance condition. They had to check that it definitely wasn't genetic, to make sure she'd be able to buy a credit one day if she managed in spite of it to be able to afford one. There is a failure of nervous rhythm when she plans out and executes a gross motor action like walking. Should be around there, brain-region-wise, if that helps. Green gem, can you fix that?

Oh, definitely, green is perfect for this. Bringing her up to solidly above average on [that conceptbundle] is about a third of this green gem.

Nice, nice. There's... yeah, she's not getting out of this situation without needing to be able to walk briskly. Nomf.

There's that weird sideways feeling of strain again. Definitely more exercise-y than painful. And this one is only a third of a gem, so it's less. The green rock dims noticeably in her hand.

"I should maybe get the water thing. But if I make it for filtering stuff generally, like oxygen and nitrogen, or like salt out of water just like water out of air? Mud out of sand? Bugs out of hay and flour? I think that will still work to get water and that sounds like pretty useful magic for all sorts of things."

"...yes, it does, especially if you routinely have bugs in your flour, ew. Let me teach you something quickly in case it helps."

She has, on her pocket everything, a tutorial about Quicksort.

"Understanding that is using too much of my translation I stopped listening. Even though it's really interesting."

"...I can try demonstrating physically with the gems?"

"Maybe?"

He is holding a gem of each color and making contemplative faces. 

"Huh, blue is best for this? Weird. I know about atoms and if I think about moving the atoms, it gets a lot better..."

She has the periodic table on here somewhere!

"Ooh neat..."

So it has to do a little bit of shaking to get things out of other things, like if you had sand mixed with salt and it's all sticky... But the original goal is to get water and it definitely still needs to be able to do that... 

"I think I have a good idea but I'm not sure it's best."

"What's your idea?"

"A magic cloth that I can move around with my mind and only lets some kinds of molecules through. And also it breaks up molecules a little bit to help with that. So I wave it around in the air and water collects on it because water can't go through."

"I'd probably make it bag shaped if I were doing it that way. And you might want to be careful about breaking up molecules, sometimes they can come apart into components you'd rather not have around. But a selectively permeable bag sounds really handy."

"I can always bundle it up into a bag. And since it's magic and not real, maybe it can go through itself. Umm... About breaking molecules, I'm thinking about cleaning sticky things with it. Or rust."

"Maybe what you want is to be able to select one thing at a time to either be able, or not be able, to go through the bag - besides you, you should probably always not go through the bag. So you can say water's the one thing that doesn't go through, and swish it through the air for a while to collect water, or you can say that unoxidized metal is the one thing that does, so you can pass a rusty object through it and it'll come out clean and leave the bag full of rust. I'm worried a cloth won't catch water, though."

"If it's not letting water through, it'll catch water. Maybe it can be one-way, let water in but not out... And it costs less blue if it's just a ball of magic and not a magic cloth with these new ideas... Magic is wicked neat!"

"It is! I think I need a language power to exist on the planet even though you have one, I'm going to work on that." She picks up a blue gem.

Blue gem, can you observe how machine translation on her pocket everything works, and copy that structure, to make this work for more than an hour per day?

It only knows as much about her pocket everything as she does, but it could mimic the general idea - shifting things to one language and back rather than directly imparting meaning into her head?

If that's cheaper than the meaning thing, yes. She can spend some charge looking at recent patch notes for her translation package for an idea of what it's working with, does that help?

It helps a little. And this is overall significantly more efficient than it sounds like the kid's is. She could keep it up for three, four hours a day-ish on one blue gem.

He suddenly declares, "Ooh!" And reaches for a black gem from the cache.

"What's your idea?"

"I remembered something about black. It can make other magic last longer. With some black helping I can set it up and let it sit, like, overnight, to get more water. Or make it follow me."

He touches the black gem. 

"Yeah, it seems like that would work. If that's the best idea."

"It does seem useful, if we have a container suitable for an overnight amount of water."

Gem, can she keep this amount of basic machine quality translation but also gain the ability to trade some duration for "footnotes" on anything that is particularly hard to machine-translate?

