"...I suppose you can try that." He sighs. "But if you're disrupting the rest of the class I'll have to ask you to change back." 

"Okay." Mariga parks behind a desk in the back row, on the far side from the door so nobody will need to squeeze past her. The desk isn't quite at the ideal height, which is annoying for about five seconds before she realizes she can just shorten her legs a bit. She doesn't do anything she expects to disrupt class, just stands there taking notes.

Class is somewhat disrupted anyway by people turning around to stare at her, but the teacher aggressively ignores the distraction and goes on with the lesson as normal, and they settle down after five minutes or so.

Mariga runs out of charge at some point in the middle of that class. 

Mariga stretches her charge out as far as she can with careful note-taking, then pulls the chair she had pushed aside back over and collapses into it. Hopefully everyone was done staring and doesn't see her wince. There's a gap in her notes while she deals with the crash, but by the end of the period she's back on an even keel and slowly charging again.

The teacher, either considerately or coincidentally, refrains from calling on her while she's recovering from the transformation. 

A few people are surprised at the end of class to see her back in human form, and pepper her with questions on the way to the next class. 

"Did you turn back on purpose?" "What does it feel like to change shape?" "Is it weird having four legs?"  

Conversation is a welcome distraction, and by the end of class she's mostly got her equilibrium back.

"No, I ran out of charge. Eventually I hope to be able to stay transformed all day."

"Changing doesn't feel like anything but the shapes feel different. The different limbs, obviously, but also the magiform feels more . . . present? Like I'm getting my senses directly with less anything else in between."

"Honestly having four legs feels more sensible than having two. It's easier to balance, and easier to stand still for long periods, and just generally nice."

There are a few more questions, but then they have to get moving. 

The rest of the school day passes uneventfully other than Mariga recovering a bit more than a third of her charge. 

Mariga's new routine ends up pretty similar to her old one, but she flies to and from school and spends the time thus saved on magic practice and robot design. It won't be long before she has a fully mechanical magiform and a better understanding of what she can do with enchanting objects.

Enchanting objects gets easier and easier as she refines her magiform and gains more charge to work with, and also as Mariga gets a better idea of what she's doing. The default thing her magic does to an object—as she discovered with her initial attempt to do unspecified magic to a blade of grass—is to make it glow, blue unless she specifies another colour. That remains one of the easiest changes to make, alongside changing the colour. Other properties, like texture, smell, or rigidity, are more difficult. So far, all her enchantments eventually fade, but they last longer than they did at first. The magic seems to think she could figure out how to do permanent enchantments, but it's out of reach for now. 

Another thing that's not quite within her reach just yet is programmable enchantments, ones designed to change after they're put in place. It feels like there must be a trick to it, a way to make them stick without needing a top-up of charge every time, but it's eluding her for now. 

And then one evening a large ball of swirling ice-blue energy appears in the middle of her room, spits out a man, and vanishes. 

The man is dressed in blue robes, in a style which she'll recognise from history lessons or art museums as Ancient Etrelatan, the antique culture that dominated in this part of the world before modern Azama and its neighbours. He's also just collapsed on her bedroom floor.

...and he might have had wings a moment ago? 

Mariga is doing her homework in human form and not at all expecting this!

"Aaaaa!" It takes her a moment to realize that the unexpected thing is a collapsed person, but then she adds "Oh no, are you alright?" She bends over him and tries to see if he's breathing, brain a fog of Oh no and What.

He is indeed breathing! Also groaning and, after a moment, trying to sit up.

He blinks at Mariga and says something in what's probably Ancient Etrelatan. 

She gives him some space, such as there is between her bed, her desk, and her bookshelf. "Do you speak Makazo?"

The man levers himself up to lean on his elbows and says something else, tone wry and self-deprecating in a way that suggests the words are something along the lines of 'Yeah, I let myself in for that one.'

He looks around the room with a confused expression, as though he's never seen anywhere like it and isn't sure how he feels about that yet. 

Possibly it is time for charades. She points at herself and says "Mariga", then pulls up a map of the continent and points at where they are on it.

"...Marel," he introduces himself absently, leaning forward to peer at the map in fascination. After some squinting at coastlines and muttering to himself, he points to the same location with a nod. 

So, if she understands him right he's where he was trying to go. Which leaves, given his clothing and speech, the question of when. She goes over the words for numbers on her fingers and then tries to tell him what year it is.

He nods, seeming unsurprised, and gives her a number that's lower by a few thousand years. 

Wow! That's quite a long time. She pulls up a translation site on her wrist comp and sets it up to translate back and forth between Makazo and ancient Etralatan, and says "I expect you have many questions. I do too."

"...Did the magic come back?" 

"Came back? I didn't know there was any before a hundred years ago. But, uh, yes, magic exists now."

"Good." 

He thinks for a few seconds, and then asks something that comes through translation as: "Are my people remembered? Our words survive; did our deeds?" 

It transpires that the easiest way for Mariga to answer this is to show Marel the SimpleWorld page on the Ancient Etrelatans. 

The Ancient Etrelatan civilisation was dominant in the Etrelatan region (covering parts of modern-day Azama, Gidran, Parabi and Lateria) from around the 14th century BCE to the start of the Common Era (0 CE).^[1][2][3] It was preceded by the Erenian civilisation and succeeded by the Etrelatan Dark Age.^[4][5]

...renowned for their art, culture, and philosophy...

...considered the basis of modern ideals of state governance...often called the "cradle of civilisation"...

...was in this period that worship of the Seven first became widespread, replacing or subsuming older religions in the area.^[21] Most of the myths and legends about the gods, as well as the majority of surviving religious texts, originate from this period or shortly afterward.^[22][23]

Mariga lets him wiki-walk on her laptop until he feels sufficiently caught up. She's curious whether anything he looks at turns out to be inaccurate or distorted; it's not often you get to hear a perspective on ancient history from someone who was actually there.

That would probably be historically fascinating, but right now Marel is making interesting faces at a page about the Seven Gods. It's written from a modern perspective, as the worship of the Seven is still the dominant religion in Azama and its neighbours, but the core of the religion hasn't changed much since Marel's time. There's no obvious reason why he should be staring at a list of the names of the Seven, a string of emotions passing across his face too quickly to decipher. 

...Jurah the Judge, Emarelin the Healer, Banora and Hanora the Two-Faced God, Anadi the Smith, Colasen the Soldier, Zhaene the Stargazer and her consort Thadanor the Stormbringer.^[3] This list is widely...