It slams its Kerenzikov to maximum acceleration and begins perceiving time three point two times faster than normal before it finishes landing on the ground, and spools out a foot of softly glowing red wire from its palm, holding the end carefully with its other hand, before landing on its feet with a very solid thump and looking around wherever the fuck it is now--

A solid stone room. A very solid stone room - if she looks very closely in the dim red glow, she'll see that the floor and walls and ceiling all seem to be contiguous stone, not bricks, and on the floor is inscribed some kind of dark pattern of dizzying complexity. There's the faintest suggestion of a single massive door.

And, slowly spinning and drifting on the air like a dandelion-clock, a huge mass of liquid-crystal shards, thousands, spines around a core that's impossible to see past the millions of facets reflecting and refracting that faint red glow.

It drifts slightly closer. 

Nope. 

She lets the wire retract, pulls out a pistol from her thigh holster and shoots it while backing towards the - suggestion of a - door, not really expecting this to work.

The pistol fails explosively in a way you wouldn't imagine pistols could fail - a gout of flame bursts from it, and the metal sort of crumples on itself with a sad sort of sucking sound.

The inscriptions on the floor flare briefly bluish. 

If she tries to step over them to get to what might possibly be a door, she'll find that - 

- she can step over them perfectly well. 

It spins softly back, at that. 

And then up and over like a leaf caught on the breeze, and then around the room for no discernible reason candles flare to life, dozens of them, and she can see it properly - impossible gemstone shapes like the dreams of a mad jeweller-god, intricate spiderweb-archwork forming a spherical structure around a plasmic core.

There's a weird pressure at the front of her skull for a moment, and then she finds herself imagining - 

[a rough, unpolished chunk of stone on a beach of smooth pebbles]

Fuck! Sabotage? Her hand is slightly singed, but not seriously harmed. Would her other pistol, the miniature railgun and not the chemical propellant one, also fail explosively? Are her implants still working properly?? No time to consider these questions.

She reflexively pushes back at the pressure, but apparently not enough. Her brain monitor watchdog program flags the thought as anomalous outside influence. No shit! Is this - some other parahuman? She thought she was the only one on her planet...

"What do you want?" She bites out, eyeing all the carvings warily...

It whirls frustratedly, sending weird spectra of unrecognisable colours dancing around the room, and redoubles its efforts. At least she's talking now, that makes things easier.

[I said, that was rude.]

"You know what else is rude? Kidnapping. Mind alteration."

[I summoned a Thing from the Far Realms, not a human. And you plant images in the minds of others every time you speak. I am only more direct.]

A pause, as it drifts softly. 

[You are a human, are you not? The texture of your brain is strange.]

"I consider myself a highly augmented human. Communicating by fucking sounds is the accepted fucking standard and a thing that I am reasonably sure is not some kind of security breach, subversion, or attempt at an attack on my person. Unlike telepathy which is using some mechanism I have no fucking clue about to make unknown changes to small regions of my brain without the understood and trusted medium of my optic and aural nerves and the natural interpretation of said signals. Do me that courtesy and I will be significantly more inclined to treat this as some sort of accident instead of a hostage situation."

She has had about one subjective minute, now, of looking around and trying to make any sense of all the markings on the floor, walls, and presumably ceiling. Does anything have a resemblance to the languages in her database, or any other common images therein?

They're mostly extremely intricate geometric patterns inscribed with things that look kind of like letters, but nothing resembling any languages she knows. 

...Is she, uh. She's just referring to her database and checking with her eyes, right? Not actually making and uploading digital images of the spellforms or anything like that? Because there's a good reason why spellbooks have always been copied out by hand, even in the old days.

[I do not know your language. I do not possess organs of speech. I am the Professor of Conjuration at Silvermoon. If this were an attack, you would be dead. I am being very courteous by doing things your brain will interpret as language. Mostly language. Augmented in what way? You are not a cleric. Have you trafficked with devils for magic? Where do you live?]

She's constantly recording her entire sensorium, of course. It all gets saved to her onboard Cyberdeck. Her eyes are computers. Her ears are computers. The millimeter wave RADAR in her forehead and shoulders is a computer. Her skin is partially computer. Her computers are deeply wired and laced up into her brain, which has several novel semi-biological and non-biological enhancements, both Tinkered and non. It's all very tightly integrated and well maintained.

'Courteous'. Right.

"Courteous? You're holding me here - well, I admit I haven't just asked to leave, but I assumed you would say no. May I peacefully leave or be returned home? Surely you could be patient and take efforts to learn my language. I would cooperate with that. You clearly don't see the telepathy as a big deal. I do. It is a very big deal to me. It's a matter of bodily autonomy! I have privacy. I have secrets. I don't know how telepathy works and can't trust your answers if you tell me. If you claim not to be prying into those or reading my mind, I will not believe you. You're right, you haven't killed me... Still, I don't see any particular reason to answer further questions given my current epistemic status and your refusal of what I believe is a reasonable request."

...Something anomalous is happening. One doesn't survive this long and see this much without learning to spot the increasingly rare chances to learn something new. 

Well, it cannot reply without telepathy. It would be wise not to spook the anomaly any more. But it therefore cannot offer to trade a teleport home for answers. 

It gives up. There is an ancient wizardly device for solving problems like this. It is called a graduate student. 

[Come to help me], it sends. [There is a thing that looks human and speaks only a heathen tongue.] 

There is a loud clunk and the door vibrates in its frame and creaks slightly open. It drifts politely back and waits to see what the human does. 

She bows slightly.

"Thank you. Suddenly appearing in an unfamiliar environment was very alarming and I interpreted it as an attack... I don't mean to hurt anyone unless I am clearly attacked."

...She's not sure if this person (and it definitely is one, odd substrate for its mind notwithstanding) understands, though. If it acceded to her request it won't.

She composes herself with a deep breath, goes up to the door, and peers through the crack?

The depths of the dungeons underneath the Faculty of Conjuration. This is a twisting stone passage lined with flaming torches, leading to a flight of steps to the left and a set of double doors to the right. 

There's a large window that seems to just have solid stone behind it.

And the sound of running footsteps, getting closer. 

She pushes the door open with a wary glance at the 'professor' and steps out away from its workshop, trying to appear nonthreatening. Polite 'stern but not pissed off at you specifically' japanese-corpo body language.

It will sort of vaguely follow at a distance. 

She comes running through the doors at an extremely impressive pace considering the high heels, and manages to somehow make it look graceful and above all natural, like a gazelle in the woods. 

"Professor! I brought -"

Her inhumanly violet eyes light up when she spots the Entity. If she notices the look on her face, she doesn't let it stop her.

"Well met!" she says in Dr Baika's mother tongue, in exactly her accent, but in a curiously breathy and musical manner she's never quite heard before. "You must be the thing that looks like a human? I am delighted to make your acquaintance." 

Yeah, augmented, probably, and therefore dangerous.

...Well, as far as the odd Night City dialect Japanese goes, is it setting off her mental interference alarm still? It's probably a Thinker power...

Shallow bow; High rank stranger to high rank stranger.

"Hello. I am Dr. Baika Hasumi," last name first, "Degree of medicine from Oxford university, with Ph.D., cybernetics implantation specialist. I suddenly appeared here completely unexpectedly and I am rather tense. The professor seems to have stopped using telepathy on me after I explained my objection to it, which I do appreciate. I am human, depending on one's precise definition of human. I consider myself human. Where am I, please?"

No mental interference at all. She's not actually totally sure what this Spell does, but it seems to be working. To her it just feels like she's speaking Elvish. 

...Degree of medicine? Oh no, is this is going to be Necromancy? Well, there's only one way to find out, and that's talking to the Entity mysterious human! She's disappointed that it's not a creature of the Far Realms, assuming it's not lying, but opening a portal and getting a random human is still exciting!

"The Silvermoon Academy of Wizardry! Don't be tense, it doesn't help! Where is 'Oxford'?"

('University', adorable!)

"And what kind of magic is 'cybernetics implantation'?" 

(That comes across as some kind of obscure term she thinks has something to do with ships.)

 "What were you doing when you got here? What's wrong with telepathy? And by what definition of 'human' are you not human? Do you want to come to my room and sit down, by the way?" Normally that would be an incredible breach of academic etiquette, but if the Conjuration Professor has an office or something she doesn't know about it, and one of the few advantages of the Conjuration Department is that the head of it is not humanoid and accordingly very reasonable. 

'Wizardry'. Magic? Is that how they understand their Shards and the powers they grant? Because her current leading theory is that she's been kidnapped - possibly accidentally - by some version of Earth that powers are slowly working over, much like the weird accident that crossed her over with 'Earth Bet' when she got her own power... Well, the impression she likes to give off in this circumstance is kind of 'airy, absentminded professorial type'. It's a little harder to do that while under this much stress. She defaults to 'corpo bitch' instead. She takes a moment to focus and think.

"...That's an awful lot of questions at once. The problem with telepathy is that I don't understand what it is doing to my brain, not the way I understand speech, which is vibrations in the air being interpreted by my aural nerves as concepts. If I don't understand something, it could be doing anything to my brain and I know very well how many terrible things can be done to a person's brain, accidentally or intentionally! I have to fix them in patients sometimes! So telepathy is really alarming and feels kind of hostile."

Is this- No, she didn't introduce herself. Hm. Better to assume higher status in a stranger than lower status. Did she see some kind of hesitation in the woman at the mention of 'medicine'? Is that a mistrusted and primitive art here? It makes her want to defend her profession.

"Very well, let's go to your office. Oxford is located within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland... Just north of mainland Europe. On the planet Earth. It's easily in the top twenty centers of higher learning for medicine in the world. I also learned a vast amount of biology, anatomy, and other factors to the practice of medicine, the treatment of disease, the use of surgery to correct cancers, repair traumatic injuries, keep people alive and well... All that, of course, hence the general medicine degree."

And now comes the part where she tries to lie about her Tinker power, and imply it's normal.

"I wouldn't describe cybernetics as magic. Cybernetics is the practice of integrating machines into the body in order to replace lost capabilities or add new ones. Ranging from artificial eyes to correct for blindness or failing vision - or replacements to lost arms or legs or hands or what have you, polymer arteries or new hearts to correct for the heart disease that often strikes elderly humans, improvements to one's strength or ability to think quickly with machines that interface with the arms, or brain... It's normal enough that there are standards. There are many cybernetics implantation specialists. If I am not human, it's because I have surgically implanted a great many machines inside myself because they make me more like the me I want to be."

What's a nice and harmless one to show off? ...She pops out one of her optics, poking her own eye with no hesitation and then showing the glassy front and conical metal back with its interface to her optic nerves for a moment, before popping it back in.

"These let me see further, sharper, record what I see, and see things that humans normally cannot like infrared or ultraviolet. Such things are reasonably common, and I'm wealthy enough to have access to the best ones, and learned enough to customize them and use them on myself. But it's still more of a physical craft, than magic. I've installed new eyes in hundreds of people, it's one of the most common treatments. Though I seem to be far away from my suppliers and my workshop now... Which is rather worrying... What does the Silvermoon Academy teach?"

When she takes the optic out, she can't see the incongruous window any more.

Oh no, the Professor is going to see her bedroom. 

Well, hopefully it will be distracted! She beckons the Mysterious Human after her as she turns to head back the way she came. 

She's never heard of any such land. There are lots of little kingdoms, supposedly - she didn't skip all her Cruel and Unusual Geography lectures - but then she hears "planet Earth".

...

All right, ammunition for the camp that the planets are other material worlds like theirs, and Myrillian the Mystic therefore wasn't lying and imps aren't falsifying all the astrological experiments again. Unless the Entity actually is from the Far Realms and planets are different there. 

What kind of name is "Ground" for a planet anyway?

This day is starting to get strange even for Silvermoon. 

She's managing to nod along sympathetically to all this talk about how you have to cut people open when they're ill - places outside the aegis of the Church must be awful, but that's a dangerous sort of thing to think about - when she learns what "cybernetics" are.

Well, that's wizardry, all right. Hundreds! What! She is never letting the Dweomercraft Faculty get their hands on this woman or she'll never make it out again. Even the elven cities don't have that much wizardry. She's not sure the Old Kingdom had that much wizardry. 

Then she hears "improve the ability to think quickly" and all caution flies out the window. 

"...Interesting!" She finally manages. "I think we have a lot to talk about! I have never heard of anything like that. 'Earth' doesn't sound familiar, and wizardry isn't as common here as on 'Earth', at least not any more. Silvermoon teaches - wizardry. All this kind of thing! Arcane powers, manipulating the world by learning secrets, stealing powers man was never meant to know. We don't have 'cybernetics', though. Just the normal ones," then she realises how stupid that is, "er, Conjuration, Abjuration, Transmutation, that sort of thing."

