"I'm not an illusion mage but I can do something similar."

And she lays out a diagram, first element and sixth and seventh and eighth in such and such a configuration, with single and double covalent bonds.

Gema asks a couple of questions but mostly understands.

"Do you expect this to be toxic? Will I need a bowl for it, is it going to be liquid?"

"It should be a powder, I think." She quickly makes an angular bowl out of light. "It can go in here. Yes, it's quite possibly toxic to anyone but humans though I don't know for sure - and toxic to humans if you take too much."

"Will it be safe if I make it wet so it's less likely to blow into my face?"

"Ah, yes, it doesn't react with water."

There's a noticeable breeze as air is drawn to the bowl but Gema works slowly enough that it's only a gentle breeze.

"If you want to wait for it to dry before you weigh it you can do that. If you're in a hurry you can trust me about how much of the weight is water. I have a scale inside but we can take it down to the market and use someone else's scale if you'd rather."

Half a pound or two pounds she'll have her fix of caffeinated soon, "I'll just trust you. Oh, Valanda told me to mention she sent me to you. I would've gone down to the market otherwise." And here's fifty rings.

She encloses the bowl. And, right, she needs precise scales to measure out a safe amount of caffeine. But that can wait. She goes back to Valanda.

"So, you wanted to talk politics and law?"

"Yeah. Mostly about how I think that baking slavery into law probably makes for really terrible suffering for quite a lot of people and the world suffers for it."

"That's probably true but I'm not sure what you want from me besides a ward."

"You said if people realize my world exists it might cause a war?"

"Yeah. Having more than one independent country causes wars. I guess it's lucky for us if you can't get back."

"I think having more than one independent country might be worth the occasional war as long as it's not a nasty, horrible, drawn-out war. If there's just one country, it's incredibly difficult for any of the rules to ever change again. And it's possible for states to coexist without war. There are countries that haven't had a single war, ever. They seceded peacefully and everything."

"How old is the oldest state that hasn't had a single war?"

"That's probably... Harrinila. They're pretty small, maybe two million people, but have been around peacefully for at least 600 years."

"Are they in some very defensible and not very useful mountains somewhere? Does anyone want their territory?"

"I'm pretty sure people want the territory? It's coastal and flat. They have an army, I'm sure. They're kind of allied with a bunch of other small states in the same area? They formed when a bigger country in the area lost a war badly enough that it stopped existing at all and - fragmented."

"Allied? What exactly does that mean for them?"

"All the small countries promise to back each other up if anyone declares war on any of them, but not if any of the small countries declare war on someone else. Plus, like, tax and trade and law enforcement agreements I think?"

"So they're as strong as a large country defensively and only as strong as a small country offensively. But aren't there any large countries that want to attack all of them? Can't someone, I don't know... you don't have knowledge magic, so couldn't someone trick most of the countries in the alliance into thinking Harrinila attacked some other country so that other country could 'retaliate' and conquer Harrinila without the other countries in the alliance helping Harrinila fight back? Why hasn't that happened?"

"I guess they have, uh, special ways for the leaders to talk to each other and send trusted messages? And it's more complicated than that, that's the history book version."

"It's possible you could avoid having an immediate war but I wouldn't want to count on that. I don't know how to send you home anyway, so it's a moot point."

"I want to do something. Every single child in the world a slave..."

"It's not illegal to own a slave and not use magic on them, just dangerous and stupid. You could get really rich and buy up some land and make a nice fenced-in place to keep children and then buy as many as you want and keep them there."