Sure, that works, Blue says.

(White chimes in that it can help with that, more cheaply! And save a chatlog.)

"I could dump out the whiskey keg?"

Oh it's being helpful! That's so cute. ...how much more cheaply.

"Alcohol has calories in it... but I have no alcohol tolerance and I'm guessing you don't either?"

"Not whiskey. It's really strong."

(Mostly it's that all the gems she's touching react at once when she considers a magic.)

Using, enh, maybe a tenthish of a white gem and 2/3 of the blue will get her the same thing as before, plus historical log and footnotes-style capability for at least a few times a day.

"What's the approximate relative value of these gems, is it just - their rarity, as reflected in the ones that are here, or is it more complicated?"

"I think orange yellow purple and sky-blue are more expensive? I don't think you can just go to the store and buy one. Oh, I remembered sky-blue exists and is different from blue but I don't remember what it does."

"Okay, but if I can do something for less than ten percent of a white one or for about a third of a blue one...?"

"...Probably the white one?"

Nod.

She does not need the chatlog, white gem, but she'll take its footnotes and the blue gem's language assistance.

Once more, the power stretches and twists and flows. Once more the feeling of exercising something immaterial swells. Is it stronger than before? A bit tenser, a bit more strained? Hard to tell.

"I want to go ahead and get the filter magic. But after that we still need to deal with the mountain lion. Also green can help us be okay with less food, or blue can help forage, I know some wild plants, or red make us stronger and faster. But there's still the animal. Unless it went back home..."

"Wasn't the point of getting the gun box open that we can shoot it?"

"Yeah but... Are you sure you can hit it the first time? And you need a way to see it. There wouldn't be time to reload..."

"I'm not positive I can hit an invisible monster, admittedly. I've spent time at a gun range but not a lot of it and the targets were visible."

"Invisibility breaking magic? Or seeing invisible things magic? That's really... Only useful today, though."

"...echolocation?"

"Or maybe living things sense?"

"I'd rather have echolocation personally but if you want to spend the power space on it go for it."

"It was just an idea. You're the one who needs to see it - sense it- And shoot it... I know how to shoot too. Not great but some."

"If you want me to shoot it I'm taking echolocation, yeah."

Blue gem: echolocation? It works like so. Apparently bats do fucking calculus.

Magic echolocation is right in Blue's wheelhouse. The receptive bit anyway. It does nothing for producing chirps. If she wants to magically have the same sense that proper echolocation would give her without noise that's much pricier.

(Red can do the chirping part! It volunteers.)

Does she need chirps or can she just derive information from the normal noises that exist in an environment with her and maybe if it's too quiet talking or whistling?

She can have magically improved sense of location of objects based on the sounds they produce and echoes from other sounds in the environment but it's a slightly different thing than 'echolocation', the original concept, which involves emitting a chirp and listening closely at the echo.

Does it have to be a chirp or can she click her tongue or something instead? Is that more or less expensive?

It could be any kind of noise she wants but something high pitched and clear, like a chirp, works best? The red cost of this is really minor, like 5%. The blue cost depends on how sensitive she wants it to be.

She doesn't need it that sensitive, enough to aim at the center mass of a large animal and not walk into walls in the dark will about do her. She doesn't want to spend 5% of a gem on being able to squeak unless it saves her a lot on the blue end.

Eh, save on blue? Not really. What's left of this blue gem probably will suffice for that unless it's a very very quiet large animal.

"Was it very quiet on its feet, do you know?"

"...Dunno. Didn't go close. It roared."

Then probably it does not rely too much on stealth. Echolocation-except-not-with-chirping, go.

Shiiiing. Behold, a new sensory modality! The kid, and the donkey, are breathing. She's in a cave and can just Know its rough shape. The exit is that way, it's windy out.

Cool. "Pretty sure I'll notice if it comes in," she tells him.

"Good... Mrrrhmmmm... I'm a little scared to get more magic because what if I made bad choices, but I think it's good. The selectively permeable sphere. I thought about how to move it around and how tough it is and things like that..."