"-I posit that cybernetics and medicine are not wizardry. With sufficient education, tools, and time, anyone could manage it. Though I do approve of this Promethean attitude towards knowlege... Prometheus being a myth of the man who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the people of the world. Still, 'wizardry' is translating as a concept of outdated mysticism and fakery. You are implying things that seem... Impossible under my understanding of how the world works, bar a few poorly understood corners of it... And I have seen significant proof that my previous belief was wrong and look forward to more. Conjuration?"

Don't pull a dwarf's beard and don't imply a wizard is fake - possibly from the Far Realms, right. 

Polymorph.

"Not fake!" croaks a raven that swiftly turns back into an elf. 

She likes this Prometheus customer. 

"So is Wizardry! Anyone can learn it! Except - it's like poetry, or music, or something - anyone can learn it but most people aren't ever going to be any good at it. And you have to be really good to get anywhere without your brain eating itself! All right maybe not anyone can learn it but I still think your thing sounds like wizardry! What makes mysticism outdated, anyway? There's new mysticism that works better? And Conjuration is one of the magical disciplines, the Art of... well, moving things across different worlds. Not normally ones like yours. It's one of the most dangerous ones, the mechanics of the Planes are," not at all understood, but that's dangerous to say in front of the Professor, who is pretty sure it understands perfectly well thank you very much or at least that's what it telepathically communicates if you're foolish enough to ask "extremely liable of misinterpretation."

All this is delivered in one breathy fascinated torrent that seems to just make it extremely clear that this mysteriously elegant person is startlingly interested in hanging on your every word. 

"Mysticism is outdated in that it rarely produces consistent replicable results on my world- Definitely less than industrial production or scientific inquiry. I considered mysticism as a sort of social technology, that people use to rationalize the behavior of the uncaring universe or convince themselves and each other to cooperate, more than anything magical. -Brain eating sounds very alarming. I agree that interdimensional- Er, inter-planar? That subject is hideously complicated."

She can barely understand enough of Dr. Haywire's notes to make an ansible or two, and she was really lucky to have got even that much during the whole Crossover kerfuffle.

"You have the ability to move things across worlds? That's amazingly useful, I can only imagine the chance for trade if you can avoid having a war about it."

Naevys's room is one of those bizarrely-shaped spaces you get in really old buildings, original purpose long since forgotten (or maybe, considering where exactly they are, not discovered yet). It has a messy little bedchamber visible through a side door and a couple of chairs gathered around a table covered in mostly-empty bottles of wine, bits of silverware stolen from the dining hall, and various substances Dr Baika won't recognise. The rest of the room is haphazard piles of books and parchments, blackboards with strange diagrams, and a collection of different artworks - paintings, statuettes, a small working fountain - that look quite tastefully put together despite everything. 

"So you do know about Conjuration but not any of the others? But you can't actually move across planes? That makes a lot of sense, the Planes are, uh, unpredictable, I don't know if any trade happens across them! Maybe it does and I just haven't heard of it, though. Actually going to planes is," why the gods invented adventurers "dangerous. So," and here she leans towards Dr Baika with searching violet eyes, "What's your home like?" Even wizards from the Far Realms probably don't just tell you their secrets of you ask, but 'probably' isn't 'definitely' so she's fishing. "What's it like when everyone is - 'augmented'?"

"I only know of one person who seriously studied Conjuration; He's dead now, and I, ah, acquired some of his notes. I haven't made much use of them, because of how nonsensical and dangerous it seemed. If it can be approached safely, or those other branches you mentioned, I'm interested in that."

Her ansible is kind of one of her biggest secrets, no matter how interesting these two would likely find it. Better to go 'Dr. Haywire's notes made no sense and I'm not poking that'. (The raven thing made no sense except as 'powers, I guess'!! How do you even control something that's too small for your brain? 'powers, I guess'!!)

"Well- It's very different from here, we make extensive use of machinery and computers... And it's not that everyone is augmented, some people can't afford it, or prefer to avoid the drawbacks, or are too young for it. In particular you need to be... At least around eight to ten for anything at all, and the safe options expand over time 'till adulthood. Here, let me show you."

The laser emitter built into her lower right arm has a projection mode. She finds a convenient stretch of wall and points the little glass lens on her right wrist. What to show... How about a perfectly normal clip of her walking around the front area of her clinic, past the receptionist (who is almost elfy-pretty and has hair that's shifting through the rainbow), (fast forward) down her private elevator and into her private garage, into her car (slow down again) and then driving along some of the nicer-ish areas of Night City to a decent restaurant. Environmental sound comes from somewhere on her person, too.

Well that makes sense! The early history of wizardry isn't something she knows about but it probably killed most of them. "It can be done safely!" Silvermoon is the safest place in the world for wizards, nearly nine students in ten go on to lead full and healthy lives. "Show me the notes and I'll see what we can do!" Now she needs a distraction. "If we can get a stable connection to your plane that would be ideal, but it sounds like it might take a while! Would you like to stay here while we work it out? We can probably find somewhere for you in the department!"

Oh, huh, they have Illusion as well. All right then. 

That city doesn't look like anything she's seen outside of history books, and even by those standards it's pretty weird. "So... The huge towers and the moving devices, those are also 'cybernetics'?" she tries. 

"I do very much want to go home. And also acquire tools and materials to recreate some of my equipment if that's not possible in the short term. I'll need to do self-maintenance eventually if nothing else... And nope, those would be 'machinery', or for the towers probably just industrial production. Cybernetics refers to things that closely interact with a person, usually directly on or in their body, though ancillary systems count too. The term has evolved from its original meaning. Are you familiar with the term 'electronic computer'?"

Generally, no, but Naevys is a wizard of the Fourth Circle and knows some of the secrets they don't teach most Elementalists, like how that thing that happens if you rub a bit of amber on some fur is mystically symbolic of Lightning, and that this is one of the slightly dangerous sorts of secret. This calls for an appropriate level of caution.

"No, I'd love to hear about it!" she says. She radiates sincerity. "I think we're familiar with completely different kinds of wizardry somehow. My kind does things like create energy or change the properties of things, or at the higher end move instantly across Creation or alter reality or something, not so much improving people." That actually sounds pretty worrying. "So how do you have enough wizards for 'industrial production' of a whole city?" The Old Kingdom had that and nobody knows how they did it, but again that's not the kind of thing you should talk about because there are seventeen different theories that each have extremely well-respected and important defenders who might turn you into a frog. "Generally here wizards are quite rare. For humans, at least."

"I think we do have completely different kinds of wizardry, yes." If you interpret wizardry as 'powers' or as 'technology', it works both ways. "As for the city, machines making machines making machines that make machines to make more machines. More or less. Most people don't really know how they work, or only know parts of it, narrow specializations. They just use the machines and work their own narrow slice of the whole complicated system. That and three hundred or so years after a few key inventions- The first big machines that did the difficult muscle and craft work, creating more wealth and incentivizing further invention and automation. Computers are more advanced, though the key factor is the computing, not the being enabled by electricity... It's all just clever yes-no logic. With enough simple mechanisms, you can make a machine add. When it can add, it can multiply. And when it can multiply, it can basically do anything... Informationally speaking, at least."

This is starting to sound like one of those things where if this person ever finds the Dweomercraft Faculty the world ends in a week. Exciting! 

"I don't suppose you know anything about those first machines? Three hundred years is a very long time for humans, we should try to be fast!" It would be sad if the visitor never lived to see it! "And - when you say anything, informationally - can 'computers' think? Do they have souls? Can they do wizardry?"

"Oh, I absolutely do. I could give you an industrial revolution if you have a decade and a fuckton of money. It's a bit early to be considering doing that though, I need more background information to see if it's a good idea. As for thinking computers... It doesn't seem impossible."

She isn't actually completely sure what an "industrial revolution" could refer to, she thought the old empires were richer just because they were better times with stronger magic, but - "What kind of information? And do you need the First Machines or can you do augmentations and things by yourself?"

"...I'm absolutely going to need a workshop and to build a lot of things if anyone wants augments, yes. As well as likely days to weeks of lead time. I'm also a doctor and can perform more mundane medicine with much less prep. If you have any urgent injuries or epidemics, I'll likely be happy to help."

"Oh, bless you!" One of the strange things about talking to beings from beyond this existence is that you don't tend to think of them as heathens, but of course they all are. Poor things - she shouldn't dwell on that! ...Converting the visitor is probably best left to someone who isn't Naevys and after all do they really want ecclesiastical attention here, no they do not. "Don't worry, these are holy lands - unless you can spread 'medicine' very fast like with the cities, that could be important in foreign parts." And now that she thinks of it, that would shift the balance of power and oh no she'd have to do politics. Human politics. 

"-I think I need context on 'holy lands'. Gods have never done anything for Night City and I have never seen any evidence they exist."

"...What, none of Them?" That might actually be good news, but still. "I mean - er, places where the Church has a presence. ...The Church is the - collective of all the faithful everywhere, the heirs of the Prophet. How do you know what gods are if you've never seen any evidence They exist? Did They die somehow??"

"There are various religions that ascribe various things to various gods. Mostly one god, the creator of all that is and was and will be." Eyeroll. "It always smelled like wishful thinking to cope with the unfairness of brutal reality to me. You don't get to have nice things unless someone makes them. God's not about to just give you presents."

"...So, er, gods are Someones making nice things - I am not any good at theology!" Normally she wouldn't admit to not knowing about something, but you have to be honest about gods. "You mean you have no clerics - people who can channel divine power - that explains why medicine is so important, right? I think you might actually like to hear about this but you did say you wanted background knowledge! So: gods definitely exist, a lot of Them are really bad news but the good gods sometimes give powers if you're very holy - I think I'm making a mess of this explanation - clerics channel divine power from the gods, they can heal injuries and wield other powers too. The gods don't directly do things often but it does happen. I think the gods would approve of your attitude, though. Even the Church was something people made. What do you need to know, here?"

"We don't have any clerics, or if they do they're quite secret. You have people who can do certain things- How was it determined these things are god-granted? Did someone say so? Or what? My priors on this are very low but I'm not unwilling to believe it, especially if many different people agree. The fact that you're not excited about medicine is even somewhat convincing!"

"You have a really interesting way of thinking, you know?" She hadn't expected it to be this kind of interesting! More the kind that has casualties! She'll take it! "I'm starting to like it! Normally heathens have very different questions, I gather, I've never actually met one! Sometimes if you pray to a god and you're the right sort of person you gain divine powers. Some powerful clerics can commune directly with the gods, a little bit. Very rarely the gods talk to people. Usually it turns out to be just a lie or a hallucination but not always!"

She's wondering if 'gods' are the same kinds of 'shards' that mediate powers, under agent theory...

"I certainly can't make a decisive judgement on this today. Certainly people believe it so my actions ought to be largely similar whether I also do or I think they are deluded." 

Shrug. 

"How many people out of a hundred can read and write? How many people out of a hundred can learn wizardry if they cared to and had admission to a school? How many actually do? How many out of a hundred farm? Estimates are fine. If your ratio of farmers to other workers is high, the path to prosperity may lie largely in improvements to farms."

"We should probably find a priest for you to talk to at some point!" But that's not important because it sounds like she's about to learn some ALIEN MAGIC. "...So, to be clear, I am an elf, we are not exactly like humans but there aren't nearly as many of us. I've never heard of an illiterate elf and a lot of elves learn some magic eventually, but we are... of a different sort from other races. Elves don't really have farms like humans do. For humans..." she has no idea, she hadn't met any until she came to Silvermoon and the humans here aren't exactly normal! But still!

 "I think most humans - sixty or seventy in a hundred? - can read and write a little Low Common, it's what merchants use, but they aren't really literate, they wouldn't be able to write a poem or read a proper book or anything like that. I have heard that one human wizard apprentice in three survives and makes First Circle, outside Silvermoon that is, and I think most humans aren't good enough to even try, so... maybe ten? I would guess it's less than one in a hundred who actually do. I think more than half are farmers? Sixty in a hundred? I do know it's a lot more in heathen lands, more like ninety, that's in Scripture. Do people tend to know this kind of thing where you come from? And how do enhancements or 'industry' help farmers?"

"Yes, that's very high. One in three survive? ...Hmm. Mechanized plows, seed drills, pumped irrigation, automated weeding, mechanical threshers and harvesters, ammonia reactors for fertilizer, pesticides... Oh, I could engineer nitrogen fixing wheat... I'll need equipment but really, seed engineering is great because it could spread without me personally or even anyone who needs to know what they're doing. With appropriate cautions so it doesn't run wild."

