"What do you already know about how living things work, we look enough alike that you're probably made of cells and have a genome and stuff."

"Maybe not that much. I tried to read a lot of books but I don't remember that much from them. I knew about cells. It was in a newspaper. I know about germs."

"Well, at least on Amenta, contagious diseases are caused by germs of two general kinds - sometimes alive things that are often just one cell each, sometimes things that are almost alive but don't do all the things living things do, and, again on Amenta, there are cells in a person's body that are specialized in finding and attacking those. It's possible you could get a kind of narrow cell-growth power that would work reasonably well for healing and also let you give someone extra disease-fighting cells if theirs didn't seem to be doing the job but I'd be a little nervous about both aspects of that power..."

"...I think when people spend green on not getting sick it might be helping the soldier cells? Or maybe it just makes it hard for germs to live... I can get it so it can make more of certain kinds of cells but it'd take more blue, so I can see the cells I want to copy..."

"You'd have to be able to see them? Huh..."

"I don't really know anything about kinds of cells."

"Is it useful? Bearing in mind that I know only about a different biosphere."

"Probably? Especially if it can help with being sick. There are lots of diseases."

So she can ramble on a bit more about what she knows about biology.

This is really interesting stuff! Even if it's maybe wrong because of alien reasons.

...Why did an alien show up, anyway? It's weird.

...Eventually, he will acquire the healing power, with corresponding cell-seeing ability.

"Oh... It doesn't hurt, but it's not going away fast..."

"Coming up on your limit, you think?"

"Yeah. Umm... Let's add up all the crystals we used? So we know."

She nods and assembles her empties.

And the math comes in...

Nicholas:

Translation - 1 blue (It was almost a year ago now, he explains, so it doesn't really count against current capacity. Apparently he lucked out and found one in the woods, and used it himself instead of his parents definitely taking it for themselves.)

General calorie/water reduced needs - 1 green

Filter Sphere - 0.7 blue, 0.25 black

Healing + cell-seeing - 1 yellow, 0.3 blue

Total: 1 green, 1 blue, about a quarter of a black, 1 yellow.

Pelape:

1 red - Crystal structure adjusting power

1 green - Dyspraxia fix (above average coordination now)

.66 blue + .25 white - Machine translation + TLnotes

.33 green + .1 white - Skin/everything electrical power

Total: 1 red, 1 green, about a third of another green, two thirds-ish of a blue, and about a third of a white.

Counting the rest of the gems, there remain:

23 red

25 green, and one 2/3 full green

34 blue, and one 1/3 full blue

4 black, and one 3/4 full black

3 white, and one 2/3 white

"...so if the one you used a year ago doesn't count toward your limit now it would seem I have more capacity than you. Is that because you're a kid or because I'm an alien?"

"Dunno. This is a LOT of magic for everyone except super rich people."

"I got that impression, yeah. We're going to be huge targets for thieves if we let on."

"Maybe we have like, two, that thieves can take and think they got all of them, and the rest are... Sewn into clothes and bags? Buried in the food box?

"Thieves might take those things too. Not that I have a better idea."

"And they glow, which makes them easy to find... We could just bury them somewhere again and come back in a year."

"We could bury them in a few places, as we go."

"......I've been thinking...... I think the whiskey is poisoned? Jervis never drank any until yesterday. And then he did, and then he seemed real quiet, and then he lost a fight that he should'a won."

"...why would he have had and drunk poisoned whiskey?"

"What if someone poisoned it so they'd get him and then they could come steal his magic stash?"

"...seems roundabout but I don't know the circumstances involved."