"Oh, yeah, if I can do it once I can do it every day," he assures her distractedly. "That is unless it needs some kind of rare materials we can't get on a battlefield for love or money—which I should probably check, come to think of it..." 

He checks.

"Ah."

She has no idea why she allowed herself a moment of optimism, this is exactly in keeping with the theme of the rest of this goddamn day.

"So there will be a quest to retrieve the forgotten something of wherever. Your credibility grows by the second." Her voice only shakes slightly beneath the sarcasm.

"No, not exactly." He doesn't seem bothered by the sarcasm. "Spells don't tend to ask for a specific instance of an item, just one that meets certain specifications—which is good, because otherwise you'd get rich wizards competing for all the rarest items and no-one else would be able to cast anything above the fifth tier." 

"Get to the point, Harding," Roberts puts in from where he's been standing quietly by the tent flap. He's clearly a little lost with all the talk of magical theory. 

"What do you mean, 'not exactly'?" 

Harding glares and jabs a finger in his direction. "You, shut up, I'm working here." 

He turns back to Daria. "I don't suppose you happened to be carrying a tuning fork when you were inexplicably Plane Shifted?" 

"No, why do you need a tuning fork? I can show you everything I have on me if it'd be any help, I have my work bag with me."

"Because the spell wants," he quotes, "'a forked metal rod attuned to the target plane'. Nothing here's going to be attuned to wherever you came from if you've never heard of this plane and we've never heard of yours, so if you haven't brought anything we can use..."

She dumps the contents of her bag unceremoniously on the ground, then picks through the inner pockets for the more delicate items. There are various chunks of metal and rock, string, wire of various thickness, feathers in plastic bags, carved wooden rings, a notebook, several stencils, small pouches with coiled hair, drawing implements, a small tool kit, and a lot of other assorted miscellany.

"Unless you can fork some of the wire and that counts, I don't think any of this works, but look for yourself if you want. Careful with it, though, some of the containers have breakable stuff."

"Sure, yeah, of course, I can be careful. I'm a wizard and an inventor, I work with breakable things all the time." 

As he talks, he goes straight for the toolkit. Anything in there that might meet a very generous interpretation of the requirements? 

Scissors? Pliers? Wire cutters?

"Yeah, one of these might work. Don't really want to find out what would happen if it doesn't, though." He looks speculative. "Fortunately,  I know a way we could find out whether it works..."

Roberts sighs. "The augers are not your servants, Harding. We need every prediction they can make for the good of the war effort."

From his tone, this is an argument they've had many times.

"Augurs? Do those do what I think they - no, not the point." Focus, Daria.

"If it's the only way I can get home I can help with the - good of your war effort. I like to think I'm not entirely useless." Hopefully they're not secretly evil, but she doesn't know how she'd even start checking that and if she diverts resources from one area and contributes to another she'll come out even. Probably? That sounds like the sort of reasoning Mariam would disagree with but Mariam's not here.

Roberts looks at her seriously. "We'd appreciate any help you wish to give, ma'am, but you're under no obligation to aid us. You're from another world: you don't follow any of our gods, and you're not a member of any of our military orders. Since you found yourself in a war zone by accident, I have a duty to see you safely returned to your home."

"That's not - it's not about obligation. Can I help make it faster, or not?"

"It's...not my call to make," Roberts says cautiously. "And even if you can help enough to free up an auger, you might not get the answer you want. I think your best option—"

Harding interrupts, "The gods didn't call you to think, my friend." He gives Daria a speculative look. "So what exactly can you do that would be worth more to this war than a casting or two of an augury?" 

'Gods didn't call him to think?' A religious order, maybe. Has she offered to assist in a holy war of some kind? No, focus - "If I say 'necromancy', what does that mean to you?"

"...you're a necromancer?"

Both men are instantly on alert. Roberts steps forward to put himself between her and Harding, one hand on his sword hilt. 

Harding reacts just as strongly, magic beginning to glow in his hands before he catches up with what she said and stops.

"...could you...repeat that? Might be a translation error, it sounds like your world's magic is different—" His tone says please let this be a translation error. 

- well, fuck.

"I do ritual based," she pauses, grimaces slightly, " - magic. The most intuitive applications of it rely on the imprints left behind after death."

"Imprints?" Just like that, Harding is back to nerdy fascination. "Are we talking ghosts, magical signatures...?" Brushing Roberts out of the way with a careless wave, he steps towards Daria again. 

"I'm not sure what you mean by magical signatures."

"And I'm not sure what you mean by imprints, that's why I'm asking!" 

"Right, but - ugh. An imprint is the impression you get from something connected to the person that they leave behind when they die. You can get information from them but the quality of it degrades over time. It's not a ghost, I would assume we don't have your type of magical signatures but I don't actually know what those are, so."