"Yes. Wizardry is really dangerous, in lots of ways. It isn't necessarily that you die, if you're not one of the lucky ones, but a lot of really bad things can happen to you. And anyone nearby. Blowing yourself up is one of the best ways it can go wrong." That's a sad thought so she's going to try not thinking it! "Your odds are much much better at Silvermoon, though, don't worry! There aren't a lot of safer places to be than the same room as a friendly archmage! We can see what kind of aptitude you have - it's not just cleverness, but that helps a lot - I bet since you already know your own world's magic you'll be fine. Anyway don't we want it to run wild? Also what kind of equipment are you looking for?"

"...I suppose we'll see." 

Here's some photos of lab equipment on the wall. She rattles off a list of lab equipment. Incubators, centrifuges, fume hoods, spectrographs, thermocyclers, dryers, vapor deposition...

"...But really, these are all fairly specialized things your society would have little reason to build."

Good, she thought of a way to say it without saying "primitive".

"I'm going to have to make all of it myself from whatever's available locally, and run everything off my implants, so, components... Glassware? Alcohol, as pure as possible, or I can make a high proof distillery. It's for sterilizing things. Things for precisely measuring and handling liquids. Magnets. Copper wire. Shelves, trays, cabinets. Quartz. Chemical precursors like benzene, or am I going to have to mix those up too- Lots of glassware- I can do some computationally expensive math to pay for this if that's useful. Is cryptography useful? Knowing about large prime numbers? Anything where you need to check a hundred million variations on the numbers and find one that works, really.

As for the seeds, it would be a dark sort of victory if my new strain of potatoes outcompetes all over plants and ruins natural grasslands or forests, replacing them with endless fields of wild potatoes. For instance. I don't know what I'd be destroying if I made highly resilient crops with extreme natural spread and just let them loose. So I'm thinking something simple that farmers have to do to the seed to make it take, maybe. Or, well, there's a lot of ways to put guard rails on."

"...I don't recognise any of those devices but if you tell me what they do then we should be able to help. Wizardry uses a lot of... specialised things, and we can make new ones very very quickly. The question is going to be," now it's time to be delicate, "getting funding. And faculty support." 

She glances at the Professor, which is still drifting eerily through her room, and doesn't seem to have said or done anything either way. It's making her increasingly nervous. It's really really annoying sometimes to try to detect the subtle moods and whims of, basically, twenty tons of rock. 

"I don't know what 'benzene' is, this translation Spell is very weird, that sounded like a compound word in old Elvish, but everything else is fine. When you say as pure as possible - do you just want normal alchemical spirits for cleaning things, because those still have lots of water in them, or do you actually want Dwarvish whisky? It's all right if you really just want to drink it, that's a completely reasonable use of a research stipend! Cryptography - sounds potentially very useful? You could, say, check a hundred million Spell formulae, except that's a horrifying idea I shouldn't have said out loud sorry Professor please don't do that there are a lot more Spells that do horrible random things than useful things because there are more horrible random things than useful things, is one of the many many problems with that idea, I should stop talking and change the subject now. How exactly does the "checking" work? Could you, maybe, find the lost name of the Old Kingdom? Or the location of the Great City itself? Or, there are bound to be interesting encoded things in the Library, I bet someone must be working on it. Also has the thing with potatoes happened before?"

"I mean to use it for cleaning, not intoxication," she drawls. "I might want distilling equipment anyway, for other chemical processes. The potatoes thing has happened before with some of Arasaka corporation's custom fish farm species infesting waterways throughout Russia and eastern Europe, driving many local species extinct and causing other issues with algae and pollution... And yes, I do understand the need to procure or justify funding. I could fund myself by synthesizing chemicals, maybe? Dye? Artificial flavors? Medicines. Wizards seem like they would be extremely, perhaps unwisely, interested in nootropics and stimulants... There exists a pill that lasts about four hours and makes you extremely awake and alert, improves reflex speed, boosts memorization, improves ability to pay attention, and has a relatively gentle come-down... In humans. Not tested in elves. Much more dramatic than the active ingredient in tea and coffee, if you have those. And as for the mathematics, it's really more for, mm, I need to understand the rules and be able to state them in formal logic. Finding the name of a lost empire isn't the kind of thing it can do, unless I had tens of thousands of books in a computer-digestible format maybe. Finding, say, the fastest possible path to visit twenty towns once each if you know the time to travel between each one to its neighbors, that I could do."

She's going to need to come up with something to keep the alchemists out, too. "Wizards do sometimes create new creatures - that's said to be where owlbears come from - but I've never heard of them driving other things extinct, we should be careful with that! If you can do dyes and ??flavours?? at scale, then yes that might work, but for now I think you want other wizards' help." Also, it means she can distract all the other faculties, make them believe the medicines are the point... Maybe she'll finally get an actual study out of this. "We do have tea and coffee! The tabaxi sell them, the Academy gets through a lot of tea, there's lots of drugs that can help with wizardry but tea is one of the only safe ones. If you have a better alternative that should definitely be our first priority. Let's test it on an elf right now!" The Professor can't eat things, which means by rights she will be the first wizard to try the magic pills, which is as it should be. 

"Owlbears! How would that- Oh, I can't go off on every tangent. I'll find out later I'm sure. I can probably make some with enough glassware and precursor chemicals. Do you have chemistry suppliers here?"

The word implies different things than alchemy; Pure physical matter, no magic involved. She is digging in her jacket pocket and, yep, here is a little orange plastic tube bottle labelled with an 18-character name and '150mg'.

"As, of course, a responsible and safety-conscious doctor, I must remind you that this may go sideways. Beings as similar to each other as, say, rats and humans, or dogs and humans, sometimes react differently to the same drugs, so being able to eat the same things humans can is no guarantee it is safe for you. So I must ask that we go somewhere where you can be comfortably monitored and treated if there is an adverse reaction."

"Nobody knows how! It's just an example I remember reading about, there are lots of things like that! Ah - background information, I keep forgetting -" It's harder than she would have expected to remember that this is an alien creature from the Far Realms, and that she has to explain the world from first principles, but happily changing your entire way of thinking on the fly is part of the skillset for a wizard. "- Wizards... generally don't like to share, for a number of reasons... and writing magic down isn't trivial. Also modern Wizardry is mostly cobbled together from what survived the Doom, hundreds of years ago, a lot of your questions don't have answers yet but I bet we can use your magic to find them. 

This translation Spell isn't commonly used - Naevys found and learned it, during her apprenticeship, after a painstaking search through the library, for the niche use-case of understanding a language that might never have been spoken on this planet before, for talking to things that might utter horrific truths in alien tongues that cause you to go mad, without involving telepathic contact. It's handy for that, but it does have its limits. None of the languages Naevys speaks actually distinguish between "magical" and "physical". There are extraordinary powers that aren't well understood - "magic" - and one subset of those, certain things mortals can do, is "wizardry". "Alchemy" means doing weird things involving material properties, often as part of the School of Transmutation, but technically what blacksmiths do is another subset. She hasn't ever actually heard anyone talk about a clear distinction there. Naevys is not understanding any of these nuances just yet. "Chemistry" is coming across as "special-alchemy", and not very clearly. 

"...I'm not actually sure if we have suppliers, but we definitely have supplies. They might just come out of a vault somewhere. If you need to know where they come from you'd probably want to talk to, I don't know, the Secretary to the College Council?  But yes, glassware and lots of precursor substances won't be a problem at all."

Wizards very often manage to hurt themselves in the course of their experiments. Actual physical injury that can be treated is, honestly, looked down on as amateur stuff, but it still does happen. 

Also, as may become clear to her when Dr Baika turns her attention outwards, the Academy occupies an interesting sort of place in the world. 

But for now, it suffices to say that they have a Chapel and it has some attendant clerics, in case you make a silly mistake with the kind of lesser wizardry that only causes physical injuries when it goes wrong. 

"Those are very reasonable terms!" For magic pills that make you a better wizard, this is the best horror from the Far Realms ever, "let's go to Chapel and maybe you can also talk to a priest there if you're interested!" There, now nobody can say she didn't warn them. "Supposing we can get you basic equipment, do you know how long before you can make medicines? "Industrial processes"? Augmentations?"

"In order, days to weeks, months to years, weeks to months... I've been presuming but should spell it out clearly that some sort of accounting for all the favors back and forth will be had eventually? There's a lot to gain here from academic exchange." 

If she isn't magicked away from all her shit again once she's built it. She'll have to repeat her thermite-mines-next-to-the-hard-drives trick.

Ah, fair enough. Apparently there aren't actually any wizards on any plane who'll just tell you all their secrets for free. "There certainly is! Your case is actually slightly strange. Usually a visiting wizard will go to lectures, have conversations, swap bits of knowledge and Spells and things as they see fit. I don't know if there's ever been a visitor with a completely new magic system before! But the fact that the Professor is still here -" and it is, floating eerily and saying nothing, it's getting really annoying - "is pretty good proof you're very interesting and going to get a lot of attention and resources. Er, now that I say it out loud that sounds like it might not be very reassuring from your point of view! As a show of good faith I... could just teach you introductory wizardry?" Which is brave, she's overstepping her bounds, but you have to do that sometimes if you ever want to be a really good wizard. "It takes a while but a day would be enough to get an idea of what kind of talent you have! Or - what would make you feel better?"

"Hmm. So, money, tools, materials are one thing but it can be so easily lost again. Knowledge is much harder to lose, unless you lose your life. But I've been told that students sometimes explode, see, and I'd really rather only explode when I decide I'm good and ready to. There's also, er... My weapon malfunctioned when I acted in haste and fired it at the Conjuration professor earlier. Which makes me wonder if my techniques will really all work smoothly here. But there's no point yammering on and dithering about it forever either. I'd like an introduction to the basics yes, and I can offer around as much introduction to high technology, or at least the same amount of invested time. In addition to a sample alertness pill."

"Your weapon- you attacked-" she doesn't glance at the Professor, with some effort. "...Well that was brave!" Faculty generally make a point of never making clear exactly how tolerant they are, but she hadn't expected you'd get away with an actual attack. Maybe the Professor is just flatly immune to material harm or something? 

"Magic does sometimes behave strangely in other planes, but the malfunctioning might have just been some kind of old ward or something like that. It's exciting, anyway! If there are things that work differently here we can use them to learn! Come with me, and I'll give you the kind of gentle introduction that can't possibly cause you any harm unless you're extremely irresponsible on the way, and then I can try your pills when we get there!" 

"Well, from my perspective I had just been kidnapped. But, yes, my apologies again. That sounds good, thank you."

All right, here are the ancient secrets that are the seeds of wizardry. Pay attention and try not to have any stray thoughts, mortals are not really designed to tinker with the inner workings of the Cosmos. 

"Wizardry" is, fundamentally, the weaponisation of thought, awareness, soul. Ever heard a song that made you cry? Made someone do something by choosing the right words? Said the right thing to get out of trouble? Wizardry is basically the same principle. There are words, phrases, lines, ideas that have mystic consequence: a Spell is, in a sense, a kind of spirit, a fragment of sentience, bound and shaped, and "preparing" a Spell means making your own mind into a vessel that can hold it. Get good enough at that, and you can do simple magical workings all by yourself. There are rules, some of them mathematically precise, but they're more like the rules for composing a symphony. Magic is alive.

More simply: magic means visualising the unimaginable, feeling transcendent thoughts, perfectly, without getting lost in them. 

Canonical Wizardry is the set of traditional arts taught here, codified by ancient archmages to be relatively safe. Relatively. 

Since you're already a wizard of a sort, we can skip the usual initiations and riddles! You already know what Conjuration is; there's also Abjuration, creating shields and protections; Transmutation, altering worldly qualities; Evocation, controlling the elements; Divination, seeing the unseen; Illusion, creating images - oh, Dr Baika already has that one, sorry - and Enchantment, affecting the minds of others. Conjuration, Divination and Enchantment are the most dangerous, in that order. Any of those speak to her?

More mysticism... It's not all bunk, surely? The emotional resonance theory of powers... Hmm.

Her head practically snaps to attention. "Transmutation sounds like it could have some very interesting synergy with crafting!"

"It certainly does!" From her diaphanous robes she produces a long white wand, carved with quite startling intricacy. "Basic Transmutations change minor properties, like colour or smell or the like -" she chants something in a language that doesn't translate, and the flagstones turn blue and Dr Baika's shoes turn yellow and the air smells like a pine forest for a moment - "and they usually aren't permanent, though there are exceptions. Do you have a favourite animal, by the way?"

