"Oh, I knew someone whose lungs didn't work right. Or at least I knew of them. A green gem fixed them."

"Yeah." She rummages for a green gem.

She knows actually kind of a lot about her balance condition. They had to check that it definitely wasn't genetic, to make sure she'd be able to buy a credit one day if she managed in spite of it to be able to afford one. There is a failure of nervous rhythm when she plans out and executes a gross motor action like walking. Should be around there, brain-region-wise, if that helps. Green gem, can you fix that?

Oh, definitely, green is perfect for this. Bringing her up to solidly above average on [that conceptbundle] is about a third of this green gem.

Nice, nice. There's... yeah, she's not getting out of this situation without needing to be able to walk briskly. Nomf.

There's that weird sideways feeling of strain again. Definitely more exercise-y than painful. And this one is only a third of a gem, so it's less. The green rock dims noticeably in her hand.

"I should maybe get the water thing. But if I make it for filtering stuff generally, like oxygen and nitrogen, or like salt out of water just like water out of air? Mud out of sand? Bugs out of hay and flour? I think that will still work to get water and that sounds like pretty useful magic for all sorts of things."

"...yes, it does, especially if you routinely have bugs in your flour, ew. Let me teach you something quickly in case it helps."

She has, on her pocket everything, a tutorial about Quicksort.

"Understanding that is using too much of my translation I stopped listening. Even though it's really interesting."

"...I can try demonstrating physically with the gems?"

"Maybe?"

He is holding a gem of each color and making contemplative faces. 

"Huh, blue is best for this? Weird. I know about atoms and if I think about moving the atoms, it gets a lot better..."

She has the periodic table on here somewhere!

"Ooh neat..."

So it has to do a little bit of shaking to get things out of other things, like if you had sand mixed with salt and it's all sticky... But the original goal is to get water and it definitely still needs to be able to do that... 

"I think I have a good idea but I'm not sure it's best."

"What's your idea?"

"A magic cloth that I can move around with my mind and only lets some kinds of molecules through. And also it breaks up molecules a little bit to help with that. So I wave it around in the air and water collects on it because water can't go through."

"I'd probably make it bag shaped if I were doing it that way. And you might want to be careful about breaking up molecules, sometimes they can come apart into components you'd rather not have around. But a selectively permeable bag sounds really handy."

"I can always bundle it up into a bag. And since it's magic and not real, maybe it can go through itself. Umm... About breaking molecules, I'm thinking about cleaning sticky things with it. Or rust."

"Maybe what you want is to be able to select one thing at a time to either be able, or not be able, to go through the bag - besides you, you should probably always not go through the bag. So you can say water's the one thing that doesn't go through, and swish it through the air for a while to collect water, or you can say that unoxidized metal is the one thing that does, so you can pass a rusty object through it and it'll come out clean and leave the bag full of rust. I'm worried a cloth won't catch water, though."

"If it's not letting water through, it'll catch water. Maybe it can be one-way, let water in but not out... And it costs less blue if it's just a ball of magic and not a magic cloth with these new ideas... Magic is wicked neat!"

"It is! I think I need a language power to exist on the planet even though you have one, I'm going to work on that." She picks up a blue gem.

Blue gem, can you observe how machine translation on her pocket everything works, and copy that structure, to make this work for more than an hour per day?

It only knows as much about her pocket everything as she does, but it could mimic the general idea - shifting things to one language and back rather than directly imparting meaning into her head?

If that's cheaper than the meaning thing, yes. She can spend some charge looking at recent patch notes for her translation package for an idea of what it's working with, does that help?

It helps a little. And this is overall significantly more efficient than it sounds like the kid's is. She could keep it up for three, four hours a day-ish on one blue gem.

He suddenly declares, "Ooh!" And reaches for a black gem from the cache.

"What's your idea?"

"I remembered something about black. It can make other magic last longer. With some black helping I can set it up and let it sit, like, overnight, to get more water. Or make it follow me."

He touches the black gem. 

"Yeah, it seems like that would work. If that's the best idea."