"And if you drop it you probably don't want it to sink through whatever it falls on."

"Thought of that, I control where it is with my mind. And how big it is."

"If you can fit it neatly, sounds good."

...He takes a deep breath and activates it. A blue gem dulls, and the black one does slightly, too.

And then there's a subtle shimmer in the air, a ball discernable as a transparent bubble.

"...I don't know how fast it will be. Depends on how dry the air is, I guess?"

He squints closely at the bubble, looking for... Condensation or something.

"It doesn't feel particularly humid or dry to me right now in here."

He waves it around some.

"-Ah, look, fog! It's working!!"

"Not really enough to drink, but soon!"

"I don't remember how much fog weighs. The sky is really big, so even if it can rain a LOT maybe not that much?"

"Are you running out of translation?"

"...No? I'm not out. Kinda close though."

"I ask because that didn't make sense."

"Fog has to weigh something, right? Because it's water. Just floating water. But it's not important I should save the last of the magic. Umm... Maybe just some being tougher or faster would be good. I don't know."

"Fog has mass. I'm going to go for an electricity power, because if I do it right I'll also be able to keep this working," she indicates her everything. "And it can do several different useful things, though not nearly as many here as it can on my planet."

"Oh, like telegraphs? Those are electric. And I think... Magnets or something..."

"Yes, like those."

Red gem (though she'll be touching a few others if they want to chime in), here's what she knows about how electricity works and the specs for her pocket everything, what can you do to let her keep the everything operational and maybe zap stuff less gently also?

The thing is, she may "know" what the units involved in electricity are and how they relate, but she doesn't know in terms the crystals understand. There will need to be a good chunk white involved to pull that information from the ether and regulate everything safely.

Red can totally do lightning, though. In a bursty sort of way. Green can too, but more in a sustained way? Better for charging batteries at least. Blue can't really help here... Well, a LOT of blue could give her the ability to withstand lightning strikes and convert it into whatever red and green are doing as more juice?

Hm, she wasn't expecting green to pipe up and that suggests she doesn't thoroughly understand the specs of the colors.

She checks but she does not actually have a convenient chart of how many electrons go into how much voltage or anything like that on her local storage.

She assumes but would be remiss in not checking - presumably it'd be vastly more expensive to have the ability to revert things such as her everything to previous states (worse for notetaking, but very widely applicable)? To create or act as a solar charger? To make the everything work without electricity at all?

Revert things such as her everything to previous states: VERY expensive and limited, takes white and black and red.

To act as a solar charger: Still some white, and some blue.

('Creating a solar charger' gets some sort of reaction from black and white, but it feels underspecified)

To make the everything work without electricity at all: Lots of white, bit of green.

(What will he need to invent things? A good memory? Steady hands? The filter ball is a good start, and being able to read foreign books too, but he just doesn't know...)

Okay, scratch all that then, she's got limited capacity. Green, low-level sustained electrical charge generation that'll charge her everything and... make her zap people or animals who touch her if she's got it up? Like, at least enough to keep bugs off and discourage people nonverbally inquiring if she hooks on the side.

Yep, a whole green can do a fairly deterring amount of charge, and half could do 'bug zapper' level, sustained for long periods. She'll still need a lil bit of white to successfully charge the everything.

A smidge of white is fine. She doesn't necessarily need to kill bugs that approach, just make sure that in this preindustrial world she's really inhospitable to parasites and anything carrying diseases, so she can settle for a pretty low level, she thinks.

The low level she's thinking of is 1/3 green, 5%ish white.

Yeah that seems fine. Ker-magic.

Shiing! The sense of warm stretching is maybe fading more slowly this time. 

"I'm definitely noticing the having had a lot of magic, I should slow down. Maybe we want something to get the donkey up and moving but that can wait till we see if giving it water does the trick..."

"He's probably just tired?"

He's still wiggling the filter sphere around. The air feels kind of dry now, and there's a couple inches of water at the bottom of it.

"I want one of us to use the yellow one. For healing. In case the mountain lion attacks."

