That's harder, but she's a pretty good wizard, don't you know. "I can! I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'power source' but it doesn't come from anywhere, if that's what you mean - some wizards will tell you Evoked elements come from the planes but they're wrong, they still work under a Dimensional Anchor."

She smiles at Dr Baika, raises her wand, and very sternly makes Lightning behave itself and be a steady stream which it extremely doesn't want to be. 

Electrolysis does work and does make something that burns with a characteristic squeaky noise and does in fact make water!

She rambles on about some chemistry concepts as they set up and do the experiment. Molarity, mass balance, what a 'compound' is...

...And the oxygen concentrate makes fires flare up a bit, right? Regardless, "I think the 'elements' I know are just a completely different phenomenon. The magical elements, and the... Material elements?"

All right, that's pretty good! She does know what atoms are but it's weird to imagine being able to count them. 

"It looks like it! Which raises the question of how any of this actually works at all! If 'chemistry' works on this plane then wizardry should work on yours! And now that I think about it lots of things are probably explicable by 'chemistry' and we just don't know about it, like maybe you could explain blacksmithing or druidry or brewing or something in purely 'chemical' terms! Are there any things in your world that might actually be magic? Alternatively they might not be the same phenomenon at all, maybe 'chemistry' is an ancient epic Spell, or-"

That is such a thought as you should stop having right the fuck now.

"- anyway if there are things like that in your world we have two promising avenues on research nobody's ever thought of before!"

Ah, yes, those sound pretty normal. Well. Normal by today's standards!

'Alexandria' is probably a lich, note to self, don't speak her name lightly or anything. 

... Evocation, Illusion, Divination, Dweomercraft, Enchantment. All right. She suppresses the bitter stab of disappointment. It makes sense, if you really think about it most Entities from the Far Realms would have at least some familiar magic, "cybernetics" and so on are still genuinely novel!

"Fascinating! Yes, all of those sound like classic magic! Manifestation under stress does happen sometimes for wizards but - honestly that sounds like sorcery, very rarely magic kind of... ends up in the blood, takes hold of people, they're not really common or safe enough to study but it seems sort of like wizardry but not quite, they normally don't understand it and can't control it but can be extremely powerful. That makes sense! Does it run in families in your world?"

"Occasionally, never quite the same..."

And wasn't there a theory it was more based on prolonged proximity than blood? That's part of what made Agent Theory popular... But she can't remember clearly and doesn't have those databases...

"Hmm. I could explain blacksmithing and brewing in chemical elements reasonably well, I think? Or at least if I watched a smith and brewer for a while I could figure out if they're doing anything unusual compared to my expectations. Alcohol is a product of a type of fungus, you know? It eats sugar, but instead of exhaling carbon dioxide - dead air - like animals, it exudes ethanol. To oversimplify things massively, anyway. Same with bread starters, if you've ever heard of yeast or a 'starter' or 'culture' that bakers use for their bread. It's a benign fungus that humans have managed to use for ourselves, much like cows or any other livestock. Or, well, it was humans on my planet."

It must surely have been the dwarves here and they would probably know about yeast. She however is an elf and has never really thought very much about where food comes from. 

"That does sound a lot like sorcery! It's not common here, I don't know if we have any sorcerers, they probably wouldn't talk about it much. It tends to just pop up sometimes in the right bloodline. It is strange that you never developed wizardry in that case. Unless sorcerers are a recent development for you or something?"

There's an obvious guess here that this has something to do with Dr Baika's presence. Maybe their planes have been getting closer, maybe 'chemistry' wouldn't have worked here a century ago. 

"All within the last half-century. The giant monsters emerged at around the same time, too."

"Well that definitely sounds like a planar incursion! What kind of giant monsters are we talking about here? And are any of the sorcery powers known to be useful for - you know, the 'augmentations' and 'chemistry' and so on? Wizardry can probably replicate it if so, we're good at that."

"There are three. We call them the Endbringers. Each as tall as a tower and wielding immense destructive power. They take turns- Three or four times a year, picking a city to destroy. Sorcerers across the world join forces to try to repel them, but... Driving them off is the best one can hope for."

She sighs.

"...I'm itching to get to work doing basic chemistry or learning some magic - maybe a slower way than by being transformed, to see if I can make any progress at all that way, first."

She winces at the thought of that. That's not the kind of thing it's a good idea to imagine. "...All right. Er. I feel like I should warn... someone... about Endbringers existing just in case our hypothesised planar connection goes both ways. And tell the Professor to be really, really careful trying to find your world again."

Could the Academy - could the whole world - fight off an 'Endbringer'? She has no idea, senior wizards don't exactly advertise what they can do, but the name doesn't inspire confidence. Silvermoon survived the Grey Siege without a scratch, but she doesn't believe half the stories they tell about that. Evil ancient dragons exist and can definitely destroy whole cities but usually don't, maybe because you don't live to be ancient if you pick that kind of fight, so... possibly? And she'd really expect the gods to intervene but then she's never been clear why They allowed the ancient empires to fall. It's not something she's keen to test! Unless maybe they could plan some kind of interplanar assassination. 

