No yeah she wouldn't ask Megi to stay.

...She guesses, uh, where should she send mail?

"...Hmm. There's a few places I'll probably get it eventually."

She'll write down about half a page's worth- Two notable temples, a merchant house in the south, and a few other kitsunes, Sinnah herself, one called Weiss, one called Lilia, and one named Katherine.

"Sinnah is very dedicated to magic and things that enable doing more magic, like money, or sex since that's the fastest way to get more energy to cast magic with. Lilia plays at being a noble lady and lives over near the City of Fire. Katherine is a homebody who lives down in Noten, in Greatcliff City. She runs an orphanage and school. Weiss recruits me to fight Cryptids occasionally. It needs doing. Though I have no idea where she is any given time, her house is near a village in the March of Flowers, also in Noten."

"Good to know!  ...I was thinking about asking if you knew Sinnah's mailing address anyway; I have a spell I really want to work out, because if it can be done it could upend diamond scarcity."

"Well, you have it now! That would be... Well, revolutionary. I hope it works out."

...Okay, one last hug, and then Megi will leave with all the best wishes for Alicia's endeavors.

One hug for the road, mhm.  Safe travels!

And thusly she settles in for University Education 2.0, Now With Magic.  ...She's not going to put her plans for artificial diamond manufacture in the mail until she can't progress them any other way, though.

Several Months Later...

She has been working towards this spell design for months.

For almost a year, even.

She just needs to find a way to refactor it that doesn't require her to write two runes on top of eachother.

Baby-kitsune neuroplasticity aside, English has better swears, and when every attempt to refactor this spell leads inexorably to a collision again, when the hypothetical 'rune convolution' technique she just spitballed might exist is very much not known to her... she really wants to swear at something.

"Motherfucking piece of shit spell structure, why the hell won't you cooperate with me, all I'm trying to do is replicate naturally-occurring real-world conditions...  Bloody hell.  I'm going to absolutely fucking lose it if I don't figure out how to work this."

"Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" Drawls another voice in Tirran English, the next table over. "Or, more appropriately, are you relying a bit too much on magic? I've built a prototype steam engine out of heat and condense cantrips. Turned out to not actually solve the problem, but..." Shrug.

"...I somehow doubt I'm going to reach, let alone maintain, temperatures in excess of 1500 degrees Celsius and pressures in the gigaPascal range without magic, but maybe I could externalize some of it...  If I can make a safety margin or a remote activator, which might prove ultimately more troublesome.  And why the hell would you make a steam engine when you can just go straight to electricity?"

Then she realizes that this conversation was in English.

"...And why the fuck are you dropping Earth references?  Ain't nobody who'd say that but a programmer and we don't have those here!"

"As I said. It didn't work out. Something like a strong vessel that can contain pressure, yes. Though giga... Hrm. Oh, we don't have those here? Snake, your cover's blown! Get out of there!"

"We also don't have any nanomachines, son.  But yeah apparently one of the resource constraints on magic items is diamond dust, and diamonds are just carbon but fancy!  Wish I knew more chemistry, or, failing that, had some of the Zachtronics games that were chemistry-focused.  Which wouldn't exactly help with the reactions but could at least get me some stoichiometry."

"What kind of genre is Zachtronics? Is that like those Tony Hawk skating games? Or Mario? All that stuff is annoyingly fuzzy, anyway..."

"...Automation puzzles.  Very programmer-lite, or just actual programmer - assembly or machine code.  I think I got very lucky; there's - I don't remember what killed me, but I remember so many random facts.  Then again, my episodic memory was already absolute shit to begin with."

"D'you have any unit conversions, by the way?  That's really what's fighting me the most now that I've figured on doing something like one of those fusion laser things instead of trying to cram the heat and the pressure into the same spell circles - I don't exactly have the international prototype kilogram in my back pocket, no matter that that's deprecated.  Or...

"Wasn't there something about redefining the kilogram in terms of Avogadro's-number of carbon-12 atoms...  Or was it redefined from that to something else...

"What I wouldn't give for Wikipedia, instead of half-baked memories thereof!  Or even just the index card cheatsheet I made for a physics exam once!

"...Speed of light is 2.998 times 10 to the eighth...  Avogadro's number is 6.022 times 10 to the 23 atoms to the mole...  But how do I actually rederive the rest?  I know there was a definition of c in terms of Hertz - or, seconds to the negative first power - but absolute heck if I know what that number was...  And then I don't - wait, maybe I do, or a close-enough - no, quartz clocks are affected by temperature - and I mean I know there was something about pendulum clocks but I don't remember the precise formula...

