If she won't be interrupting them, yeah, she'd like that.

"It wouldn't be an interruption!" The younger of the two guys says. "We're, uh, trying to figure out a problem and taking a break or talking about it helps sometimes. If you want to talk. Er, if that counts as talking."

She counts it, yeah. What problem are they working on?

"It was making a funny sound and then the pressure development dropped like a rock tossed overboard," the other guy says. "Noise stopped, though. We could take it all apart but it's faster if we figure out what happened."

She could probably help with that if she knew how the engine worked, but it might not be worth their time to explain it to her. Oh well.

"Oh, uh, you might be helpful actually - we call it rubber ducking. Er. I'm not sure why. But when you explain the problem to someone else sometimes that makes it easier to see what's wrong."

Well, sure, she can do that. And maybe her other spell will be useful, too - she can make things, they aren't quite real so they're not good to use as an engine or anything but she can still make a model for them.

"Wait, not quite real - That's awesome but what does it even mean-"

It means stuff like this - she makes a book, opens it up to show them the gibberish inside, turns several pages and shows them how the opening never moves from the center of it.

Some things work better than others, and she can get some use out of a magic engine if she knows how it works, but she has to personally be paying attention the whole time or it stops moving like it should.

"Well it's not like I understand how computers work so this isn't - hmm. The speaking-without-sound thing is even weirder now that I think about it."

It's magic, yeah. It's not a long story exactly but it's a weird one, they don't believe her about it where she's living now.

"I have heard many weird stories and they're usually pretty hard to prove, yeah. Might be better to just get to, uh, talking about engines instead."

Sure. So how's it supposed to work?

Well, hot gas expands. It works like this-

Teddy and the other guy trade off bits of explanations with each other. Teddy hesitantly asks for a model of the rotary chamber after a couple of minutes, to make explaining easier.

She builds as they explain, adding parts as she thinks she has a good enough understanding of them to get it right.

She can't make a rotary chamber without knowing how it works, though.

Well, then, this is how it works, and it spins like this, no that part should be shaped a little more curved, see how it fits against this other thing...

"This is very cool you know."

She definitely knows.

And then there's a rotary chamber, done up in something like colored glass so all the moving parts are visible.

"So, do you think it could be the, uh, air intake here, it could've been vibrating and then snapped off maybe...?"

Technical discussion ensues.

She listens politely and asks questions when she has them. It's pretty obvious that she has a bit of an engineering education already; not enough to contribute, really, but enough to avoid asking questions more annoying than 'what does this term mean'.

Here, the local sort of English rears its head - a lot of the jargon is different. They eventually decide that it's probably the air intake bit, here, but it might be this gear over there instead, which would be bad.

"I'm honestly not sure whether you want to watch us try and open this up."

(She keeps her terminology questions to a minimum, once it's obvious that asking every time she's curious would be obnoxious. They're pointing at things often enough that she can figure most of it out anyway, with a little effort.)

She'd like to see, if they don't mind her sticking around. She can put shields up if it's dangerous or anything.

"Not dangerous, just a bit messy and maybe boring," comments the older guy. "Ye've got all those nice clothes and everything. Mostly you want to work on engines in rags and aprons."

Oh, she can fix her clothes if anything happens to them, it's part of her magic. An apron wouldn't be a bad idea, though -

And now she's wearing an apron in silver cloud-painted denim with shimmery tulle ruffles at the edges, just as fancy as the rest of her outfit.

"...Woah, I didn't catch that bit at first. Do they go away after a while like the other things?"

"Engine, lad. Focus on the engine. Trying to understand that stuff's all but a lost cause anyway."

"But I'm interested!"

She can explain it later, but it's a different part of the magic with different rules, they don't go away until she makes them.