".....I'm me, not Bruce Wayne. And I can cope. Especially when I'm staying busy. The forests outside the wall are all managed, for wood, but are currently pretty un-crowded, by the way. It being winter, and all. 'S private-ish and relatively close. If you don't wanna go there though, wouldn't blame ya."

"Wouldn't mind going somewhere more private, yeah," she says, in the local tongue once again.  "And it's not like I spawned here, I'm enough used to forests that I don't mind them all that much.  ...Anyway - avoidance is not a healthy coping mechanism.  I say, like a hypocrite."

She disturbs her robe-thing, more of a traveller's cloak than an academic's, just enough to reveal an orange and white tail from the right angle for a moment.

"...To continue swerving around mental potholes. If my information is reliable we can't have kids. Ever. Which I regard as a good thing. Not that I'm going to, say, test it ever. I can't exactly pop down to fucking Ace Hardware," pronounced in English, "or Radio Shack or the local library anymore either but otherwise distraction has worked so far. And they do have libraries here still. I've done courier work. I have giant fucking wings in my werewolf form, which is strange but fun. If tiring. And I made some furniture, and sold it, so that's a viable plan too. Had that as a hobby, I'm pretty sure, before tee em. So I'm in a stable situation overall, I think."

She nods, and puts her notes away with a bit of applied telekinesis as she follows her new friend(?) off to the woods.

"Good to hear that spelled out in so many words.  I'm not sure I explicitly knew that before now, come to think.

"Glad you've got something to live on, too.

"I don't have all that much in terms of earnings, myself; I've been trying to pluck some low-hanging fruit at the intersection of physics and magic, but that means that I've been busy studying above all else.  Though I do help out the nice girl who's been hosting me.

"...By the way, d'you know about how kitsune can smell evil?  Of a specific sort, not just, all evil ever, but there's cursed shit.  Some very cursed shit.  Mostly to do with 'Tirran Empire' ruins - dear gods, why did that even become a thing, we were supposed to have stopped having fucking Empires sometime in our millennium, not...  turn around a squizillion years later and make an Empire from nothing - but cursed shit is like nuclear fallout.  Gets everywhere."

"You mean curse energy? I think we just... Can. There's a lot of it in untrammeled wilds. Best to just go around. And well, perhaps the capitalism has infected me. Career... Careeeeer... Moneyyyyyy..." She affects a zombie groan.

"Yeah, there was some pretty close to where I popped into existence and - well, it's part of the causal chain of why I ended up in this city instead of who-knows-where.  Insert giant dominos meme here.

"...Not gonna lie, the capitalism has also affected me, a bit, though I'm hoping to pull a Bruce Wayne about it once I've made my squigillion dollars."

"Are you trying to make diamonds? I'm thinking about aluminum... It's quite rare here, only relics. I know you have to electrolyze it, not just heat it up..."

"Ooh, aluminum, yeah.  It used to be the fanciest metal, and then just absolutely cratered in price...

"Don't have the slightest damned clue what the rest of that process was, or even its precursor ores, but maybe it's kind of like the thing where you can separate hydrogen and oxygen by electrifying water the right way...

"But diamonds are useful for magic stuff."

"Bauxite. It's... Orangey-reddish. Like desert rock. I distinctly remember delivering some because someone fucked something up and the dust got fucking everywhere... Oh, yes, the magic. It's very strange. I feel like I'm Newton wondering about the apple. Anything persistent does need a lot of diamond, it's quite expensive, I suppose if I were rich enough I could just brute force my airship. I was experimenting with vacuum balloons..."

"Oh cool, you know that.  I knew the name but nothing else.

"...Maybe I did know that, actually.  Fanfic has the most interesting random bits of trivia.

"But I did fail to remember that until now, so it's moot, and hell if I know where you'd find it - I've got a side project of trying to reconstruct the periodic table from the material divination spells but, I do not actually know how that spell works...

"But yeah I'm trying to crash the diamond market, because diamonds are just fancy coal."

"...They did make artificial diamonds, right? I remember something about a diamond cartel... It may well be the most viable shortcut. All good technologies are revolutions, really."

"Oh yeah, and they did it with, like, chemical vapor deposition or some shit rather than just recreating the natural conditions, too, but I've got no chance of getting that to work and I can't do any fancy magic atom-manipulation to go about it some other way, so.  Heat and pressure and carbon it is."

"I suppose that will either work, or it won't... I could take a look if you don't mind, but it might be - a long time of onboarding me. And whatever happened to going off into the woods..." 

Sigh.

"I'd be glad to have your fabrication skills even if and as you might not catch up to me on the magic angle for a while.  I'm thinking I could stand to make some infrared lasers, and then line them up just so - the problem I'm having with trying to put everything in one spell circle would be trivially resolved if I could use multiple spell circles, but I think I'd best spread things out a bit if I'm doing that so there aren't any instant death beams in play.  Or maybe I could just displace the existing heat from the center...  But I kind of want to make laser beams."

...Isn't this the woods?

Well, it's a big city. A really big city, built densely and crowded. They might have to make small talk for a while first to get to the edge.

"Hmm. Magic infrared lasers?"

"Well, yes.  It's not like I can just whip up all the hardware for a non-magical version, and I've only the vaguest idea of how hardware lasers work to begin with, anyway.  ...Wish I had a spectrometer, absorption frequency and all that...