"Maybe we should design a power for it now, but which of us gets it should be whichever is in a position to use it, if we do wind up getting hurt."

"I think injuries are more time critical than infections but probably it should help with both."

"They're pretty different, it might be hard to get one efficient power that does both."

"There's some diseases that aren't just bad germs, too..."

"What kind do you have in mind?"

"Miner's lung or pellagra. Oh and hatter's disease. That one is because mercury is poisonous, not because of hats. But hat makers used a lot of mercury. Mrs. Wilhelmina Gearing found that out with magic and wrote it in a book."

"...well, I'm hoping to avoid poisoning in the first place, which sounds easier than avoiding injury."

"Probably injury is more dangerous right now."

"Yeah. Also I trip a lot, so it'll be nice to have something for the bruises and sprains I pick up all the time, which I guess is a reason for me to be the one with the healing power."

"...Didn't you just use magic for not tripping?"

"- you're right, I did, I'm not used to it yet."

"I'm scared of being hurt and not being able to fix it. My dad is evil but he was right about one thing. You can only rely on yourself in the end. I want to have the healing magic."

"Okay. Unfortunately everything I know about biology is about Amentan biology, not yours, we look similar but I don't know how surface-level that is."

"...You have a word for germs. And organs. And lungs and hearts and nutrition. I'm almost out of translating."

"I have translation, though I think it'll be a little clunkier than yours."

He reaches for the yellow gem, looking to see if the stranger is going to stop him.

No, they just agreed he should have the healing power. "Do you have a design, or a few?"

He's speaking English now.

"I'm asking about them now... It's weird. I just read 'yellow is healing' but that's not quite right. It's something else that healing is easy to get from? It wants to spread out?"

"To spread out?" she repeats, in English, with a fairly pronounced accent.

"Yeah." He waves his arms out wide. "Go everywhere. Make other things more that thing. It could make plants grow too."

"Is it... accelerating time?"

"I think it wants to be nice? Or something? What the crystals can do is weird. There's not a word for what a red crystal can do except just 'red crystal things'. My ideas for healing magic is one that tells the magic to make your body be more alive but not in a cancer way which seems slower but like a good fit for yellow, and one that makes your own healing go way faster, I think that will make you really hungry. And one that can change what a body part is like if you know what it should be like instead but then I will need to get books about doctoring and it's kind of gross but I know bones should be straight and skin should not be bleeding or infected."

"One of the ideas that turned out to be way too expensive for recharging my pocket everything was restoring stuff to a previous physical state."

"...Yellow says it can't do that at all."

"Huh. Can I touch it and interrogate it a bit, I won't use it."

...He holds it in two fingers in a way where she can touch it, too.

Poke. Hi, yellow gem. What's this healing-growing-spreading thing you do?

It could give her the ability to make things heal or grow in a big wide area! Line of sight, as if the magic were light, is especially good.

She could get various abilities to make a pattern or substance become more of itself? Disrupted body to a whole and nicely patterned cohesive body (I.E. healing). Make a clover patch cover a wider area. Fractal patterns in sand.

Huh. Bringing things into - alignment with other things nearby?

.......Ish? Not really.

Would it be good at cleaning? De-noising data? Weaving and knitting?

Yes on cleaning! Not really, no on data. And yes on weaving.

In a relatively naive healing power is it copying a state of health from something?

...It could definitely make a healing magic that abstracts a hypothetical ideal state of health from the thing being healed and adjusts towards that?

Where does it get its hypotheticals? The genes or something?

.......It could do a power that gets hypotheticals from genes? That's slightly pricier.

"These things are weird. I'm not sure I'll have any particularly amazing insights assuming you'd like a healing power and not one for weaving."

"Yeah they're weird. I think I'm going to ask for magic to change living things. And a little bit of blue for knowing what I'm changing and what healthy looks like. I could use it for healing and for doctoring and maybe gardening too..."

"What do you already know about how living things work, we look enough alike that you're probably made of cells and have a genome and stuff."

"Maybe not that much. I tried to read a lot of books but I don't remember that much from them. I knew about cells. It was in a newspaper. I know about germs."