"Anyway! Yes all right that sounds like a good idea until dinner. ...Learning magic the slow way normally takes a very long time, though it's possible a lot of what you know will carry over and there are occasionally prodigies! Since you already know some kind of magic I'd be inclined to put a Spell in front of you and try to walk you through it."

Does she have an apprentice now? Exciting!

"Or I can try transforming you into a different human, which should leave the augmentations alone. I might actually be able to polymorph you into you. Or I can leave you to your alchemy! There's lots I have to do!"

"Some very introductory magic would be good. And perhaps we can take a minute for me to give you a quick medical exam. I've noticed your response to the stimulants is pretty extreme, it'd be a relief to check for any, ah, damaging side effects on the elven physiology. Your heartbeat is not a human heartbeat... I'm not even sure you'll metabolize it at the same rate as humans, though we'd be about one fourth done with it if you were human..."

It is an extreme response, an extremely good response, she has three different ideas for how she might go about reaching the Fifth Circle without dying horribly and she's not dreading handling the political ramifications of all this! Even though it's going to involve human politics!

She's not totally sure what constitutes a medical exam but it sounds kind of hot? Don't spook the humans, they get very strange about that kind of thing.

"...I didn't know you could hear my heart beating! Er. I'm not objecting, but that's very personal for elves, our hearts beat out rhythms, usually important ones. I don't know what to expect in terms of metabolism. I know elves normally don't smoke tobacco - all right, maybe you should check."

"...Huh. I won't count 'irregular heartbeat' as a symptom then. It's usually bad for humans. I thought I mentioned improved senses as part of my augments. I worked very hard on mine. Custom. I'm proud of them."

She glances across the room.

"I've improved my hearing, eyesight, and smell- Sort of, the last one. Touch and taste I haven't done much with. But I can see a maker's mark on that bottle, top shelf second from the left. It's a key and a sword. I haven't looked at that shelf yet so I'm not just remembering it, either..."

She starts clearing off a place for Naevys to sit, presuming that she'll go over and check. Without a proper exam table or anything else she's just going to use her own augments and not try to improvise anything.

Touch and taste would be the first senses she'd improve. That's humans for you. 

"Impressive!" Relatively. "Elves incidentally see much better than humans, particularly further, but yes normally a human wouldn't be able to see that. ...Come to mention it how do your thinking augmentations work? Normally it's - I don't know, you hear stories about prodigies, but it's normally months or years of apprenticeship before you can do any real magic."

She'll hop up and sit where directed! She's got no idea what to expect but she's willing to be very cooperative, and is also paying close attention in case this is in fact some kind of horrible Necromancy. 

"Brains are complicated, but essentially I am always thinking and reacting faster. The world is in slow motion, to me. I have a memory coprocessor that helps me remember things better, and I take drugs to improve my ability to learn, but I am not more of a genius, fundamentally, than when I started."

It's really not the limit of her custom optics, but the limit of what was easily demonstrated.

Before she starts, she mentions that she practices medical confidentiality as part of a code of ethics.

It's pretty much a standard physical with calm and smooth doctorly instructions! Looking into her eyes and listening to her breath and asking her to stretch and questions about how she feels and if anything bothers her, and explaining what she is looking for...

If Naevys has anything subtly wrong with her, she'll probably be able to ping to it with a lengthy examination. On top of learning a lot about elves by comparison. But maybe magic takes care of aches and pains, allergies, moles, and so on.

Naevys misses something she really should have caught because she likes this. After some swift internal debate she decides not to try to hide that, she's never done it before - it wouldn't even have occurred to her to try if she weren't on magic stimulants and trying really hard to understand the Visiting Entity - and confidentiality sounds like it should cover it, right? She's not sure how oaths work without gods to enforce them, but elves don't really need them anyway. It would be nice if humans were like that where Dr Baika comes from!

"That," she will say breathlessly, "sounds like it should help at least a little. With learning magic, I mean."

What bothers her: ...This one goes on for a while. She's mostly extremely excited! And happy! And kind of nervous about offending Dr Baika and about the broader ramifications of this and about her future career and about all the Ominous Observations she's been making and about what it says about her that Better Coffee makes her suddenly actually much more able to concentrate and notice things! Also-

Physicality: very fucking weird, that's what. It's like somebody took human biology and wrote fanfiction about it. Her teeth and skin are apparently flawless. Eyes: inhumanly violet. That's her natural hair colour, the rest of her body hair is like it too but very fine. Blood vessels behind the retina where they belong, thanks very much, but actually a lot denser than in a human. Breath: normal, if oddly floral. Stretching: extremely flexible but no other signs of connective tissue disorder. She has very unusually high general intelligence, reflexes, impulsivity, sociosexuality, coordination, and balance, but all in a way that isn't quite right. She has slightly below average physical strength for a male human, but doesn't look very muscular. Her bones seem oddly thin. The drugs hit her very hard but she's coping.

