(She's going to get out. Maybe if she builds an unstable destructive construct, but paused on a sufficiently long timer, intending very hard to defuse it? ...She'll try that later.)

She goes, and returns, and doesn't shout or rage at all.

Off he goes, thinking of what he wants to use her magic for if he can.

She pays very close attention to the 'how magic works' section of the video if it loops back there.

No loops yet. There's a lot of content on this thing.

Then she waffles between watching it and taking notes and reviewing vocabulary she noted earlier and adding controls for her little chair and hate/frustration/fear/despair and working on a real calculator, not the glorified abacus she threw together already, which is going to take a while.

Valanda comes back after a while with nuts and dried fruit and all the imperial laws of the Hari Empire. He offers Walta all of it.

"Can you tell me what your magic can do?"

"Bathroom first?" She can use the time to compose herself and invent a plausible lie... She needs to test this. "I-" don't need to go very badly. "-Really need to use it."

Okay, so a plausible way to make herself seem incompetent maybe??? Aaah.

"Yeah, go ahead." She's probably noticed by now. Might not have but probably has.

"Okay..." Deep breath. "Constructs are made of light. They take a long time. I tell them instructions very carefully while touching them. They can move, they can change shape, they can be hot or cold, they can change into illusions and back to being solid, they can tell if something is touching them, they can tell things to other constructs."

She does a passable job of sounding excited to explain this instead of resentful.

(They can get squeeze air down and then suddenly fail, exploding, accidentally. Or deliberately. They can sometimes explode all by themselves in messy tangles of twisting force. They can suffocate or crush someone. They can slice someone in half even if the edges act like they're blunt, with enough force...)

"Are constructs the only kind of magic you can use?"

"Yes."

"If you're trying to keep a construct solid and someone presses against it or hits it how much force does it take to break it?"

Shrug. "Iiii don't know exactly." To exact precision - yes, that worked. Sort of. "You can test them I guess?"

"Have you ever tested them? Do you know of an amount of force that's definitely enough? Do you know of an amount that's not enough?"

Shrug. "It depends? They break sometimes. You can stand on one, usually."

"Can they tell things to other constructs that are far away?"

She doesn't even have to dodge this one, "No. They have to touch."

"How big can a construct be? How small can a construct be?"

She waves confusedly to the ones she already made. "I have to reach it? And too small, they break?" ('not very bright' is surprisingly hard to pull off when you already learned a language pretty darn quickly and can't lie.)

"You probably don't know enough words yet... I need to know about immortality. If you get older and older then your hair turns white and then you die, if you're human. That's called aging. Can your magic prevent aging?"

Sigh. "No. Can do-" Don't mention helping doctors, don't give anything away you don't have to, "Not enough words. Not aging."

"Illness? Illness is the thing where..." Valanda imitates a sneeze and a cough. "Can you heal illness?"

"No." Not with constructs. "Almost no life things."

"Almost? What life things can you do?"

Whoops. "-Cold things, hot things, cook life, freeze life. Cage, keep animal in. Like that. Not - not do thing to life, do thing that do thing to life."