((Hey, electronic chemical sampler, what changed in the last six seconds, if anything? Does that pine smell correspond to actual molecules?))

"I'm a little fond of pigeons as I have a pet of sorts." At first she was just a dummy to practice on, to make a prosthetic bird leg, but the silly thing grew on her.

...'Chemical'? It's air in substance, pine resin in accidence?

Electrochemical sensors: yep, terpenes. 

Though, of course, your nose is also a kind of electrochemical sensor. What tests are actually being run here?

"All right! I'm going to turn you into a pigeon. Don't try to resist, just try to notice how it feels. See if you can separate out the feeling of being a pigeon from the feeling of being hit by a Spell! Ready?"

She kicks her Kerenzikov up to max mental acceleration, looking alarmed and snapping into a slightly more combat ready posture.

"-I would really rather more explanation of how that works first! Where does the brain go!"

"...In... its head?" she says uncertainly. "Why do you - oh, of course, you have 'augmentations' in your brain? Usually things on or in your body just meld into the new form, but they'll come back when I drop the Spell. Your brain like all the rest of you is just temporarily turned into the pigeon! It works just like your soul controlling your normal body, except it's a pigeon instead."

"That sounds profoundly unpleasant and I don't want to attempt it."

She is a wizard, and so the back of her mind goes on analysing. The visitor is obviously nervous about magic. Very sensible. But to be so concerned about what would happen to her brain in particular - is this some kind of superstition? Heathens have those, they say. Or is it just about the augmentations? To be fair, she wouldn't like even temporarily losing Mysterious Thinking Augmentations if she had them, which she very much intends to! There's something she's missing here... 

But she is an elf, so what she actually says is "Oh. All right." It would never even occur to her to try to do anything other than look very hurt. That was rude. Even by alien standards. 

...By alien standards. 

Oh, that was silly of her. 

Because if you don't know Wizardry and you've never heard the Gospel the existence of souls isn't an obvious hypothesis, and maybe not even a true one, because you're from the Far Realms, and so from that point of view (and some Spells can't be prepared except into a mind that really truly contains the right point of view, it's one of the magical skills) the obvious candidate for the locus of your personality is-

"Oh! No wait we need to check to make sure you have a soul!"

"-We have the metaphysical concept of a soul, but I've never been able to observe one. Also, I don't want it to fuck up my Kerenzikov and I really don't know if it will, not without observing it happening to people significantly more than your demo earlier."

One of her long term projects was copying her brain into a blank. But that's something to be exquisitely slow and careful with.

"...If you've never been able to observe one then why do you know what one is? What's a 'Kerenzikov'? Also we're almost there but how concerned are you about whether or not you have a soul? I would be extremely concerned but I'm not from 'Earth' and I need to remember that! Will you be upset about magic to try to divine your soul the same way you were upset about telepathy?"

She seems to have completely moved on from what just happened, she's excited again. 

The Church (there's only one, or rather only one left) maintains a Chapel at Silvermoon. It's called a chapel because humility is a virtue, but it's the size of a cathedral and filled with gold and jewels because those are important. 

The exact spiritual standing of the Academy is not the sort of thing they talk about, thank you. Most people don't ask.

Their role here is to provide moral counsel, and very often physical healing, to the flock, just like it is everywhere. You are not, as a wizard, as special as you think you are, and it is important to be so reminded.

You can, and should, confess all your secrets under seal here. It's important for the health of your soul, and as a wizard you do need to worry about that, quite a lot, in fact. 

Its doors stand open before them. Marble, gilt icons, sweeping wings and stained-glass windows, the smell of incense. 

...All right, she really hopes they can go in and find a cleric so she can try the magic pills first, but even she isn't actually going to insist they prioritise that over making sure Dr Baika has an immortal soul, she's not that crazy yet. She looks at her expectantly. 

Sigh. "At some point I'm simply going to have to trust other people," she says it skeptically. "Telepathy was particularly alarming because I know brains and - well - I thought it was Enchantment, or a route to an Enchantment, or something like that. What is a soul, mechanically speaking? What properties does it have? What operations can be performed on it? What implications does the lack of one have? Anyway, no objection to observing my 'soul' without changing it."

How ostentatious. As a display of wealth, and therefore power, it makes the impression it's probably intended to. Just like Arasaka's cold black walls and real wood furniture. Whoever is in charge of this location, they are not to be trivially messed with.

"Those are excellent questions! Your soul is the rational part of you, the thing it's like something to be! It can exist independently of your body, that's why you're still you even if you're a pigeon. Operations on the soul would constitute Necromancy, which we do study but definitely definitely do not practise because it involves profaning the sacred and violating the natural order of the universe and that would be wrong. I would be surprised if you could be thinking and talking without a soul but then I was also surprised that - lots of tiny lightning elementals? I need to actually study your magic, I'm pretty sceptical of this translation - can do arithmetic! I don't know personally how to check but I know who to ask, does this mean you do urgently want to know?" Please say no, she wants to try the alien magic drugs. 

"Excuse me," says a mild elderly voice in tones more appropriate for 'fuck you'. The speaker seems to have appeared from behind them, and to be speaking formal standard Japanese. "That was not a meet question to ask the laity, still less for the laity to answer. Who are you, child?" He is old but sharp-eyed, and looking at Dr Baika extremely intensely. 

"...Dr. Baika Hasumi, PhD, MD, specialist in cybernetics. From very very far away, apparently." Bow, a deep one; Mid-ranking stranger to high-ranking stranger.

(She doesn't like churches, religion, spiritualism. For most of her life it was obviously a load of bunk. But it costs very little to be polite.)

(Where did he come from. Some dimensional pocket? A stealth field? Sudden additions to company make her nervous; She unconsciously shifted posture to get her monowire ready.)

(An apologetic glance to Naevis, but this is clearly not a person to ignore)

"So I perceive." He glances at the elf. "Then you are not properly catechised for this, as you should have known. It was foolish indeed to try to give instruction so."

Well this is uncomfortable. 

He turns back to the visitor. It might not be obvious to the elf - all humans look strange to elves - but she is indeed obviously from very far away, and correspondingly dangerous. 

He hasn't spoken to many heathens before, but being posted here does require a certain flexibility.

"You have never been instructed. Hear then the word. The soul is the spiritual principle of you. You do not have a soul, you are a soul. The soul gives your body its form, its animation. It is not only blasphemous but a contradiction in terms to suggest you might not have a soul. It is repulsive, not to mention dangerous, to suggest interfering with it. You were made in the image of god, child, you should not lightly contemplate defiling it. May I ask how you arrived at this question?"

"...So I ask again, what is a soul? I am not unwilling to change what I already know, given proof, given agreement from many people who ought to know, given sound and sensible explanations and especially predictions you make that correlate more with souls existing than my prior beliefs. As, so far as I know, people are... Patterns. The arrangement of fat, protein, salt, and water that form a brain, but the brain is the vessel. The person is the pattern of electrical potential in it, the map of connections that fire and form and dissolve as thought and learning occurs, the memories and personality and capacity to learn and empathize, all suspended somewhere in this vastly complex weave I have only really understood the surface of by observing brains. If you could take that pattern and put it in a new body, it would still be the person. Is a soul akin to this pattern which I have observed myself in my studies?"

... Most of that was obvious nonsense. However. He is quite highly ranked, as mortals count these things, and therefore not entirely untrained in the eldritch arts of textual criticism, and so to him some of that sounds uncannily like certain dubious and fragmentary exegeses attributed to the early companions of the Prophet, which it hasn't been found prudent to distribute widely. 

He'll remember that, but he won't give anything away if he can help it, either. 

So he smiles indulgently, but not particularly pleasantly. "Ah. Yes, the Fairview Heresy. Some follies stretch great distances, it would seem. The physical nature of the body, including the brain, is accidental and associated with the soul, much as the position and behaviour of the strings of a lyre are accidental and associated with a particular song, but not the thing itself. There is an analogy to your "patterns", an imperfect one, and there are many learned men* who I am sure would be fascinated to hear what you may have gleaned about the soul from your studies. But no, the soul is a transcendental thing. I do not like to speculate about this notion of moving souls into other people, as that would be foul Necromancy." Also he's fairly sure it does in fact happen and is incredibly horrifying, so he's grateful that he isn't allowed to know much about it. "Now why do you want to know?"

* Common has a succinct, everyday word for "sentient being", but other languages don't for some reason and translation magic is not perfect.

It's not heresy if she's never even heard the teachings, now is it. (Is it? She doesn't know and doesn't really care.)

"I want to know a great many things of course. Eventually. Most centrally things to do with the body, medicine, biology... I've only just heard of owlbears and they must be absolutely fascinating. But knowledge and invention are fun, and are how one moves the world. As for souls particularly, where I'm from it's commonly believed that there is no such thing. Even as others assert that there is, without reliable testimony or any recent proof. I certainly hadn't seen any indications of it until today."

...Technically, no, it isn't. Technically, you have to be baptised to be a heretic, even if you say the exact same things. Personally he doesn't see why, but one of the many qualifications he has is being the sort of person who will actually respect technicalities no matter what he personally thinks.

He isn't doctrinally required to be happy about it, though. 

"Curiosity is not a sin." It damn well should be. "Quite the opposite. We are commanded to learn." Not in the way wizards insist on going about it, though. "Be careful, however. The world may be moved for good or for ill."

He isn't convinced there's been a good invention in seven hundred years.

"The existence of the soul is multiply evident. You can comprehend not only a high mountain, but height; not only a heavy stone, but weight; you can comprehend the immaterial, and must therefore yourself be immaterial. You can moreover desire knowledge, as you do, or love, or justice, none of which have merely material substance. You can in fact encompass Spells, which have no material existence. If you cannot comprehend such lemmas, consider then that a wizard transformed by magic, such that the accidence of the body is entirely different, remains entirely the same person. Do you understand?"

"That argument requires that you accept several premises that I don't consider self-evident. It is like saying that a dog can comprehend food, and so therefore it must be food. Perhaps so, if one likes dog meat, but the latter fact is not connected to the former. It is true that it is a mystery to me how a transformed body, as I saw before my very eyes, could remain the same person despite an entirely different body- We were discussing that very topic before we arrived here. I have encountered before, people with extraordinary abilities that do not seem to have any obvious material source, magic of a sort different to what Naevys here has shown me. The soul is quite a possible candidate for these phenomena, and you and many others say it is so, so I should believe it is so, at least as much as the evidence I have seen and heard so far supports. It surely is commonly believed to be so! But it's a very new idea to me. So I instead wonder about what properties souls might have, how to observe them, what implications this has on other things I believe to be true."

Yes, of course you are Just Asking Questions about the properties of the soul out of innocent curiosity, just wanting to understand, of course. Like the last dozen heretics and witches. 

A dog cannot actually comprehend food, animals lack the rational faculty, but the first and most important principle if you're going to be a confessor for wizards is to never let them sidetrack you. 

"Only the gods can truly observe the soul entire. Wizardry claiming to involve the soul is dangerous at best, sinful at worst. As far as you are concerned, the important properties of the soul are immateriality, transcendence, rationality - the soul is the part of you closest to the divine." He finishes as though that's a satisfactory answer. 

This is quite upsetting! She looks between the priest and Dr Baika. She would consider talking to her telepathically, but she's not actually sure the visitor would be all right with that now, and she's a bit hesitant about keeping something from an actual cleric, that sounds like the kind of thing you look back on and regret while you're being burned as a witch. "...So Dr Baika if you have practical wizarding questions about the soul I'm sure we can find someone among the faculties!" Can they please move on to the part where she gets to try the magic drugs now.

She's watched a dog associate lots of different stimuli back to the sensation of 'food', in a variety of ways, on her monitors when researching neurology! And her shard agrees! They're capable of assessing a new object and deciding whether it fits the same category! They're capable of deciding whether or not to eat, and of deciding to share food! It may not be the way a human thinks of it, but - well, perhaps they're talking past each other. She wants to keep arguing the point, but this man clearly does not.

(And what is the divine, she wants to ask, merely powerful extraplanar beings?)

"Sir, I'm sure we wouldn't want to take up too much of your time. Perhaps you could recommend a book for me to read, or a more appropriate time to learn about this subject. Miss Naevys merely led me here as a safe place to be treated in case she has a bad reaction to a potion of sorts that I know is safe for humans, but do not necessarily know so for elves."

He has reports to write, and he has a sense that he has fallen far short, but this at least he understands. 

