Margaret doesn't usually have magic accidents. But this time she was holding her whole rune dictionary and also an unlabeled thing she found in the magic shop, and she really wanted to see what the thing did as long as it wasn't fatal, and now she is somewhere unexpected. If it turns out that the thrift shop thing was a teleporter that'll be kind of disappointingly redundant but not actually a problem.
"Yup. Also the insides of people are full of them at the best of times, so it's important to wash your hands before and after surgery, though I guess maybe with Gifts you don't need to do surgery. And isolating sick people from each other, that's important too. And there's a kind of bread mold, of all things, that makes a substance that kills bacteria; I would need to do a bunch of experiments to figure out what kind of mold and how to get the chemical out of it and that's if it even grows here, but the general point is that there are things people can eat that will cure diseases and some of them have probably been discovered already but there might be more. Oh, and do you have, uh, the thing where you can give a person a version of a disease so mild they don't get sick and then they can never catch it for real?"
The Healer looks puzzled. "I - hmm. We know that happens sometimes - there's a lot of common illnesses that tend to be milder in kids, and if they catch it then they're immune, but people moving here from different regions can get very sick. There's sometimes discussion of whether children should be exposed on purposes, but - we don't know how to ensure it's mild, even in little ones they sometimes end up with a serious case."
"There are ways to get a sample of the thing causing the disease--viruses, they're usually called, when it's the kind you can do this with--and boil it or something to make it weaker or even totally dead, and expose someone to that. You would need to experiment with mice or something first."
"A man named Edward Jenner; he got really famous for it. We should try to invent it here--and I should also try a spell to replicate the effect; it will scale better if we do it without my kind of magic but might as well work on both. What are the names of some diseases here that you can only get once?"
"Is doing medical experiments on animals a common thing here? Also what are the procedures for taking a medical thing you've invented and telling people about it and proving it works so people will be willing to try it?" This time she is going to do everything in the right order and not get any more kinds of arrested.
"It's not as common as it should be, in my opinion! Here in the capital we have a Healing centre and we study mice and sometimes pigs, they're more similar to humans. ...Some history here is that until a few decades ago, Predain didn't actually have anything in the way of infrastructure for training Gifted Healers. There was - still is - a big medical college, the Predain College of Chirurgeons, but they thought Healing Gifts were just superstition." She snorts. "Which is kind of an impressive thing to overlook! I guess it's easier when no one has any training and we couldn't reliably distinguish Healing from, say, Empathy."
"Wow. I'm glad they figured it out eventually! Do you think it would be possible for me to do some experiments in the Healing center? For non-magic stuff I can just tell the existing experts what I know but it would be really helpful to have access to mice and a way to safely expose them to diseases and similar for the magic side."
"Awesome!" This world has its downsides, but being able to do magic research in public and get treated like an adult about it is really good.
Two days pass before she hears anything back from the Healers, though she does get an apologetic note saying they're discussing it; in fact, before she gets a time to visit their station, she instead receives a note from Ma'ar asking if this afternoon would be a good time to meet.
The one convenient thing about how her kind of spell design works is that she can basically always put it down on short notice. She meets him at whatever time and place he suggests, nervous but also excited because he might have been able to talk to Urtho with the magic phone.
And Ma'ar confirms her suspicion within the first ten seconds. "I sent the artifact over to Tantara, with an envoy. Urtho was willing to speak with me."
"Nothing very conclusive or helpful." Ma'ar pauses for a moment. "He - may be willing to meet with you. He is very curious, it seems."
"I am pretty surprising. I'm--willing to meet with him if you think it would help? And if you don't think he would--try to make me make magic weapons or something."
"No, I do not think he would," Ma'ar says, sort of absently. "His greatest weakness has always been that he flinches from ruthlessness, most of the time, even when it would be correct." He turns to look at her. "Also I will send you well-protected, and with a way to contact me if you need rescuing."
She swallows hard and says, "I'll do it. What do you think he wants, just to ask me questions about Earth?"
"And about your magic, I imagine. - I do not mind if you tell him, it will put him in a more generous mood, but - I would appreciate it if you kept it to the peacetime applications only, and did not make anything for him."
"Of course." The last thing she wants is for the war to escalate, and she knows what a war with her kind of magic can become. Besides, Ma'ar has been, well, an extremely good foreign government person to be debatably imprisoned by, and she has no interest in double-crossing him.
Ma'ar nods, briskly, and then gets up and paces while he explains what to expect. Urtho's Tower is like so. This is what he remembers about Urtho's most trusted staff, though with the caveat that it was decades ago. The plan right now is for some of Ma'ar's people to Gate her to the border, there's a stretch with a sort of no-man's-land neutral region in between the two garrisoned borders. And then she'll cross to Tantara, be met by an escort, and transported to the Tower from there.