"The... ones. Those." She points to the illustration.

"Good, you can see them. That'll be helpful."

The lesson continues! More about electricity than chemistry now. He hands over another hundred-twenty at some point.

Transistors: Are this thing! The key point is that they're a switch. Whether there is a positive charge on this part, allows or denies flow of electricity through that part. With a lot of these in complicated sequence you can make a calculator.

Here's how he tried to build this transistor. Here's what it's supposed to be structured like. "I could have a structure mage make this, but that's not fast enough. I want to make them by the 1728, by the 20736 or more, at a time. There are ways to do it, and this is the first step. So the question is, what exactly is wrong with it? Then I can try to figure out, how did I fuck up making it?"

She borrows his pen and paper and starts drawing a diagram of what he actually made. She adds helpful labels, if "WRONG" is helpful.

"I'm not sure if those are all important, I don't know how different it can be and still work."

"Kind of all of it is important. So, looks like the, uh, phototreating is at fault here... It bled through and made a messy crater instead of a neat trench. Or I baked it too long, maybe. What about this one?" He presents his second attempt.

She doesn't take quite as long this time to draw it.

"Doesn't look any better to me."

"Eh. Well, I'll figure it out sooner or later. I did expect this to be hard, but it'll be much better than the relays I'm using now - relays are about a quarter-inch across at the absolute minimum, and as you can see transistors are much tinier. I have one of a different type of transistor attempt, which also is not working correctly, and then I want to try a little something in the field of cryptography..."

Diagram; Transistor.

New drawing. "I hear you have to fail twelve times before you can make anything new."

"Sounds about right. I'll get it sooner or later. I have cash reserves and relays until then."

How about some crypto experiments? Mostly he's trying to figure out if knowledge mages can decrypt something if it's never shown in plaintext and the key is kept secret.

"Nope."

Doesn't mean she can't wrack her brain to figure his cipher out but magic won't do it.

He laughs. "I'll give you 1728 rings if you can decode that by next week and tell me how you did it."

There's about a 0.04% chance she'll be able to brute-force it unless he accidentally revealed something. Vampire brain for the win.

She thinks about it.

"If you're waiting for a hint you'll be waiting a while. Also, I think we're done for the day."

"Can I keep it to reread while I'm working on it?"

"Sure. Want a lift back to camp real quick or are you gonna walk?"

"I could use a lift!"

"Then a lift you shall receive. Free of charge, even."

He winks and picks her up and whooshes back, a little slower this time.

"If your inventions don't work out you can just give people joyrides!"

"Ah, but I know myself well enough that I can already tell I would find that dreadfully tiresome after a while."

"That's a shame, you move fast and you're fun to hang onto."

They reach Valanda's camp. He sets her down.

"Oh, I am? That's news to me. Most people back home find vampires terrifying."

"How many people do you think I've met who couldn't have killed me if they wanted to and the law would let them?"

"No, not quite what I meant. It's more the fact that the government back home can't do anything about vampires if we decide to kill and steal - as my compatriots so often do - that makes us so scary. I considered trying to fix that, but I probably would have died trying."

"If you've showed me your top speed then even if you somehow got through all of us at once you couldn't make it to the mainland before the imperial government's spies noticed you and with the warning they'd have they would kill you. If you weaved around enough to make aiming hard there would be collateral damage but you couldn't escape. And you would have to kill almost everyone here for the imperial government to need to intervene because most of us stand a chance against you if we're fast. I'm pretty much the only one who'd be helpless. Anyway good governments make for good neighbors and I'm really glad you're here, I like you a lot."

"...Well, now I'm wondering about ways to pull it off a little bit. I don't dispute that the American government would probably be 'better' if it had the ability to deal with vampires and witches. I like this place a lot better than where I came from. Can't say much about the people yet, to be perfectly honest."

"No? A ring if you'll tell me what you don't like about us?"