"Of course. There is indeed a book on the subject." He can produce a worn, simple copy of the Testaments from - apparently nowhere (a pocket that looks too small for such a thing, if, say, you have superhumanly good senses and can replay the last few seconds a few times). "This is such a place. Administer your potions." It's showy and spiritually perilous but on this occasion - he raises his hands, and his fingertips glow with a light like candlelight. 

She takes it and respectfully doesn't immediately stuff it into a pocket, holding it reasonably carefully.

...Alright, here is one corpo-grade stimulant pill, handed carefully to Naevys. And another from a different bottle.

"The peak effect should last about four hours and take about two or three minutes to begin. I've used them frequently myself and it is a feeling of alertness, physical energy, improved reflexes, better working memory - that is, faster and easier to remember things relevant to whatever you are thinking about, and increased neuroplasticity- That is, better learning. This does include both formal study and less deliberate forms of learning, like learning from the attitudes and emotions of those you interact with. Practice what you wish to become, it is said. Common side effects include elevated thirst, heartburn, dry eyes, and elevated heart rate. And difficulty sleeping for up to eight hours after a dose. Not to be taken with opium-based painkillers. Not to be taken more than twice a day."

All right, good, heathen responsibly introduced to priest, awkward conversation over, Dr Baika probably has is a soul, time for INTELLIGENCE DRUGS. She swallows them both. 

What she wishes to become is the most powerful wizard in the world, obviously, why does anyone else ever want anything else?

"Those sound fine! Elves don't sleep in exactly the same way humans do but I'll sleep outside tonight just to be sure!" 

Wizards. 

When it goes wrong, if it's not going to kill her, could he maybe let her suffer for a while before burning the poison away with holy light? No, no he couldn't, no mortal for hundreds of miles around has the authority to dismiss him but that's not actually a great comfort when you work for Whom he works for. 

Also it would be wrong, naturally.

It's not like they ever learn anyway. 

He stands ready, again, to rescue a wizard from the consequences of her actions, again, at a moment's notice (using power that could otherwise theoretically save a dying child in heathen lands somewhere, of course). 

Oh.

She feels it when it kicks in. It's more sudden than she would have expected. Her stomach burns and her heartbeat thuds a sudden staccato - human hearts don't work the same way, she should have remembered, but she's not collapsing yet - and elves run warm at the best of times but now suddenly her hands are sweaty and her face is blushing pink and -

And then it feels like she's been half-asleep all her life and now properly woken up.

Her first thought is that she's got to pull herself together and set aside how much she hates academic politics and make sure Dr Baika gets left alone by anyone who might be interested, which is everyone, until she can make more of these. And then she can own the Academy. 

She laughs aloud - she can't help it, along with the wonderful clarity there's a bubbling feeling in her chest - certain parts of the Church are going to be interested in this as well - all right, she has a lot of leverage but she needs to act really, really fast - 

"Excellent! I don't seem to be collapsing in agony which is encouraging!"

Her thoughts do move faster, but by far the best thing is that things she doesn't like thinking about are much easier to think about now. 

...

This... is quite a high-ranking cleric, isn't it. Who was, suspiciously, ready for them just as they arrived. 

Come to think of it, it's strange that she doesn't know a lot about the clergy at Silvermoon. It's just - the way the world is - a wizard must never take that kind of thing for granted, why... 

...She doesn't know much at all about humans but they don't exactly have a lot of clerics. Why have this many, and this powerful, here?

All right she really really really needs to grow up and get a lot better at politics really quickly! She's not powerful enough yet to-

OH, no, she absolutely needs to try some actual Wizardry like this, that's her absolute first priority!

Come to think of it-

She breaks her silence, during which she's been staring enraptured at Dr Baika, to wheel around. "Thank you Reverend you've been very helpful I think I'm stable!" She doesn't really realise how quickly she's talking, but turns back to the EXCELLENT VISITOR FROM THE FAR REALMS. "We need to take advantage! Of this! We need a list of priorities! Do you have any? Off the top of my head, more soul investigation, actually check to see if we can just set up transit to your world, find a way to teach you wizardry that's less uncomfortable than polymorphing you which honestly is tricky if you're that solicitous about your brain but I bet someone knows, set up an alchemical laboratory-"

She's definitely carefully observing Naevys, looking faintly concerned. Pulse, pupil response, movement speed, microexpressions, breath... She can glean a surprising amount of medical information just from looking.

She seems fine. These pills are kind of designed, not just marketed, to make you feel like a conference room shark, sharp, instant answers on the tongue, socially aggressive, a bit. Seems to be working as intended for her.

"Alchemical laboratory, I'll need one if I want to get anywhere, especially since I won't be able to order anything from my usual suppliers. And you wanted an intro to compsci lecture?"

Pulse: high! Not dangerously so, but getting there. And... weird, not an irregular rhythm but not a normal one. 

Pupils: dilated!

Speed: fast! Now especially, it's possible to sense something unusual about the way she moves - not anything that can be put into words, it just seems off.

Microexpressions: having the BEST time.

Breath: ragged and heaving, more than expected for a human. 

"Yes! Tell me about the tiny counting lightning elementals! Let's go!" 

This development was predictable; in this time it has already arranged an alchemical workroom under the control of the Faculty. It can let Naevys know. The Entity clearly has some sort of extranormal perception, so it's going to have to be more careful than usual with spying. 

The issue with souls was not predictable. It is not as sanguine as the priest. 

It drifts unobtrusively away, down into the cellars and then the dungeons, towards the Faculty of Necromancy. Theoretical Necromancy, of course.

She hasn't forgotten that the orb is a person. Perhaps it's bored, or has duties to attend to.

And she can tell Naevys is forming nascent intentions of monopolizing her contact with others; It's kind of cute. It would be high foolishness to just go along with it, though perhaps she can maintain some of her flighty airhead image?

She starts explaining more about basic computing theory as they walk.

...And she's not under any illusions at all that facilities at the local megacorp/university are not under her own control, which limits what she's willing to do, how much to let the Tinker out... Her natural predisposition is an extremely suspicious one, but that's due to acculturation to Night City. Is it different here? Perhaps, sample size of two. ...Three. Insufficient data.

Regardless, how does this 'alchemical workroom' compare to a modern Corporate biochem lab? Her expectations are in the basement.

It becomes apparent as they walk that something strange is going on with space here. The walk to the Chapel was short and simple, but with the benefit of recordings it's clear that the way back doesn't go the same way. 

Naevys seems to know where she's going, somehow.

Well, today she learned some fascinating things about very small amounts of lightning! Probably of interest to the Evocation Faculty even though they normally prefer very large amounts of lightning! Unfortunately the Evocation Professor freaks her out even by senior wizard standards. 

The principles of 'computing' don't sound like they necessarily depend on electricity. That's an important concept in magic, there aren't many things like that. She's never heard of a phenomenon in wizardry as stable and predictable as that - though she wouldn't have expected lightning to work! It's maybe the most dangerous Elemental phenomenon there is!

Her alchemical room is at the top of one of many, many towers, a wide round room of very solid stone. Spiral stairs lead to the lantern, a space at the very top open to the sky, and skylights admit the sun (and vent poisonous fumes). 

There's a bookcase fronted with very thick glass, and workbenches littered with crucibles and cauldrons and retorts and scales and alembics and dozens of devices she doesn't recognise. There are sturdy locked cupboards and racks of very strange material samples - slabs of different types of stone, and ingots of metals - she can recognise gold, silver, iron, copper, but there are many more, including a very small bar of something greenish-black, a few tiny chips of something like charcoal, and a little disc of something no earthly colour, like a tiny bluish-silver mirror. There's a huge, creaking copper and wood distillery, anvils, hammers, a huge furnace with heaps of charcoal, but also large jars of strange oils, powders, and a small heap of weirdly twisted logs. 

She starts comparing things against an internal database, and can recognize quite a lot if it can be used as a medical related tool in any way, thank you Tinker shard, but what if they are magic things.

Still, "Not as limited as I was expecting! We'll get back to the idea of sorting algorithms later, can you tell me what this is, for example? Not just wood for burning, of course?" She indicates the logs.

...How in any way are we talking, here. And what exactly counts as "medical". This could be important, considering the true nature of alchemy. 

Huh. There's got to be a way to make a Spell do that. She's never even dreamed of attempting Spell design, it's supposed to be Fifth Circle minimum and not safe even by magic standards, but right now nothing feels like it could be that hard. What happens if you Wish to sort something as fast as possible that's probably not a clever thought. 

"Oh - lightning-struck oak roots. Some rituals do burn them but they mostly work as a symbolic basis of - creation, new beginning, raw material, that kind of thing - it's occurring to me now that maybe alchemy for you is as different as the rest of your magic! Is this enough to go on to make basics like - 'benzene'? - or do we need to get creative?"

The Shard's database is vast and it has extradimensional sensors, plus it's using borrowed information from Dr. Baika's own senses... 'Medical' is things related to altering, enhancing, changing, damaging, repairing, controlling, or analyzing living things. It's best at surgery and microbiology, but the umbrella is broad. The closer the relationship, the better- It could identify an unfamiliar niche tool for checking teeth instantly, but random bottles of chemicals might only be twigged on what effect they have on the body after a bit of close investigation, and something like a weapon would get almost no extra information besides, perhaps, the types of wounds it might inflict (and how to make those deadlier).

"It sure sounds like it is quite different! I'll be wanting things mostly for their material properties, not their magical ones... The tools will be mostly alright, the base metals I recognize, but I need to see if anything else here is something I know how to use. Sulfur, pitch, animal fat, sugar, alcohol- Again, not for drinking- Ammonia, soap, salt-"

What is up with Naevys's pulse, she must have an entirely different cardiovascular structure, her power wants her to perform a full physical-

"-Benzene is only one of many things I'm going to need, really, but I can make them all out of each other. In time. Pitch, tar, and other oils mined from the ground are the best starting point for it. I'm looking forward to combining my branch of knowledge with local magic."

Really, synthesizing a bunch of basic chemical feedstock is going to suck. It's annoying as fuck, a waste of time, she'd much rather order industrially produced bottles from Biotechnica and Arasaka, with known purities and safety seals and all.

This device is for analysing the shape of cranial bones with startling precision. These are phlebotomy tools. These are for extracting a bewildering array of bodily fluids. That is dissection equipment. This is a specialised syringe for administering tinctures to the lens of the eye. There are lots and lots of vials of random substances. These are - a weird series of aids for meditation practices, including a hand-powered gearbox with an oscillating symbol designed for something like EMDR therapy. 

"All of those are fine! If there's something specific you need a device to do we can probably arrange it! Also I'm sorry this might be my translation Spell - full disclosure, there aren't standard procedures for this, or if there are I was never taught them, I learned this Spell long ago because according to legend some Things from the Far Realms speak tongues that drive men mad - but I'm still not sure what you mean by 'material properties' that aren't 'magical properties'! I can arbitrarily alter lesser properties like flavour or colour if that helps? And yes there has to be a way to combine these things somehow," now she needs to make a calculation as to whether or not she should give away her best and most dangerous ideas!

She's leaning yes, it's not like no other wizard could come up with them, and she needs to move quickly, and she doesn't want to hide things from the visitor!

"I know you're nervous about wizardry but there have to be some problems your world's magic can solve! Alchemy is related to Transmutation magic and it's said to reflect transformation in yourself, such that you'd master the art if you became spiritually perfect - I wonder if your - thinking augmentations? - could help?" Also maybe this way she gets the thinking augmentations.

"Material properties are... Somewhat hard to explain, it goes down to an understanding of matter and alchemy... Well, it would take a while to explain. Let's try these words: Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine, Neon, Sodium, Manganese, Aluminum, Silicon, Phosphorous, Sulfur, Chlorine... All of these are considered fundamental, elemental types of matter. Why are there skull measuring tools...? Well, one works with what one has. And yes, mostly I'm nervous because- It's an entirely new domain of knowledge, I don't know what the pitfalls are."

Well that's disturbing. 

'Hydrogen', fine, the flammable vapour when metal is exposed to acid, that one she knows about. Acid is important in elemental studies, it's part of the definition of interactions of Fire and Water. Weird that it would be a fundamental type of matter, it's just a Fire-Air conjugate, but fine. 

Sunstuff, stonestuff, emeraldstuff, borax, charcoal, natronbirth, sharpbirth, what the actual fuck is this list of elements. Is this maybe the translation Spell trying to shield her mind from eldritch blasphemies by producing nonsense? Possibly! The books didn't say it did that but they say a Spell is somewhat shaped by its vessel, admittedly not usually this helpfully!