"...Was Kelvin to Celsius a plus 273.15 or 273.5, anyway...  Pretty sure it's point fifteen.  That stands out too much for me to have made it up.  But what the hell that means for any other unit...  Is 'probably nothing', really, even though heat is motion on the atomic level...

"The density of water rounding off to 1 doesn't really help me either, dammit, because that's too many units I don't know!  Argh!  ...Maybe there was something about the triple point...  But I don't actually know what that is in SI units either!  Though water freezes at zero Celsius and I think that's not particularly affected by atmospheric pressure, so maybe..."

"...This conversation did not go how I expected it to..."

She stands up quite suddenly and starts walking off, coffee still on the table.

"...Eh?  Don't forget your coffee!"

"I am taking a walk."

She walks faster.

...She might be back in ten minutes or so, though.

...How is she the person with less social skills/more social anxiety in this interaction?

She very carefully doesn't pay attention to this other reincarnate Earthling, though she's kept the coffee warm while she frenetically tries to figure out a temperature conversion.

Coffee.

"...I don't like thinking about Earth. I'm not really very... Happy... Here. And you seem quite high-strung. So, I don't want to talk about it in public any more even in a dead language."

"...Well.  That's an entirely reasonable thing to ask, and hopefully I will not let my mouth run off ahead of my better judgement.

"Is...  There something that someone could help with?  I don't know if there's anything I can do, but...  I'm trying to be Chaotic Good, and all."

She switches to Atsosi. "...I probably should talk about it with someone. I've spent... More time in the wild than in a city. I really just needed to go shopping for metal and tools."

She nods, switching to the local tongue herself.  "Probably, but it doesn't have to be me.  I might...  Hm.  Well, I'm not sure I know anybody who knows anybody, either.  Not anyone from around here, for sure.  ...What're you working on?

"And.  Sorry about scaring you off earlier.  I promise I'm not normally like that, I've just been struggling with this for months and.  Well.  I got frustrated.  Sorry for taking it out on you by proxy."

"...Mm. I've always found shrinks to be kind of... Dubious. I want an airship, or an airplane. Or a fast boat."

"Ooooh that sounds neat.  I'd love to help, actually.  I know at least any things about heavier-than-air flight.  ...And vaguely remember a book with magic lighter-than-air flight that might be reimplementable locally, come to think.  ...As for psychologists being dubious...  I mean, honestly, yeah, you're not wrong, I don't know if the profession exists here but there were...  I did my time, my last go 'round, and it didn't directly help with much.  But talking to somebody about your problems...  I know I got a lot of help out of talking things over with friends, when I was a mess.

"...This is rather forward of me to offer, I suppose, but some part of me is very loudly insisting that you need either a hug or to pet something, and I can't do hugs yet.  So.  If you'd like.  Just, um, not the tail, please.  That's.  Sensitive."

Yes it's honestly probably too soon, instincts, she knows that, but no she is not going to leave this person to their misery, and...

This one's been living in the woods.  How long has it been since their last friendly touch?  She doesn't know about foxes, but humans need that sort of thing!

...Really, brain? You traitor.

...Fine. Head: Meet table.

But she says, "My father hit me. My mother stood by and watched, for the most part. I deal with it be being utterly blunt about it. He was an asshole, she was... Ultimately, probably a fellow victim. They're both gone. It's heavy, though. Also, used to be a guy and that sure is something else."

...Some of what Alicia is about to say are things that she doesn't want to let loose around all and sundry who can understand Atsosi.  Thankfully, she's pretty sure this guy? speaks fluent Fox.  The memory fuzz seems... indicative.

"...That's.  Damn.  I wish I had something to say about that.  Because all I've got are the same platitudes you've probably heard a dozen times over - but it is still true that that should not have happened to you.  Not to you, nor anyone.

"...This is going to sound incredibly fucking stupid, but have you considered being Batman about it.  Not really in the sense of going out there and punching evildoers in the face, but -"

- and here she switches languages -

"...I've heard it said that sometimes, helping others the way you weren't helped, is a way to heal wounds that cannot otherwise be mended.  And...  I do know a decent orphanage, or so I hope.

"And, about the other thing - speaking from practical and personal experience, dysphoria's hell and I wish I knew if there was something you could do about it.  Assuming that that's something that you...  Uh...  Want to change.  Goodness knows I have no idea how I'm going to feel about some things when I'm actually human-shaped, and default-girl is going to go in the right direction compared to my prior life."