Including the visitor.

"Augh!"

There's a thump from inside the wagon. Then the sound of something small falling and a child's voice also going 'ahh!'

"- who's there," she says, wobbling unsteadily toward the cart.

Sudden silence. After a moment he rethinks it and says, "Don't go outside!"

"- why?"

"The thing that ate Jervis is probably still close. I'm trying to open his gun box."

"- can I see?"

He pushes the fabric covering of the wagon aside. He hefts the case upright with a grunt of effort- It's thick, solid iron with a very sturdy looking set of latches and locks, about three feet long.

"D'you have the key?"

"No. I know how to use a key. I'm not stupid. He had it on his belt."

He frowns and looks between Pelape and the pile of glowy rocks a few times.

"Anything that'd work as a lockpick, bit of wire or anything?"

She doesn't recognize them?? Or is choosing to ignore them for some reason??

He digs around for what he dropped- An iron nail. "This."

"Might work." Is it bent at all.

It's a little bent. He sets it down on a crate and shuffles backwards rather than allow a close approach.

"I can't know your language for very long by the way."

Pick pick pick. She has no practical experience with this but she watched a video after seeing a lockpick hobbyist on Oddball Blogs. "How long? How do you know it at all?"

"Maybe an hour a day?"

And, blue crystals. Obviously. He used a blue shard, once, a little piece of treasure worth almost as much as hid parents's house, on languages in order to understand a German textbook. Except she doesn't know. What kind of adult doesn't know about the crystals?? Maybe he can keep them all after all... But no, that just leaves him still stranded and unable to eat all of them in time.

He's not even at the limit for absorbing magic right now. He wisely saved some of his tolerance for later.

"Okay. What was it that ate your friend?"

"I think it used to be a mountain lion."

Also: Not his friend. Also also: The nail isn't really cutting it.

It's not like the secret will keep for that long. Better to avoid looking too shifty in front of adults.

"We might have to use a red crystal to open it. I've been trying to think about magic that helps in multiple ways."

"The crystals are - magic?"

"Yeah. I dunno where you're from... You hold them and think about what magic you want and you get an idea if it's possible. And then if you want, no more crystal and you have magic. You can only do so much at once or it makes you sick and kills you. You gotta be smart about it. Also they're worth a fortune."

"There are piles and piles of them here - why a red one, what's different about them -"

"Red is like. Physical things? Sudden things? Green is more... Slow. And blue is like thinking things. I only used a little green one to make myself need less water so far. Until I could think of a plan."

"How many can someone absorb over how much time?"

"I dunno. I read about it in a book once. It said it takes a year to fully reset but didn't say how much is too much. You're not going to turn on me once we escape, right?"

Of course she'll say 'no' but people's faces and manners can tell him how sincere they are. Sometimes.

"No? I have no idea what planet I'm on, why would I antagonize literally anyone here."

......Hmmmm. Acceptable.

"So to open the gun case maybe one of us should get the ability to feel and move small things. That are close to us. Instead of magic to open locks generally. So it's useful more than once."

"And it'll have to be small things because general telekinesis would be too much?"

"The more limits you put on a thing the less it costs. There's math but I can't really remember much of it. I got kicked out of the bookstore."

"...what parts of the math can you remember?"

"Um, for telekinesis specifically they had some people do different things with it, and did math... Volume... No, distance outside of you is squared... I mean, proportional to the squared... I think that means multiplied twice? Um... Force amount is linear. Duration and recharge are logarithmic but I don't know what a logarithmic is."

"...well, the language magic must be good if it's translating it anyway. Do you remember it for any other things at all?"

"I'm THINKING... I think it said you need about five cubic [inches*] of red to be twice as strong as an average man but only three to lift twice as much. Because you're also lifting yourself... I can't really remember much and I hate it. I wish I could have-"

Stolen that book. Adults HATE stealing, don't mention it. 

"It said that it's smarter for soldiers to get magic that makes them better at using guns than just being strong or tough. Good eyes and steady hands and a power to make the bullets magic. It said... There was a long list of different kinds of powers but I can't remember any of the numbers. You can ask the crystals though. It doesn't actually happen unless you go, yes I definitely want this."

*Not translated

...okay. She picks up a red crystal.

This red crystal is full, it helpfully informs her.

He will go over and poke a red one, too.

"We should write everything down before we actually do it. There's only one chance. There's not much water left but plenty of food. Also the donkey." Said animal has gone to sleep in a corner. It doesn't look too healthy.

"Is there a reason we're trying to get something that will open the guns instead of something that will let us directly kill the thing that used to be a mountain lion?"

"I'm worried it won't be enough. Since it has magic too. It was invisible."

...nod.

"What are the other colors?"

"Red, green, blue... White and black... Orange? Yellow. Purple. I haven't counted these yet."

"No, I mean, what do they do?"

"I don't know, they're rare. Red, green, and blue are the most common. I read that white and black together can let you make magic things. Oh, yellow is healing and purple can give you a pocket dimension."