"...That sounds extraordinary!" she settles on saying. "I know hydrogen, but most of those translate to vaguely intelligible words but not ones I'm familiar with. I don't know if that means someone somewhere who speaks Elvish knows them, or if Elvish used to have a word for them, or if the Spell is just making things up, they do do that. I thought the elements were Fire, Earth, Air and Water, there are Elemental Planes of those and alchemy usually relies on them. ...We can visit, if that would be helpful, they're strange and dangerous places to be but I bet the Professor would help. Maybe there's an Elemental Plane of Hydrogen somewhere. Oh! And the skull things are because some wizards believe Spells etch themselves on the inside of your skull, and that the soul mostly interacts with the body through ventricles of the brain, so maybe you can tell other interesting things about the soul from the insides of the skull, so you can try to perfect yourself spiritually and win at alchemy!"

All right yes deep breath time to discuss pitfalls. 

"All right. Wizardry is physically dangerous. Spells can have nearly any effect you can imagine, so any given Spell is more likely to be something strange and dangerous than something you understand! Also, mortals aren't properly shaped for magic, it can take a toll on your mind and spirit. It's why even powerful wizards don't use as much magic as you might expect!"

Most of them, in fact, spend most of their time at dinner, napping, arguing and ignoring research proposals.

"Canonical Spells are usually safe on both counts as long as you know your limits, don't make any mistakes and don't try to use them in weird ways. Magical research is a tradeoff in a few ways between novelty and safety, and also between physical and spiritual safety. If you want to be really safe, we can stick to known uses. That would mean - without preparing new Spells, right now, - I could for example use Abjurations to protect you from, say, poisonous fumes, or Transmutation to control things like flavour and temperature and colour, or move things without touching them, or Conjuration to teleport things, if any of that is helpful. Also this should have occurred to me, I can turn you into a different humanoid form if you give me some time with my spellbook and you still want to know how magic feels." 

"I can probably work out demonstrations of elem- Hmm actually, I should, if only to confirm that the elements and chemistry behave as I expect them to. My first thought is that I would be fucking dead if carbon's valence number or bonding energy changed- Human bodies are principally composed of carbon and water, which is just hydrogen and oxygen, and if the fundamental rules underlying the universe change even a bit I would have turned into so much salty goop, unless I've also been... Completely reconstructed, somehow, as an entity composed of particles of fire and so on... Or at least my body, I suppose, taking the soul thing at face value."

She starts examining the bottles more closely, though the narration need not specify them in agonizing detail if it so prefers.

No, the narration is fine with that, she's not exceeding the resolution of the universe just yet. A player has ever asked for the contents of a random page from a random book in a library and got a straight answer.

As best she can tell with all her powers combined:

This one is quicksilver. This one is pure water, actually very pure water. This small one is... literally just straight LSD? Don't take the cork out of that one unless you feel like it. This one is probably mostly water and ethanol. This one is a mix of nitric and hydrochloric acid. This one is blood. 

She normally wouldn't be confident in her ability to keep up with this, but she's on EXTRADIMENSIONAL MAGIC DRUGS.

"That's very interesting! There are planes with different natural laws, and entities from them that exist in very different forms here, compared to their own planes, when now that you mention it you might expect their bodies to simply fail! I've never heard of someone just dissolving after a Plane Shift though if they did they wouldn't have written it down. For multiple reasons. Actually I think there are planes where your own Form will be different if you go there. It would be weird if you looked this much like a human but were made of something else! Unless the Far Realms really are as vast as they say and the Professor just found a Thing that looks quite human somewhere in the eternities. All right at this point we should really prioritise finding someone to check if you actually have a soul and if all the parts inside you are the same! Are there any fast easy demonstrations to see if your 'elements' are real here?"

"Just because I don't understand it yet doesn't mean it's nonsense... Hmm. My first two thoughts are the splitting of water and reaction mass... There are various reactions that involve gases, usually burning. If I had a pure sample of some substance that I know the chemical formula under my own system for... I could predict exactly how much it will weigh after burning- How much of its weight has been lost to gases in the air, and how much remains in the solid. Or similar for other redox reactions, like natron and acid... I would predict this ratio based on my knowledge of elements and how they combine, and walk you through the math. And conversely, if you had a sample of pure hydrogen, when burned it will produce water and only water. If we created hydrogen with an acid-metal reaction and trapped that hydrogen gas, then burned it in a sealed chamber, and then cooled the chamber, we would find water condensing out of the air. I could even predict how much water with the same principles. As for water splitting, you can split it into hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen is the chemical element in the air that reacts in most combustion reactions. So if I did that, one chamber would be rich in hydrogen- We could confirm that with a flame test. And the other chamber would be rich in oxygen, so we could put a candle flame in front of it and unseal it, and we would see the flame intensify for a moment as the oxygen gas escapes- Pure oxygen would burn more aggressively than the diluted oxygen in ordinary air."

"Interesting! I know hydrogen burns but not that it makes water, that's weird. Can your elements not be broken down? It's known that ours can - you can separate Earth into different metals - they're supposed to be ontologically basic though now that I say that sentence out loud I feel like I don't actually know what it means! They definitely correspond to parts of the spirit, that's an important principle in some magic. Anyway. How do you split water? Let's do it!"

"For almost every ordinary situation, no, the relative mass of each will remain the same except when certain kinds of events happen that I don't know much about. They can't be easily broken down and that's why we decided they were elements. I could list facts about the special changes, but I don't understand the theory as well there, so let's leave it aside..."

With her own augments' internal batteries, charged off bioelectricity, all they really need here is some wire, glassware, water, and something to act as an electrolyte... She starts moving to set it up.

"The natron," precursor to baking soda, should serve much the same purpose, "Is only going into the water to help lightning flow through the water. There are other types of catalysts that would work too. I'm going to run this off of my own augments unless you know exactly where to find strong lodestones and lots of copper wire on short notice..."

Obviously now she has to find out about what happens when you break these elements, but that can wait a moment. 

"I do, but this will be easier."

(Also, Dr Baika can't be the only one showing off here.)

She draws her wand and flicks it, and lightning arcs gracefully from the tip to strike the tower's stones. The chamber smells of ozone.

(This isn't really her area, and making Lightning is much easier than controlling it like this - it was the last element to be understood and still isn't really, it seems to love Earth and Water, its place in Creation seems to be unclear, she's heard it whispered that Lightning lives inside people but knowing that is a step on the path of Necromancy so best not think about it too much - but sometimes you have to impress the pretty visitor from another reality first and deal with the crushing psychic strain later.)

"Ah, nice. Can you do a steady stream? I don't see the power source for that- That kind of spontaneous onboard energy generation would be wonderful in certain kinds of personal gear. Add lightning measuring tools to the list of things to make, I suppose."

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.

Dr Baika's memory coprocessor is now technically a spellbook. 

So is the storage for her visual sensory data. 

Unfortunately, neither of those media have been painstakingly treated and refined and isolated from anything else, so as to hold such power mostly-safely without it getting any funny ideas. 

At once her augmented memory is full of something copying itself, and her sensory memory isn't far behind. And of course her other augments touch those, so within seconds her brain-monitoring programmes scream warnings. Something is trying to overwrite - everything, it seems - and all her firewalls and security measures are not going to last indefinitely.

Her augments are custom-made and very high-quality and also shaped by superpowers, they're intact for now, but it's not exactly fun. 

If, incidentally, she has any vague preferences for how the room should be organised, or if her clothes aren't quite on straight or her hair isn't perfectly combed, the Spell is going to spill loosely out and try to set that right, with a flare of sparks and acrid smoke, and as it passes it hurts, like the cognitive equivalent of trying to stare at the Sun.

Blood starts from her nose, and it suddenly becomes very difficult to understand anything she senses or orient to where she is, as her mind tries to dissociate itself.

Ow.

What.

Catastrophic system errors in her OS. Self-replicating code. Virus.

Quickhack?

N o.

Power copying.

She got cocky. She tried to - to - 

-Teacher, the - he could gift powers, but - controlled the giftees - She reaches for her (second, non-broken) gun to defend herself but-

-Naevys is recoiling, and her snap judgement says she's not the threat, so Dr. Baika looks for something else to shoot-

-And something bloody tears itself out of the back of her head and tries to fix the thing that's been bugging her ever since she got here, the non-sterile environment, and reaches for the closest thing to disinfectant she is aware of among the chemical jars -

-Trump powers, attacking the mind, her Shard is reacting in alarm too -

-She's kind of a paranoid bitch, but she doesn't - actually - have - a failsafe for whatever the f u c k this is -

-But she triggers the physical switch in the back of her jaw, which slams the implants into Safe Mode. Read-only mode, magnetic fields changing in the memory chips to disallow further changes on a physics level, and only run the incredibly basic firmware she was able to encode directly into hardware, so she-

-Her hearing goes tinny and staticky, her vision goes pixelated and greyscale. Her eyes point straight ahead, change color to a neutral grey iris, and look dead and glassy. She stumbles and jerks at the pain and the sensation of her Kerenzikov shutting off, and can only hope that the spinal nerve density biosculpt, specifically built to reduce Kerenzikov strain, will help her cope with this-

"-God fucking fuck! What the fuck!"

She's audibly slurring, compared to how she talked before.

Look, the idea is that through careful study you weave your thoughts into a cage for Spells, shape yourself into something capable of magic, even your own, freeform workings of magic. The distinction isn't as clear as they tell apprentices it is: the truth is that magic is alive and to record it is to create it. A copy of a Spell on a page - or in digital memory, as the case may be - is that Spell, and a Spell is rather like a spirit. You're having these problems because the computers inside you are in a very real sense now literally haunted. 

One of the fundamental truths of magic is that it's much easier to invoke than it is to control. You're really not supposed to just have your brain directly hooked up to what is technically a bootleg spellbook. 

Well, it's too late now! You're riding a tiger, it's not exactly safe but getting off would be even worse.

You have gained: one Spell Slot! It feels like a groove carved into your living brain, or a literal gap in your soul where magic should go, the hole shaped like itself that the Spell made. 

You need: the knowledge and understanding to stabilise it. You seem to have some extremely anomalously good instincts for that already, which is why you're not yet slipping into one of the various eldritch insanities for which failed wizards are notorious, which is nice. 

She bats away the vial of oil-of-vitriol that is currently trying to disinfect her and hurries to put an arm around Dr Baika. 

"Hey! Look at me!" She's going to gently physically turn her face to look at her. "That was incredibly impressive, well done!" She didn't actually know human eyes could change colour with their mood like that, it's not common even for elves, but then she didn't know anyone could pick up wizardry that fast, even if they were already some kind of mage. Maybe the stories about the Abjuration Professor are true after all. 

She takes out her hip flask - brandy, the good kind - and offers it to the human's lips. Apples, cinnamon, oak. "You're going to have spellburn after that! Don't try to think too hard, you'll be all right but your mind needs to recover. Try to take a sip if you can. You need to bring your attention back to mortal things. Can you look at my eyes?"

She is not trying to stabilize it at this point. She is trying to get rid of it. A mantra of no, fuck you, in her head.

Her eyes aren't turning in their sockets at all. Naevys will have to physically point the doctor's face if she wants to make eye contact.

Alcohol? Whatever. She grits her teeth. Fuck off. Power, can you help this thing fuck off? This brain is your turf!

"It's a virus! It's fucked my implants! I need to get rid of it!"

[HOST] is experiencing elevated stress and alarm signals. Indicates that it is under esoteric attack. Self replicating attack.

It is now paying MUCH MORE ATTENTION. [HOST] had already alarmed it by abruptly changing location and then seeing a lot of novel things but it's much worse than expected. If it loses track of its connection to the [HOST], it will have to find a new one, and that would be terrible.

Tinker shards have a number of tools to affect the physical world on a local and microscopic scale. And a macroscopic scale. Really, most shards can manifest many types of powers in a pinch.

Flashes of energy fly like lightning through the nearest dimensional connections as its activity increases. One order of magnitude. Two, three.

It examines its host's brain and body, and nearby surroundings, for the described self replicating threat, processing unfathomable amounts of sensor data through a piece of computational media larger than most neighborhoods.

AHH YOU'RE JUST MAKING MORE UNSTABLE SPELLBOOKS

Well, too late now. Every bit of memory that's held data on the wrong part of the contents of Dr Baika's brain, or all the gods help you Naevys's still-open grimoire, is ipso facto a sort of Spellbook.

Spellbooks can be relatively stable, if they're scribed by a trained wizard who can shape a unique custom work of art to bear the Spell properly. They still tend to get... restless. It takes the right kind of soul - the right kind of sapient mind - to control a Spell in any way. 