"Well, at least on Amenta, contagious diseases are caused by germs of two general kinds - sometimes alive things that are often just one cell each, sometimes things that are almost alive but don't do all the things living things do, and, again on Amenta, there are cells in a person's body that are specialized in finding and attacking those. It's possible you could get a kind of narrow cell-growth power that would work reasonably well for healing and also let you give someone extra disease-fighting cells if theirs didn't seem to be doing the job but I'd be a little nervous about both aspects of that power..."

"...I think when people spend green on not getting sick it might be helping the soldier cells? Or maybe it just makes it hard for germs to live... I can get it so it can make more of certain kinds of cells but it'd take more blue, so I can see the cells I want to copy..."

"You'd have to be able to see them? Huh..."

"I don't really know anything about kinds of cells."

"Is it useful? Bearing in mind that I know only about a different biosphere."

"Probably? Especially if it can help with being sick. There are lots of diseases."

So she can ramble on a bit more about what she knows about biology.

This is really interesting stuff! Even if it's maybe wrong because of alien reasons.

...Why did an alien show up, anyway? It's weird.

...Eventually, he will acquire the healing power, with corresponding cell-seeing ability.

"Oh... It doesn't hurt, but it's not going away fast..."

"Coming up on your limit, you think?"

"Yeah. Umm... Let's add up all the crystals we used? So we know."

She nods and assembles her empties.

And the math comes in...

Nicholas:

Translation - 1 blue (It was almost a year ago now, he explains, so it doesn't really count against current capacity. Apparently he lucked out and found one in the woods, and used it himself instead of his parents definitely taking it for themselves.)

General calorie/water reduced needs - 1 green

Filter Sphere - 0.7 blue, 0.25 black

Healing + cell-seeing - 1 yellow, 0.3 blue

Total: 1 green, 1 blue, about a quarter of a black, 1 yellow.

Pelape:

1 red - Crystal structure adjusting power

1 green - Dyspraxia fix (above average coordination now)

.66 blue + .25 white - Machine translation + TLnotes

.33 green + .1 white - Skin/everything electrical power

Total: 1 red, 1 green, about a third of another green, two thirds-ish of a blue, and about a third of a white.

Counting the rest of the gems, there remain:

23 red

25 green, and one 2/3 full green

34 blue, and one 1/3 full blue

4 black, and one 3/4 full black

3 white, and one 2/3 white

"...so if the one you used a year ago doesn't count toward your limit now it would seem I have more capacity than you. Is that because you're a kid or because I'm an alien?"

"Dunno. This is a LOT of magic for everyone except super rich people."

"I got that impression, yeah. We're going to be huge targets for thieves if we let on."

"Maybe we have like, two, that thieves can take and think they got all of them, and the rest are... Sewn into clothes and bags? Buried in the food box?

"Thieves might take those things too. Not that I have a better idea."

"And they glow, which makes them easy to find... We could just bury them somewhere again and come back in a year."

"We could bury them in a few places, as we go."

"......I've been thinking...... I think the whiskey is poisoned? Jervis never drank any until yesterday. And then he did, and then he seemed real quiet, and then he lost a fight that he should'a won."

"...why would he have had and drunk poisoned whiskey?"

"What if someone poisoned it so they'd get him and then they could come steal his magic stash?"

"...seems roundabout but I don't know the circumstances involved."

"...I dunno. But if it was the poison would still be in the keg." He wobbles his filter sphere a bit. "I have water and nowhere to put it. I don't think it would be a good idea to poke a finger in, or your head in to drink, 'cause blood is mostly water."

"And you can't get it to release some of the water into your hands?"

"I KNEW I was forgetting something when I was designing it! I'm so stupid! Maybe a little bit of white can fix it..."

"Oh dear. I wish I had my water bottle on me but I don't."

"I want to fix it, it only hurt a little bit last time I got magic, like being pinched and not like being whipped. Maybe if I can fix it with... A tenth of a stone, it's worth chancing it? I'd be adding a little part that can do something other than the rest of it, which is a white thing... White does making other magic more complicated, too..."