"...I'm trying to think of mechanical or electrical things you could go for and mostly coming up blank.  Fucking, arc lights? I don't know.  There's gotta be something, but if there is, it's eluding me.  And I'm not sure the economy can support massively industrialized production, especially when the planet is still however-much percent remediation site by volume.  Can't have big mines if you're going to have monsters spawning in the middle of them like you're playing Minecraft and forgot to put down torches.  To say nothing of --

"Oh, hell, do people know about heavy metal poisoning - yet?  Still?  What the hell was...  Some flavor of gout?  It was a plot point in a fanfic...  I mean okay more of an aside, but it explained some shit that canon just absolutely didn't bother to explain so it's stuck in my head...  Gods.  I hope I don't have to figure out how to prove that, because I am not a doctor whatsoever.  I don't even know how to distill the horse pee estrogen.  ...The pregnant horse pee estrogen, excuse me.  Even though that shit's much worse in terms of adverse health outcomes because it can give you blood clots.

"...Well okay that just means I'm not a chemist.  But I am also not a pharmacist nor a doctor.  Knowing stuff about sex hormones is like, the one thing I know anything about, and I do that badly because I was not prepared to be separated from the people who actually knew their shit and read the papers and all that...

"...Oh fucking hell we're in an Asiatic culture.  How much do we want to bet there's mercury everywhere it absolutely shouldn't be put.  On top of things like lead paint, and - oh, hell, lead pipes, augh.  ...Gods, I hope the gods have been on top of that...  I'm.  Going to just take a moment and hope they're listening, because I do not want to forget to do anything about this - and if they don't know, they really need to."

And if there's a shrine nearby, she'll be right back, but if not, she's just going to close her eyes and think really hard in a hopefully Illumine-or-Ragni-shaped direction about lead poisoning and - okay she's not really certain about anything other than mercury not having biological use but she's pretty sure that you should basically Not go "supplementing" large quantities of (bioavailable?) metal in human bodies pretty much ever - (she remembers the guy who turned himself blue with colloidal silver, whatever that actually is, and that's a relatively good outcome...) - and also the health hazards of asbestos while she's at it.  ...She doesn't actually know for sure what mesothelioma is but she remembers something about the crystal? structure of asbestos absolutely shredding the lungs...

Oh, hell, and radioactives, too.  Augh.  Though the Tirran Emoire probably had nukes so she hopes the Light Gods already know that radioactivity exists and is generally bad for one's health if not handled extremely carefully, even if she's also going to run off down the 'what is cancer' tree while she's thinking about radiation damage...

Oi, brat. You're worrying too much~ I ate the low hanging fruit already~ Illumine and Ragni know about lead and mercury and cholera~ Your diamonds thing is the most promising thought in that skull probably maybe~

[A magical certainty that this voice is Tamamo, The Fox Goddess, included at no extra charge]

Oh thank goodness, and also Tamamo, she doesn't realize she just said out loud.

"...I think I may need either a moment or a hand, because when a goddess drops surety that the things you had worked yourself up into a panic over were actually all pretty much fine into your head, the adrenaline crash is likely to be - overwhelming, once it hits."

Sorry!  I have an anxiety disorder!  And thank you for telling me!

"Oh, did that 'goddess' say something to you?"

Hahahaha. You both need to lighten up in very different ways. Bored now, wandering off...

"Well, Tamamo just said, and I quote, 'You both need to lighten up in very different ways'.  Before, apparently, deciding that this was boring and wandering off.

"...Also, I heard those airquotes.  Is there a reason you're using them?  Because I can tell you for a fact that the gods are real, albeit as far as I know most likely planetary-scale.  Tamamo stole some of my lunch once.  ...Well, not precisely stole, if I recall the details correctly, but close enough."

"Or do you more mean to airquote 'goddess' in a way that implies not-deserving-of-worship, which...

"Eh.

"I could argue that position either way, really.

"But like.  The gods are real, even if the one most entangled with kitsune is very Chaotic Neutral about it."

"The second thing, really." Sigh. "I would consider myself an aspirant to Lawful Neutral. If the impressions that's conjuring up are correct... Ugh. Now I feel stupid. I should have done this earlier, but I can just cast Overland Stride on both of us to save time... Well, it does take a bit of energy - much less than more dramatic things but some, which is nontrivial to recover..."

"Probably.  You don't have enough paladin vibes for Lawful Good to stick.  Although paladin-ness is more of a strict subset of LG than the entire corner, so, who knows.  I model Good as - prosociality in the broadest possible sense of the word.  Doing things that help other people because you're there and you can.

"I've no idea of my own Law-Chaos alignment, especially these days - trickster spirit - but...  I do try to be Good.

"And as far as your spell goes - I'm not in a hurry, really.  Don't spend nontrivial magic on my account.  Though I'd love to see the diagram."

"When we're not walking, sure. I popped four Sinnah's Flys in a row to get over Graver's Canyon but I try not to spend too much mana all in one go like that too often."

"Oh damn, you can cast that?  I haven't quite dared try - not after I saw someone rather fuck it up by trying to be impressive.  Admittedly, he was the sort of guy who gets his degree by bribing the college, but as it is I'm still just studying that spell rather than actually casting it - even with how miscasts have been diverted from exploding.  It has a quine in it.  Well.  Not a quine quine because it doesn't reproduce itself.  But it's a spell that contains two spells, you know?"