Wiping the memory would help, but it could still spontaneously manifest magical phenomena if it were used for anything else. Spells are sticky like that. The physical substrate will remember that it used to be more. That's why you burn wizards when they die. Well, that's one reason. 

It'll probably be fine. It's not like the Shard is without defences. 

And the Spell is actually not trying to copy itself any more! (It's Unseen Servant, Dr Baika was trying to learn it and it was trying to be helpful! The Shard doesn't seem to want that, though.)

In the bowels of the Conjuration Department, certain occult tripsigns and strange omens alert it to danger. 

There is Something watching this place rather too closely.

The Academy dates back to ancient times and has considerable fortification. It does have to contend with the delicate balance between permitting experimental magic at all, and not being devoured by horrifying things from beyond the veil, which was somewhat limiting, but it does pretty well. Certainly no known force in these lesser days could easily threaten it. 

It wasn't designed to hold off TERRIFYING NASCENT SUPERINTELLIGENCES. 

This doesn't seem like just spellburn oh no she's a complete fucking idiot!

It's fundamentally not in her nature to Enchant anyone who reacts that strongly to telepathy but seconds potentially count in cases like this -

"Dr Baika! Listen! If any of your 'augmentations' are 'recording' you need to erase the recordings right away! Anything that could possibly contain an image of the Spell! And don't make any more, don't do any other magic yet!"

Her eyes aren't focussing. That's not a good sign. 

They're never going to let her have an apprentice what if she got the Visitor killed she didn't want to involve anyone else 

It's not trivial to teleport around the Academy and certainly not where they're going-

Fly.

She shoves the flask of brandy into Dr Baika's hand, lurches into midair, and goes to grab her and soar out of the open skylight.

Dr. Baika is not available to answer your call. This line of grey matter is currently busy relaying other signals. Please try again later. 

The Shard has defenses against something almost exactly like this! Unless you have a very specific master key, changes to its structure are not permitted. The energies attempting to make such changes are countered by automatic defenses, blasted and sheared away by entropy beamed in from subdimensions.

Not Host has suggested a course of action, and while Host is not really paying attention or evaluating it, Host's automatic evaluation of the concept when it is presented through their connection is positive, and its emulation of Host's preferences also results in a positive.

It begins physically shredding sections of physical hardware - and short term neuron memory - in Host's body, spreading it among enough neighboring dimensions that no real 'image' can be formed at all. Atom by atom, anything that contains the offending heuristic pattern, while refraining from damaging the Host itself as much as possible.

Oh that's an incredibly bad sign, as is the eerie bluish glow like a will-o-wisp visible even in daylight. 

Well, there's only one option really, isn't there. The Professor is very powerful but she's not sure it really understands what human beings are.

She needs to look on the bright side! She literally needs to, she'll be no use to anyone if she collapses weeping. Dr Baika is still breathing and unconsciousness isn't the worst possible sign, there's probably something still left of her in there. But she still doesn't know if Dr Baika really has a soul the way she does or if it interacts normally with magic or how her brain implants factor into this and she really should have checked that first.

So, she needs a specialist in the mysteries of the soul, who won't ask too many questions, who already has a claim to stake here, who can maybe get an archmage's attention.

Well, they were probably going to be involved soon anyway. 

She heaves Dr Baika over her shoulder, staggering slightly, and flies down, down, down into the cellars and the dungeons below.

She doesn't have to go far! He's already been politely notified that something like this might happen, so he could rearrange his evening's lectures. He's prepared a ritual circle and is waiting just outside his office in the Faculty of Necromancy. For some reason most students aren't keen on wandering around here alone. 

There's a strong smell of wormwood and juniper, and a blood-freezing voice croaks, "Hello there! This must be the lady who might not have a soul, hmm?"

Oh no oh no that's the Necromancy Professor she's only ever seen him at High Table never actually spoken to him, why is he here how does he know -

She suppresses a shudder as she enters. There's an indescribable sense of something horrible and wrong, but it would be rude to point it out. It's almost surely just her imagination, but she feels like the Spells remaining in her are shifting, cowering, as she approaches the lair office.

 "Oh, Professor Albrecht! Er - yes - she was, I tried to see if she had any aptitude for wizardry," as she says it she hears how stupid she sounds, "and this - happened," she finishes lamely.

[Scans complete. Process complete. De-allocating grey matter computer/communication load.]

(Dr. Baika is now just unconscious from the mother of all Thinker Headaches, not being kept that way by her own power.)

Fascinating! It's not normally that bad, not these centuries. 

"Easily done!" he says happily, raising a hand in which there appears a staff, wrought of some black stone and ending in a twisted device that hurts the eyes to look upon.

His office is a vast stone chamber with many doors, a huge desk, many ancient bookshelves, a wardrobe sealed with a concerning number of chains and padlocks, a small kitchen, several armchairs, and concentric rings of seats like a small amphitheatre around a dreadful ritual circle with a blackboard on wheels next to it. 

"Pop her down anywhere you like and have a seat. Tea? A little sherry? Virgin blood? Just my little joke, I've run out. Now then!"

He peers at this alleged extraplanar human with the better sort of sight, his glassy cataracted eyes shining red in the gloom.

Soul, yes, but it's oddly... new-looking. Some spellburn, but nothing beyond the reach of a few good dinners and an afternoon or two of strictly extracurricular activities. 

The obvious signs of a warlock are much more concerning. He looks closer, muttering unpleasant incantations. 

...Well, it isn't Anyone he recognises, that's for certain. It's incredibly far away, maybe beyond the Far Realms. And unless he's much mistaken, interfering in a much bolder way than usual, if anything at all can be said to be usual about such cases. 

"Well! That's the urgent part done. She does have a soul, which is cheering! Did she tell you anything about her magic?"

He doesn't sound any different, but he's debating bringing out some of the more... private sorts of wizardry. 

"Is she going to - you know?" 

She never wanted to be down here that's why she listened to all the ominous warnings instead of ignoring them to investigate like a normal wizard. 

"Hmm? Kill us all? I very much doubt it! By all means try to wake her up if you like! I'll get the bucket."

... She points her wand.

"Wake." 

She's trying to be very, very gentle. 

pain

pain

pain

pain

So, what does she know...

Implants: Still in safe mode.

pain

Physical sensation, aside from pain: Hard surface. Cold. Taste of booze. Dusty smell.

pain

Oh, and someone talking. Nothing from sight. Her eyes are closed and her muscles have locked up in tension, including those in her face.

pain

Can she feel the thing trying to twist and multiply inside of her OS, still? Well. Maybe not, since her implants are in safe mode and the OS isn't running. But she looks for it, faintly.

pain

What about her power. What is she feeling from- Okay OW OW OW, that makes it worse, drop that line of thought.

pain

Hissed between teeth, "Naevys?"

"Yes! I'm here!" She bends down to squeeze her hand, speaking very quickly. "I am so sorry, I should have realised, I think your 'augmentations' essentially made a copy of the Spell. If you didn't hear me before you need to erase all of those! How are you feeling? If you know who I am already and you can say words you're going to be fine! Also good news, you do have a soul and you're a wizard now! That was very impressive!"

"Ow."

Thinker headache. This has all the classic signs of a thinker headache. And the thing is gone. Did her power do something weird again, to get rid of it? Half of the last hour or two is just a blank spot...

"I'm sure I will have more detailed reactions to that in a minute but. Ow. Can you please find a vial labelled... Ketamine, in my pockets? And feed me..." Hmm. Dosing. Dosing. She knows how this works... "Two of the pills."

"Yes! Yes, of course!" 

If Dr Baika and her magic drugs can do something about spellburn they're going to rule the world. 

She can administer 'ketamine'. She thinks. Unfortunately it's sealed with some kind of lid that won't unscrew, it just keeps turning and making a clicking noise - the material isn't familiar, kind of resinous, and inscribed with some kind of warding runes - 

Knock.

The lid undoes itself, reluctantly. 

"Here!"

"Fascinating!" So this is what has them so excited. "Hello, incidentally! Are you using your ability to feel pain for anything, or shall I make it stop so we can chat properly?" 

"Thank you." Gulp. "...Pain means damage," she manages. "The ketamine is to reduce it to a... Manageable... Level. Without removing the alarm signals entirely. So I don't do anything stupid. Or think too hard."

The problem with asking her power for a Thinker Headache cure is that it makes the headache worse. 

Later.

"Excuse me. My apologies. Who are you?"

"Oh, I thought perhaps it was just delicious. I am Albrecht, the Professor of Necromancy." 

He would be fairly tall if he weren't hunched over, and long robes hang loosely from his frame. You could almost persuade yourself that he's just an extremely elderly man, and it might make you feel better if you do. 

Looking more closely at her soul, it's definitely not only spellburn. It's not what he'd expect to see in a warlock, either. It's almost reminiscent of what happens to people who talk to gods, but not quite. 

"Your friend here brought you along for me to have a look at you. Do I surmise correctly that these augmentations of yours correspond to the bits of machinery inside you? Exceedingly clever. So sharp you've cut yourself, I'm afraid! It's little studied these days, unsolved problem of wizardry, but colour me impressed that the copying process worked at all, and didn't kill you. No Spells still in you, and no sign of any other effects, which would be quite extraordinary luck!" If it weren't clearly an Intervention.

He rambles for a little while about the history of magical notation while he prods at the woman's soul and its connection to Something Else. It implies vaguely concerning things about the nature of reality, which is the best kind of experimental result. 

"Anyway, proper wizardry on your first day is quite the achievement, intentional or not. What you're feeling now is called spellburn. You've overstressed your mind and soul, so you'll need a few days off doing something nice and relaxing and - well, human. You'll work it out."

He glances at Naevys, then back at Dr Baika. Maybe she'll just tell him about her patron! Wouldn't that be nice.

"Anything on your mind?"

It looks back at the thing looking at it. (Is that a communication attempt? Unclear. Observe/Ignore.)

She doesn't need her power to be online to wonder what the fuck is up with this guy's biology. Power mediated, obviously. Or, well, 'magic' mediated. She's pretty convinced it's a distinct phenomenon, by personal experience.

She's tired. And the meds are only making it worse. Can she turn her implants off of Safe Mode? Better not risk it for most of them... She'd probably shudder to see her current neuroinflammatory panel... But her eyes, at least, to seem normal. And her other implants she can work on one at a time, later. Maintenance and double-checking things is 'relaxing and human', right?

Her irises go back to a nice amber, and start moving normally again. She relaxes by increments as the pain control hits her bloodstream.

"-I think, I need a proper sleep. And I need to make some sort of program to - block out recordings of magic. Stop them from being saved to disk... Just turn off recordings entirely for now, though. God."

To enhanced optics, he's very clearly not breathing. 

...Program isn't a word in Common, but he has better translation magic than random graduate students and knows Old High Draconic and also many things he absolutely shouldn't, and that word implies the sort of thing somebody should really do something about, if history is any guide.

Interesting! Well, he has what he needs if and when he wants to make contact with the alien abomination plugged into her brain. 

"Sleep, yes, and food! I'm sure you can be sorted out. Do come back when you have more questions. Or if you're interested in lectures! Receiving or giving or both."

This has been embarrassing and frightening beyond belief and Professor Albrecht is standing right there and now he's very clearly making moves to steal a research project from her Faculty. She'd be excited that a suspected Ninth Circle archmage was interested at all if it wasn't, first, this one, and, second, so annoying.

Later. She can think about all of that later. 

Dr Baika must be struggling. It's been a long day for her, too.

She squeezes her hand again and helps her up.

Up she goes. (She's still massively heavier than an ordinary human, for all that she doesn't look it. Naevys probably notices this. It's the high entropy alloy reinforcement mesh, and the ballistic skin weave, and the laser components taking up space freed up from some mild lung refactoring, and her artificial liver slash second heart... Among other improvements.)

"They say you don't really understand something unless you can teach it, and I certainly aim to contribute and not just take. Later. I'm done for today. Sorry to alarm you both."

.....Off they go?

She does notice, yes. Augmentations? But she's mostly thinking about getting the hell out of the Necromancy Department and not coming back if she can help it. 

"Oh gods don't you apologise! I really should have noticed what could happen with your implants, we don't even get spellbooks in front of mirrors. The good news is you're a wizard now! Which makes things much safer. I'm really impressed, that's very rare. We'll need to see about how you want to specialise, and an arcane focus, and..."

Dinner time! 

This is mostly what the Academy is for, really, the magical research just fills the gaps in between dinners. 

You're going to need your formal robes and pointy hat, but those can be acquired at short notice. 