Nod nod. "And if we don't have anything other than our hands to drink out of make sure you don't need your hands to operate it."

He takes up a white gem... Thinks for a minute... It dims a small but noticeable amount. He makes a face.

"It hurt like a pinch again... It's going away, though..."

And then he cups his hands under the sphere, and a thin stream of water slips out.

"It works, though!"

"Oh good. I'm not terribly thirsty at the moment, help yourself."

He drinks. And then he goes over to give the donkey some water, bit by bit.

Pelape rearranges some files on her everything so she can keep the stuff she might want and cannot simply redownload in a minute.

So they're both ignoring the prospect of actually leaving for now? Good, good.

She's kind of expecting to sleep in this cave and move on in the morning when the predator's likely to have moved on!

They can do that, then. Modulo some using filter sphere tricks, dismissing it entirely and re-creating it, to deal with bathroom issues in the far back corner. (There's hard soap and other basic cleaning supplies in the wagon.)

It's not a natural process but it's a magical process and that's about as good.

The donkey seems reasonably okay after plenty of water, rest, and a little bit of stored hay from the wagon.

The kid knows exactly how to do the harness and yoke. Getting the wagon out of the little cave is a bit of a tight fit, and there's some loose rock just outside, but once they're past that it's largely dry scrubland. Pelape's sound-sense does not notify her of any stalking animals for the first while.

...The unimaginative name 'Grand Canyon' may be somewhat appropriate, actually, from the view they have down an inconvenient side-canyon forcing them to detour north. It's pretty impressive.

Wow, that's a big fucking canyon. She's new enough to being able to balance that she doesn't get tooooo close but she looks from a safe distance.

They can eat lunch here. The most obviously well-preserved food is sealed, fresh looking tin cans (canned beef, canned bread, canned oysters, canned beans, canned cherries). The flour, various jars of preserves and pickles, and glass bottles of olive oil all look decent enough, though. The kid builds a little fire and makes a batch of flatbread. He is very serious and diligent about it even if the pan is a bit too big for him and firewood is kind of heavy.

She can help with the firewood hauling but doesn't know anything about cooking on an open flame. "If we open a can we can decant water in it to drink after it's empty."

"Canned food is meant to be eaten. Just as long as we don't waste any."

"Cherries are the most appealing but if you'd rather something else I'm not picky."

"Canned bread is pretty bad. Cherries are fine."

"And you've made some non-canned bread." She opens a can of cherries.

Overly sweetened canned cherries in thick syrup on flatbread it is for lunch, then. And then back to walking alongside the donkey and the cart.

Walking this effortlessly is interesting for the first few hours, at least! She's gonna get so brown in all this sun.

A rock falls over in the distance, making a bright attention-getting flare in Pelape's echolocation.

...she grabs the gun in case that was the invisible monster.

There are a few more suspicious vague echoes from that direction.

(The kid is being very quiet and watchful.)

She whistles a little to get a clearer bounce.

It's not where the rock fell but about ninety degrees to the right, slinking slowly closer.

Whistle. Aim. Whistle. Fire.

It... 

Suddenly turns to run in a scramble of noise when she turns in its direction to aim. The shot is thunderous and releases rather more smoke than she's used to- She can seehear the thud as bullet impacts flesh, and then seehear a pained yowl and the creature running rapidly away. Seems like she might have hit a leg.

Is it leaving a blood trail?

Bit hard to see that at this distance. If she walks up and checks- Yep. Thin, but there.

"Okay. Hopefully it'll go die somewhere, or be too scared to go after us again."

Or maybe it will get more magical and become a terror of the deep desert and one of the reasons the wilds are yet feared even in the modern days of firepower. That'd make a good novel. ...I'm really glad it's probably gone."

"Me too."

"I guess we'd better get back to walking. Or maybe we should think about hiding the magic."

"Yeah, we can keep an eye out for good cache spots."

"I think you said you're an alien earlier? Are you from Mars? I have NO idea how you got here..."

"We call it Amenta but I doubt you can see it from here without a great telescope, we'd definitely have noticed if you guys were in our system."