Are there any of those around or just the common ones?

There's a couple dozen of each primary color, four little white ones and three ones that somehow radiate black, as if black was a color, and one lonely yellow.

...Okay, red jewel. Teekay is good but with the constraints in question maybe what she wants is transmutation, will it sell her that?

It can do transmutation! What kind of transmutation!

The more constraints the better, right? What about - identified elements only, so she'll be able to turn the steel in the lock to oxygen, or get water, which she knows to be H2O, out of the presumable silicon in random rocks, but if the rock doesn't have silicon in it she'll have to guess again. Does that make it cheaper - she only needs about half an inch of range away from her fingertips to get through the lock, maybe less, that and speed.

Making it element-to-element is a good start. Half-an-inch range is also a good start. It'll still be pretty darn slow if she wants to be able to do it continuously. Several minutes for a fingernail-sized patch is the most this red crystal could do.

"You're asking it about kinds of magic now, right?"

"Yes." That's not great. More specific, more specific - what if she affects crystal structures in particular, is that small enough, just nudging molecules into or out of alignment -

That is a LOT more efficient. She could do that fairly quickly with a red crystal, if it's not going to be rearranging ionic or subatomic bonds, nearly as fast as she could swipe a finger over things.

(...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."

"Math things? And what do you remember about how many it's safe to use, how many have you had..."

"There was a newspaper story about a guy who could multiply and divide and add up any numbers in his head really really fast after using a white crystal. He was a banker, I think? ...I only used one. I think probably about ten is safe?"

....Pelape checks the condition of her pocket everything.

It's in her pocket. It's not broken. It's got 84% charge.

"Does this look like anything you have on this planet?" she asks, holding it up, pressing her finger to the reader to go from splash screen to apps.

"It looks like magic."

"Okay."

...white gem and a red gem. Can she get one or both of them to keep her pocket everything working and connect it to the internet. Can she aim her whole planet at finding this place.

"...What is it instead of magic?"

A decent chunk of red and a teeny tiny bit of white can totally give her the ability to charge her pocket everything!

This much white definitely cannot give her the ability to make the pocket everything connect to her internet!

"It's electricity and - advanced technology, like, the guns had to be invented, this also had to be invented. I didn't invent it, everyone has them where I'm from. What happens if you use only part of a gem?"

"I want to learn about it when we're not trying to not die! ...It gets dimmer and you can use it later."

"I don't know that much, unfortunately, but I'm hoping I can keep it working and I can show you stuff. How does partly using a gem work with the limit on how many you can have? Do all colors count the same?"

"...Dunno but I'd guess they count partially to the limit? It's not like, poof, you touched the wire and you're dead now. It's 'progressive'. And dunno but I'd guess they count the same?"

"Are there symptoms as you take more?"

"It hurts."

"So if it doesn't hurt I probably have room for more? What's our - destination, now that your - purchaser - is dead, is there somewhere you want to go, what are we likely to run into on the way."

"...Dunno. California is west. And Mexico is south. And I think Salt Lake City is north? There's desert and mountains."

"What do you know about those places? You'd - have work translating, in California, right? Do you want to continue that way?"

"I don't know. I'm scared. ...Jervis got these crystals from a hiding spot and maybe someone will come looking for them. Lots of people are moving to California because it's big and empty and the government said you can have five acres if you're going to farm. Salt Lake City has Mormons. I don't know much about Mexico. There was a war? I don't want to go east."

"What's a Mormon?"

"Some kind of religion? People don't like them much in the East. I think because they say you can get married twice...? They seemed stuffy but not evil to me."

"People usually can't get -? Not important.

"There are - two general approaches I could try here. One is that I could load up on powers that should help us get to California or Salt Lake City, whichever, and focus on - living out the rest of my life here, getting you set up safe somewhere with or without me along.

"The other is that I can try to figure out powers that will let me contact my planet. But even if I tell them exactly where we are, with pictures of the stars at night and all, they will not have a great way to get here.

"Or I could just try to work out how to get a power to go between the planets myself."

"...It sounds like you want one of those more than the other."

"I don't love the prospect of spending the rest of my life on a planet where a pocket everything looks like magic and people sell children. My planet has many deficiencies but those aren't among them. But I don't know how likely it is that I can hold enough magic to get in touch, let alone travel there, and - I'll pretty much immediately lose control of the situation, if I bring them in."

...Oh, that doesn't sound good at ALL.

"...I think 'buying' me isn't quite right... The President made slavery illegal when they beat the Greybacks actually, so it was more like a bribe or paying bail..."

"That's... slightly reassuring, sure."

He clutches his forehead and groans in frustration.

"Even if you're the only one with magic? Since your planet doesn't have any? They fall from the sky sometimes and people are always trying really hard to go get them."

"...yeah. I think even if I'm the only one who starts with magic. Unless I handle everything with too much paranoia for it to even be useful."

...Hmmmmm so maybe HE needs to be the one who can go between planets. So he can get away if he has to.

