(...He grabs a couple of red, green, and blue, and pockets them.)

How much range can she get on that at what tradeoff for speed?

A few inches of range will make it more like a faucet filling a cup in speed. A few feet of range would make it like squeezing a tube of toothpaste in speed. Dozens of feet of range would make it dead slow again. She could get a pool of bond-adjusting magic that will fill at her maximum speed even when she's not actively using it and can be used much faster by trading away a bit of speed or range. The size of the pool depends on how much is traded away.

That sounds good probably and they are in kind of a hurry and she doesn't know if the alien kid can use a gun or if she'll be able to figure it out pronto.

Nomf.

Poof! 

Or really, more like sluuuurp or shiiing. It feels.... Warm. A little straining in some way halfway between a stretch and difficult math.

She has a new mental affordance now! It is empty, and slowly filling.

(Of course she just goes ahead and poofs magic into place instead of planning it out like he suggested. He never expected anything else, really.)

She goes and touches, not the lock, but the place where it's threaded through the crate. Is there enough to, in an atom-thin plane, "melt" the metal?

She has a lot of trouble getting it atom-thin. There's a bit of feedback from the bonds as she shifts them- It sort of feels like they're settling right back in if she tries to go 'as thin as possible'. But applying a bit more oomph and thickness will part the metal, especially where the surface ends up a little rough.

The kid is watching her raptly.

"Did you pick 'metal shaping'?"

"No, crystal-structure manipulation." Box: open. "Do you know how to operate these, I've handled guns but only on another planet."

"I watched Jervis do it. Here, you do it like this- This bag here is full of gunpowder-"

They're low tech by Amentan standards. There's three shotguns, one rifle, and two revolvers.

"Is metal secretly a crystal? Like salt? Is that why some iron is good and some is bad?"

"A lot of solids are secretly crystals. I think I'll be able to freeze water too. Break rocks. Not sure what you mean about iron being good or bad." She has the most practice with rifles, still not a lot but more. She gets it loaded.

"You have to let iron cool the right way or it gets too soft, or too brittle. That's why blacksmiths have barrels of water or oil for dipping hot things into. Water dipping makes them harder but sometimes they just break instead. Oil dipping is safer... Because things expand when they get hot, it must mess up the crystals to cool down too slowly! I love when something finally makes sense."

He pauses.

"We should get as much magic as we think we can before going out. And work together."

"Sure. While we can still talk what's the most important stuff to communicate?"

"Are you a doctor? I think healing magic probably works better if you know doctor things. And we need to have it in case we het hurt. After we get the animal we'll need water and to know where to go and maybe I'm forgetting something... I really hope we can get the mountain lion. Jarvis was kind of stupid but he mostly wasn't evil."

"I'm not a doctor. I know a little stuff. How did you get here, where were you going?"

"He bought me from the sheriff in Colorado Springs and was going to California. So I could talk to the Chinese people."

"- he bought you?"

"Well... He paid them a bunch of money and then they let me out of the jail and said to go with him."

"Are you not a child of your species, you look like a child but I don't think I'm your species, what were they doing putting you in jail?"

"...I stole a book. And food. And I accidentally let someone's horse run away."

"And they didn't send you home to your parents?"

-Nope, shutting up now.

"- sorry. That's not important right now. Repeat which things all the colors do so I can write it down this time."

He focuses deep to try and remember all the stories.

"...Red does sudden things. Changes. Fast things. Heat and motion and cutting and changing. Green does... Endurance things, like make you not need as much water, or make you tough, or make you need less sleep or get tired less. It also can make other magic last longer? Blue does thinking and sensing things. Like language. Or seeing better. And also stuff that's hard to categorize, I think it can make you harder to poison? But not get sick? White does... Things to other magic mostly. Or math things? And talking to people far away. And black does being tough and sturdy and helping make magic things. Yellow does healing. Orange does... Attacking, I think? Purple does pocket dimensions. There's another kind of blue but I have no idea what it does. I guess orange and purple don't matter, there aren't any here."