"It seems sad that you can't go home. Even if they might take over everything."

"It's not great."

"...If you want to get more magic and go home I'm not gonna try to stop you. Maybe your government is better. I don't know."

"I'm thinking about it. Mostly not because of the government, but because of how if I stay here I won't ever be able to have a baby. I could adopt a human baby, I guess, theoretically, but like who's going to give me one."

"...Prostitutes?"

"...I'll be able to get laid but we're not the same species."

"I heard the ones from Roaring Rachel bar complaining about having babies and having to quit because of it. Between when I ran away and when I got arrested, I mean."

"That might not mean they don't want the babies? It'd be pretty hard to keep a job with a baby if you didn't have a coparent helping."

"...In church they said you have to get a wife and have babies and work hard for enough money for the whole family and your wife will take care of your babies."

"...well, are these prostitutes married, or are they getting pregnant by random clients because there isn't decent birth control?"

"They're probably mostly not married? I don't know."

"I guess it's not impossible that one of them would rather not keep a baby."

"I think this happens a lot though. And there are orphans. In orphanages."

"...what, why."

"Where I grew up people say, 'you have to be able to rely on your neighbors!' and take the kids. But in cities everyone is strangers and hates each other... Or so my Dad said."

"And they hate the kids?"

"I guess? Or there wouldn't be orphanages. It sounds like you think people would fight over orphans."

"- yes! That's how it works on my planet! There's good birth control so kids appear almost exclusively when they've got people eager to raise them and there aren't enough orphans to go around among all the people who can't for whatever reason have their own!"

"Huh. That's probably better than orphanages I guess."

"I would certainly expect so!"

"I don't know if I want any more parents 'cause mine were evil. But I know I probably have to find some. Or an orphanage. Even though I have magic. People won't take me seriously!"

"Amentans wouldn't either, you look two and a two year old doesn't know how to handle themselves independently."

"I did keep getting into trouble..." He frowns.

"What kind of trouble?"

"Mostly for sneaking into places to sleep... And not having enough money for food... I tried to work, like, I picked up metal scrap from places and sold it but it wasn't enough."

"Well, those mostly sound like poverty problems and not specifically childhood problems, so hopefully if there's translation work you'll be able to get by better? It hasn't really sounded like you want me to try to look after you more than is implied by traveling together."

"I was scared of the mountain lion before? And I don't know you? It sounds like you know lots of cool things that I want to know."

"I'm not saying you should necessarily want me to look after you, I'm just observing that you in fact have not seemed to. What do you want to know about?"

"Your electricity thingy. They say electricity is the future! Telegraphs and stage shows are just the start!"

"...what are they doing with electricity in stage shows specifically, just - lights?"

"Lights, and little lightning strikes going between metal things, and an electric horseless carriage, and this spinny wheel projector thing that made it look like a horse running on a white screen!"

"Huh, electric horseless carriages before the kind that burn fuel directly, I think that's not how we did it but I guess I'm not sure you couldn't - or do you already have the kind that burn fuel and it's just not how you were traveling?"

"I don't think you can get a steam engine small enough for a carriage? They put them on trains. And for like... Getting water out of mines. Those burn coal."

"Yeah, no, not steam engines, combustion engines."

"Oh, I think they use those for tools. It's more expensive than coal."

"Huh. I don't know nearly as much as I'd like about the history of technology right now, it wasn't terribly relevant to my life before."

"What kinds of things did you aliens invent after you had steam engines?"

"Lots of them, but I don't know in what order. We've got airplanes, and shuttles that can go to the moons and back, and electric trains. Computers and the internet and all their attendant complexity."

"Internet..." He mutters. "Internet... Hmm... Is it better than newspapers or libraries?"

"Yes."

"I don't like feeling like I'm making you sad."

"I don't think any of this is your fault. If I'd ever been inclined to think that you decided to address your problems by summoning an alien, investigating the orbs for myself would've made it clear that isn't what happened, they don't really want to deal with interplanetary distance."

"You're really not mad?"