"It could turn out totally fine. I just wouldn't be able to make sure of it. I'm not important on my planet at all. No number of powers can make me immune to everything that would go wrong for me if I got into a power struggle with the governments of the major countries on Amenta."

"There's always someone in charge telling everyone what to do and it's always terrible for whoever's not in charge," he sulks.

"That's a little more cynical than I tend but I can see how you'd have wound up with that attitude."

"I've used up about half of my translating for today. By the way."

"Is it per time or per - sentence - I should maybe get a similar power anyway, nobody else on the planet'll speak Anitami..."

"It seems to be mostly per meaningful information? If I learn part of a language it starts getting cheaper."

"...huh.

"On the assumption that we're going to travel to California, what do we need - was the guy really traveling without any food or water by the time you got stuck here? Is there a place he planned to resupply? - I don't know if I can eat food from this planet, I should maybe leave room to get a power for that if I have to..."

"There's food in this box. Water's too heavy to haul across the desert, he said. He could pull water outta the air, like rain. Even desert air there's not much but some."

"How many people have magic, about?"

"Not too many. Maybe... One twentieth? And most of those have one gem's worth. They're just a little strong or tough, or can start fires, or kinda smarter than before. They got lucky and found one, or bought it off someone who needed money more than magic. They're worth a lot of money. More than a house. Maybe not more than a really BIG house. Who wouldn't want magic?"

"Right, I just didn't know how rare the gems were. There are sure a lot of them in once place here."

"Yeah... I'm really surprised Jervis had so many. He got them from a cave in the grand canyon. They were already in the box. He did say he wandered a lot, and in places other people don't usually go. I'm... I'm really mad at him actually! For being so STUPID! He had so much magic! He should have beat the mountain lion!"

"Did it - sneak up on you guys, or -"

"He went off alone somewhere and told me to stay here. He did that sometimes. And then I heard a scream a while later and I looked and I saw him running and fighting the thing, it turned visible when it bit, and then, and then I hid."

"Maybe he got all these gems by swiping them from animal dens, if some animals collect them and don't necessarily use them on turning invisible."

"Maybe." Sniff. "Ummmm. I forgot what we were talking about."

"What we need to get to California. He was relying on magic for water? How many days' worth of food do we have assuming I can eat it?"

Thinking face.......

"I think twenty four days. And yeah, he used magic for water."

"Do you know if he was planning to stop anywhere?"

Headshake.

"Dunno. ...There might be a few people near Lake Mead? And I heard they're building railroad tracks to California, but I'm not sure where..."

Actually, if he digs around a bit... Yep, here's a paper map.

"We're here, near the Grand Canyon..."

"And... how long is a mile."

"...It takes about twenty minutes to walk?"

"I'm probably going to need a gem to be able to... walk. I'm not very good at it."

"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."

"It does seem useful, if we have a container suitable for an overnight amount of water."

Gem, can she keep this amount of basic machine quality translation but also gain the ability to trade some duration for "footnotes" on anything that is particularly hard to machine-translate?

Sure, that works, Blue says.

(White chimes in that it can help with that, more cheaply! And save a chatlog.)

"I could dump out the whiskey keg?"

Oh it's being helpful! That's so cute. ...how much more cheaply.

"Alcohol has calories in it... but I have no alcohol tolerance and I'm guessing you don't either?"

"Not whiskey. It's really strong."

(Mostly it's that all the gems she's touching react at once when she considers a magic.)

Using, enh, maybe a tenthish of a white gem and 2/3 of the blue will get her the same thing as before, plus historical log and footnotes-style capability for at least a few times a day.

"What's the approximate relative value of these gems, is it just - their rarity, as reflected in the ones that are here, or is it more complicated?"

"I think orange yellow purple and sky-blue are more expensive? I don't think you can just go to the store and buy one. Oh, I remembered sky-blue exists and is different from blue but I don't remember what it does."

"Okay, but if I can do something for less than ten percent of a white one or for about a third of a blue one...?"

"...Probably the white one?"

Nod.

She does not need the chatlog, white gem, but she'll take its footnotes and the blue gem's language assistance.

Once more, the power stretches and twists and flows. Once more the feeling of exercising something immaterial swells. Is it stronger than before? A bit tenser, a bit more strained? Hard to tell.

"I want to go ahead and get the filter magic. But after that we still need to deal with the mountain lion. Also green can help us be okay with less food, or blue can help forage, I know some wild plants, or red make us stronger and faster. But there's still the animal. Unless it went back home..."

"Wasn't the point of getting the gun box open that we can shoot it?"

"Yeah but... Are you sure you can hit it the first time? And you need a way to see it. There wouldn't be time to reload..."

"I'm not positive I can hit an invisible monster, admittedly. I've spent time at a gun range but not a lot of it and the targets were visible."

"Invisibility breaking magic? Or seeing invisible things magic? That's really... Only useful today, though."

"...echolocation?"