Overall clinical picture: STR 9 DEX 16 CON 6 INT 20 WIS 14 CHA 18. 

In a human you'd say, some kind of extremely weird high-functioning cluster B personality disorder and ADHD, but her Tinker powers are insistently saying something's not right about that. 

There's no way elves aren't engineered.

Her power is starting to buzz with new biochemistry ideas. It's nostalgic.

As for signs of things with Naevys... It's professional to pretend it's not happening. She's not not interested, but this place is too new, and she's rather low on sociosexuality herself.

"You seem perfectly healthy to me! If I were in my lab at home I would recommend muscle and bone lace treatments, as well as a nanosurgeons organ. Internal armor and better ability to endure after severe injuries without proper healing, respectively. Well, actually what I would do is ask for hair, blood, and cheek swab samples and test a lot of drug interactions so I could be sure I wouldn't accidentally fuck you up. I have high standards for my work, you know! But I can't do anything useful with those here, yet."

Aww. 

"If that means I can have more magic pills then great! Also yes neither of those are things wizardry can really do so if you can replicate that here you'll probably make lots of money equipping knights and adventurers and paladins!" Assuming it's not Necromancy which it really concerningly sounds like! She needs to be careful with who gets to see this. 

"All right! My turn! Let's see if we can make a wizard out of you!"

She reaches into her robes and withdraws a grimoire that couldn't possibly have fit in there, it's enormous.

(Doing that was expensive and difficult and really that research project was mostly a complete failure, but it did get her apprenticed to the Professor itself and also it makes people very jealous.)

It's more obvious now - when Naevys moves, no matter how casually, there's a kind of... beat, like she can't even scratch herself without it looking like something she choreographed and rehearsed a dozen times. 

"...Fair warning, I don't mind but don't ever touch another wizard's spellbook without permission, they're... private... And also usually incredibly cursed."

If Dr Baika is ready she will begin to explain Wizardry in rather more detail, starting with perhaps the single safest Spell known - happily, a Conjuration Spell, her specialty - and how one might go about encouraging it to take up residence in one's mind. The spellbook itself is an incredibly intricately illuminated manuscript, flowing script and arcane illustrations difficult to focus on. 

So. How good is Dr Baika at - the closest skills on Earth are probably abstract philosophy or the kind of poetry where words like "penthemimeral" are actually important, or maybe writing symphonies? Can she think such thoughts as to make the world obey?

...A wizard's book is much like her own workshop, fair enough.

She's never thought of herself as a particularly poetic person, but bioscience and surgery is not clean. The human body is just code, written by a blind monkey over billions of years. You have to be a little bit insane, a little bit able to see the monument of Truth and Elegance in chemical cascades, to refactor that codebase.

And biosculpt is art. Making her clients happy with their looks is not something you can do with calculus and programming. She has to understand them, feel them, and seek the gap between their mind and body. Then build a bridge across that gap. And then do all the detail work, making it feel right, thinking how it will biologically respond when they are sweating, or tired, or how it holds up with their chosen fashion and mannerisms...

Also, if it helps, she's also had much practice with her own Tinker power and its fugues. Listening in to the subtle cues that take the shape of feelings in the back of her head, wrangling it back to things of current relevance, interrogating it, discerning her own curiosity from her power's, cajoling it into finding her chosen task 'cool'...

Close enough!

Actually, way too close. 

Dr Baika can't read Elvish, or Classical Low Draconic, which is what saves her, really, she can only understand things Naevys explains out loud, and guess from the diagrams, and make inferences. 

Something seems to leap from the page - or she makes some sudden connection and at once it's always been there -

The Spell, Unseen Servant, in fact, First Circle Conjuration, comparatively harmless in effect and in nature, tries to take root inside her. 

Ordinarily, this would take a lot longer. Dr Baika is cleverer than the typical apprentice, she thinks faster, she has some actual experience wrangling forces man was never meant to meddle with, and she has a teacher who for those reasons isn't bothering much with caution. After all, if you can place armour on someone's very bones and make them heal from deadly wounds, what the hell are you if not a wizard? So, try the fast way. Ordinarily, Dr Baika would get a glimpse of the nature of magic, and a horrible headache, and be well on her way to her first little act of wizardry. It would be a very impressive start to her magical career, one a lot of people wouldn't believe her about. 

Unfortunately, Dr Baika is also looking at Spell notation with her augmentations. Which is to say, she's copying the Spell. In real time. She's saving it to memory.

There's a reason you never print spellbooks.