Most places in the world can't afford to teleport in fresh ingredients from three different countries on a whim, or perform viticulture in custom-tailored realities, or get kings and emperors trying to bribe them via the snack trolley, but such are the advantages of wizardry. 

Albrecht and many almost equally eccentric-looking people make up high table. 

It might not be noticeable without enhanced optics, but it doesn't actually seem possible to count people, or even the number of tables. You get a different answer each time, if you get one at all. 

There are pre-dinner drinks, and staggering - concerning - amounts of wine. Something that doesn't smell exactly like tobacco smoke is casting a blue haze across a dark huge stone room lit by oddly-coloured arcane fire.

And of course there's student politics. 

Many people (humans, elves, someone who looks a little like Naevys but is seven feet tall and the colour of black granite in water, short stout bearded people, and so on) are going to want to talk to Dr Baika. She noticeably does not resemble any of the humans around here. How forthcoming is she feeling? 

The fresh plant-based ingredients are nice. Real bread! Vegetables! Fruits! Sweet syrup on fried dough!

None of the meat is SCOP, which makes it a step up in some ways and down in others. She thinks synthetic meat, grown in her own custom vat, actually does better on the taste and texture axis, and it's also less disgusting since it was never part of a living thing that had emotions and memories and a digestive system and so on. So she avoids the local meat, mostly.

She doesn't drink alcohol. And let's skip the coffee too. She tucks the, apparently required, garments in to closer match corporate-office style, and lets her eyes slowly cycle through rainbows. She'll show off little tricks- Her hands can move very fast, her hair can style itself and get longer or shorter and change color, she can pretzel and un-pretzel the silverware, she can do large arithmetic questions instantly and catch thrown objects while blindfolded. And she'll talk about her interests in medicine and biology.

It's probably good to meet more than one contact; If only it had happened before she got greedy and nearly burned herself out in the process!! What kinds of people are showing interest, here? What are their roles and interests? (Too bad she can't risk recording, and has to just take rapid mental notes and the occasional careful screenshot instead.)

These are mostly apprentice wizards. Naevys has chosen where to sit fairly carefully, but there's no keeping Dr Baika secret for long. 

(She is an apprentice studying Conjuration. Naevys seems to be dropping hints about helping her.)

"I do not believe it is like anything, to be an animal. I have spoken with spiders. They are not exactly conversationalists."

(She's not saying very much about who, exactly, she is, or what, exactly, she does.)

"Cows lack rational souls. I checked once. And the gods would have told us, otherwise."

(He's actually a cleric, a very low-ranking one. He was born in the mountains not far from here, and got lost and almost died searching for sheep one day and felt the transcendent glory of the gods in the marrow of his bones. He really didn't expect to then spend most of his time healing fat old wizards' gout, but he listened in church and knows what humility is. He was only sitting here by chance, or perhaps divine will. Maybe there is to be more to his life.)

"Ah," he says, not terrified because there is Someone out there who believes in him, "the Prophet specifically ordered us to cultivate our own goodness, not to rely on such things, and, I think there are animals it's forbidden to eat, or maybe only a few it's permitted-"

(He's an alchemist. He badly wants to interrogate Dr Baika about her world's alchemy, but it looks like it will have to wait.)

"There's both," he drawls, "but the specifically forbidden list is apocryphal, it's all probably-fictional foreign monkeys and giant fish. And magpies, for some reason. You should read more. But then, everyone should."

"I don't know that I'd believe that! We already know there's something we don't understand about souls! Why do you think animals are people? Also wine is supposed to be good for spellburn and I'm quite worried about that. And guilty."

(Dr Baika got quite lucky, again, it's not a bad case at all. Spellburn on this level just feels like - a sort of jittery nervousness, a sense of something wrong.)

Fine, fine, little decorous sips of things. It's not like her liver can't handle it. She just hates being slow. She's off balance, probably because her implants are kinda fucked. Over half her data storage is gone!

"It's not that animals are people... Though some of them are cleverer than you think. It gets to be a question of 'what is a person, anyway'... But regardless I'd rather grow my meat in a vat. So it's never been exposed to shit and rot on a farm. It's cleaner."

"I too try not to think about farms. Elves don't have them."

"How do you grow meat in a vat?"

The Visitor knows Necromancy. Oh dear.

"It's technically a type of algae that you alter to grow meaty kinds of proteins. Just like you can- Well, if you selectively breed plants it's like making slightly different copies of the same book, but instead you can take a few paragraphs, the ones that make a flower purple instead of colorless, say, and add them to a whole different book instead and get purple corn. I'm oversimplifying massively. You have to really know what you're doing, how life works. I need to get my hands on some local seeds and see if I can make them better."

"...Can you do that to people? Can you take the paragraphs that make someone a talented wizard, and copy them? If so you're going to either take over the world, or destroy it."

...This is starting to make her wonder about the nature of the elven forests, but she's going to hold her tongue for a moment.

"Possible. Much harder. And ethically thorny. Things like general intelligence aren't neat paragraphs, more like... Thousands of sentences embedded in other things? Tone? Pacing? Some secret code where any change you make also might end up causing anything from a stomachache to a seizure? Eh. Well. Fucking complicated and easy to mess up, anyway. I might end up giving some biology lessons. If you're unable to eat dairy without getting sick and want that fixed I can do that, though."

Wow, humans can have so many weird things wrong with them. 

"...Ethically thorny?" He's heard some alarming things in this conversation! Maybe that's why he's here, so he can report them. 

She leans forwards eagerly. "Could you make sorcerers? They're very rare but you either are one or you aren't, it's not a talent like wizardry."

"Well, if you're going to change people you'd better be really sure you did it right, right? ...I haven't studied sorcerers in detail, I wouldn't know yet. I have my doubts that anything is truly impossible, though."

Promising. 

"What would you need to get started? It's possible I might know where to find a sorcerer."

And the extremely secret location of the blasphemous sepulchre of the nameless sorceress-queen, said to have frightened the gods so much they had to kill her seven times, so if she can acquire Dr Baika's knowledge and use it for herself...

"Does this rely on the same basics you mentioned for other things?"

"I can't really say anything about this with confidence until I learn more about wizardry and sorcery. A proper understanding of biology would help, I'm sure. -Oh, you meant my tools. Yes, absolutely, I need those. It'll come in time."

"I have known a sorcerer." It's possible that she should play her cards closer to her chest, but she's risking being left out here. "It moves in bloodlines, but often skips generations, sometimes many. There are theories on where it comes from."

He does not at all consider himself worthy to interfere here, but then he did not think himself worthy of divine attention, and now his feelings don't matter. 

"Excuse me." 

(This particular translation magic is not like Naevys's Spell; it's managed to render his voice with an appropriately rural accent, not that he particularly knows this. He's trying not to sound stupid.)

"...I do not know if this is normal for all of you, but you are talking about big and strange things." And he's heard stories about what heathens get up to. "Can you tell me about what you think is ethics?"

She likes the kid. Though she's always had a soft spot for the street kid type.

"Ethics is the process by which we decide what is right or wrong, good or evil, correct or incorrect behavior and decisions. One key point of the ethics I hold to for my personal code as a doctor, as a person who does things to other people's bodies and minds, is the notion of informed consent. Before I do anything to someone else as a doctor, ideally they would be informed about what I am doing- The goal, any risks, and that I've answered their questions to their satisfaction. And they should consent to it, meaning they are genuinely willing and approving of it. Not being threatened into participation as a test subject, not being lied to about important facts..."

She's a little unsure if she should continue on. While she does enjoy expounding at length, those priests might be annoyed at any perceived usurpation of their moral authority...

She's not convinced having "ethics" is actually important, but the world is full of the skulls of wizards who disregarded ritual rules because they didn't seem important, often with the magic that killed them still etched inside. She should know. 

"Does it count if you pay them? Because I can buy you some debt-bondage contracts if you need subjects. I know people."

"...Forgive me, I think that would be a very great sin." He shoots a look at Dr Baika. "And... unethical for you, yes?"

See this is why they shouldn't just let random humans study magic. At least have a priest interview them first. An actually properly catechised one, not a shepherd's boy with big ideas.  

"If we're going to debate the nature of good and evil with a cleric we're going to need all night and much more wine. My room?"

"...Not today. I have a headache from something earlier." And Caterina is reminding her a bit too much of Generic Corporate Executive. "Anyway, he's right, it's all sorts of dubious to do experiments on people in desperate situations. It can be okay if I'm very sure it's safe already and they have the option to stay where they are instead, but... They'd absolutely be fucked over by whoever holds the debt if they don't, right? Or at least it would be a concern. So it's impossible. I'm going to need time to build up to anything worth testing anyway. Got self-repair to do first."

"One is not permitted to torture debtors in these lands." Which is more than can be said for most places, she's pretty sure. "I believe you would have great difficulty, persuading the Inquisition that this did not count as such. It is the sort of argument to which I imagine pitchforks would be brought."

"I'm sure you could find someone willing to genuinely agree to it. It's permitted if they understand what they're swearing to. Why do you have the right to force them to dwell forever in poverty instead, against their own will, Dr Baika?"

Well, if people are going to positively insist on being rude to the Visitor that's their problem, serves them right if they don't get to try the magic pills. "Self-repair is the important part here. Most people can't go that far that fast, it must have hurt."

"I'll be fine. And why would they have the right to my money?" She says, a bit hot. "I haven't any right to bar folk from seeking employment or deals with others, but I also have no obligation to provide it myself. I don't like slavery, or debt slavery, and I'm loathe to compensate those who make it their business, but it hardly obliges me to do anything about it. At that point it would be a compulsion on me, or at least a tax. We can come to an equitable trade, or not."

"I think Lord Moradin would like you." 

"How very self-possessed of you." He doesn't sound disapproving, though. He tilts a glass to her with only a little bit of irony. 

Sometimes she misses home. 

Dr Baika is really... surprisingly confident that she'll be all right for someone who'd never heard of magic this morning and has no idea what the effects of spellburn can be. Then again, she's a wizard already and she's still sitting upright and forming sentences and everything! ...She kind of likes it. 

"Nobody here is going to make anyone else here make any deals against their will unless they want me to be quite upset." She idly shakes her hands loose from her sleeves, which might be lost on their visitor but is the arcane equivalent of cleaning your fingernails with a dagger.

Her Shard will help her, and there's always her backup plan of [redacted]. She'll be fine.

"Bah, enough moralizing for now. I'm not doing anything like that soon anyway. Someone tell a story?"

People glance towards her, of course. It hasn't been long enough that she's used to it, but she has worked out that it means something different up here. She's still not totally sure what. You'd need to be unusually observant, or have more than merely biological powers of vision, to notice the little flinch.

"All right. You have maybe noticed what I am," she says with some irony, and only a moment later realises that perhaps nobody has ever heard about the drow where Dr Baika comes from. She's not sure she believes the rumour about the Far Realms, but the woman is obviously from far away.

Apologise? No, that makes surface people... she's not sure, she thinks contemptuous or possibly frightened. She doesn't really understand Dr Baika's place here, she doesn't really understand anyone's place here, but something about her manner is a little familiar.

"I am a drow, born deep beneath the earth. It is a different sort of place."

She of course has not approached the Church, but she has read the books very diligently, and they do not emphasise having to watch what you say, which is naturally not reassuring. 

"I was a student of magic. It is taught differently." So far she's gotten away with not specifying exactly how. "I was a great talent for my age. So I called then a familiar spirit. It is not lightly done. They are not of this world. I have heard that there are special magics here to do it much more safely," which is probably a trap, "but these I did not know."

"It... did not have the shape it should. It made offers that I refused. But I was put on trial in any case, for collaboration, for departing from the Mother. I did not know what the penalty was to be but I did not think I could survive paying it and stay myself," she has worked out that you're not supposed to go into details about that kind of thing up here at all, "and so I fled. I was very lucky, they did not know how far my talents had come and did not much restrain me." She hesitates.

"Caves are not like what you think, when you go deep. Very easy to be lost, easy to hide, easy to die, wizard or not. There was a -" something in the quality of her voice changes as she borrows a word from another language (she knows there's translation magic, but what advantage is there in showing her disloyalty?) "letterbox-squeeze - a gap to fit through, if you breathe out all the way and reach forwards and let all your muscles melt, and crush yourself into the dark. Flooded sometimes with hot water, and it went down, down. So I hoped they would not be keen to follow. I lived, and I was beyond lucky. It came to a passage made by dwarves, long ago, one of their ancient places now sunk. Still passable. It was a very long climb. There were things in those tunnels too. But it ended in the mountains not far away. I saw the sun and I stared, I did not know this was unwise."