Alicia spends a solid minute on various combinations of flabbergastment, contemplation, and raising her hackles before she manages to find something to say in reply.

"'Edge'.  You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.

"Slightly misused reference to an iconic work of Pre-Tirran media, and the question of what you think edgeplay is, aside, you do not understand my hopes, nor my fears, as this encroaches.  I'm not worried about the sex, except to make sure I'm only with consenting partners that I would sober-mindedly consent to.  I'm worried about things like minimum safe distance if I get it into my head to do something that has a blast radius - and knowing that a good 75% of my brain is busy poking at magic right now, I can't rule that out, and nevermind the Weave because the problem is what happens if I do something right.

"I'd rather spend this time with someone I trust, someone who I'll listen to when they tell me I shouldn't, somewhere safe both for me and from me, than with someone I've barely met, having an orgy with who the fuck knows.

"If you want to seduce me, try again later.  You're pretty enough that you might overcome my better judgement.  As it is, I'm going to keep to the plans I've already made, because to break them off now would be horrible of me and because you've just rather insulted a friend of mine for their sexual preferences and that was just rude, which does not make me want to spend time with you, and furthermore because I've already made my plans, and if you wanted to put your two cents in you should've said something before now.  And don't say you didn't know I was around, you know what my name is and I sure didn't tell you."

She quite deliberately walks on past Hanabi, then turns back.  "You should apologize to Nicole.  Sometime when we're all not busy with more pressing matters."

"Hahahaha! Nice reaction. 'Safe', ha. That kind of fear is exactly why I made the offer. But I can't force it so have fun praying or solving equations or whatever on your mountain. I'll be around here somewhere getting railed or causing trouble. Haha..."

Nicole walks straight on by without saying anything or reacting in any visible way. Off to the spirit-paths.

"...Hanabi uses charm magic and illusions liberally, you should know. And it does work on other kitsunes. I don't think she did it to either of us just now. I don't know the details but she's nebulously involved with a mercenaries guild and a prostitutes guild. She can't cast human magic like we can, and it's a sore point. She hates being reminded of it."

"Oh, joy.  Well.  Guess I'd better learn wards."

"I have copies of basic motion alarms, at least."

"...Wards against being charmed, was what I was thinking."

"I looked into just such a thing and found quite a lot of frustration and quite little of use in terms of proactive defense. There is, however, a fairly difficult spell called 'mind purge'."

"...Wonder if you could make, like, a magic Faraday cage, for your brain..."

"That was one of the things attempted. No material or type of magical barrier was found that successfully blocked kitsune charms. Mind purge is hard. I bought one scroll of it, but it cost me a Sol and two Ecu."

...Tamamo whyyyyy -- don't think that too loudly, Alicia, she just might tell you.

"...Damn, that's expensive.  Good thing we're working on what we're working on, I guess..."

"Let's be the tortoise, not the hare, about that, hm? -Oh, one thing that did block charm was the kitsune being unable to perceive the target specifically enough."

"I'm not even at the starting line yet, I don't think, so no worries there.  What I wouldn't give for a single centimeter.  Or a reference second.  I just need one reasonable unit measurement to get my math to actually work and be at the starting line..."

"...Perceive specifically, like... 'target is recognizable as a person', or 'target is definitely over there', perceive specifically?"

"Eh... Oh. I know what might be going on. Physicist versus engineer mindset. Are local units not good enough to bang on with a wrench and get close enough? Uh... Invisibility worked until footsteps were heard. Hiding in a box worked until the kitsune was told which box, even when she tried all of them individually. I don't remember all the details I think the conclusion was that it might be an idiosyncratic internally felt level of surety that a specific person is there, I'm not sure."

"No. because I don't know what the fuck they are so I don't know what I'm aiming for.  ...At least I've got the kelvin, ish, but even with thermal and kinetic equivalency I do not have the joule I don't think because I don't know what the conversion factor is - and that's still not going to get me any of kilograms, meters, and seconds because that's too many variables - and I need both kilograms and meters to get the pascal!  Well, what I need is newtons and the square meter, but even if I had a joule I'd need to have a reference kilogram...  And there's just no way I'm going to be able to measure the speed of light, and I don't know the local value of g, and I'm any confident that there was something about pendulums but this must be the dozenth time I've tried to pin down the hertz from that and I still don't remember the damn equation - something about the length, and then you have to do it at a very small angle because otherwise you start getting sine terms...  I mean, those aren't very complicated geometrically, but I don't have a table of sine values lying around...  Gods, nevermind pi...

"...In short, we could try, but we'd be flailing wildly at it in a way that would not help.  We need to figure out the force we need, before we can actually get to exerting that force.  Otherwise we're just going to waste our time, effort, and materials on a dozen failed prototypes when I really don't know if..."

"...I'm trying to do this on a budget."

"...and, good to know.  About perception."

"...Against my better judgement to not get back into this. They do have units for pressure, and temperature, and all the rest. They're not metric, but they exist at all. Perhaps you have not read the correct books, yet. Did the library you visited only contain magical theory?"

"That they have units for pressure and temperature does me no good when the problem is that I need to convert from a value I have no comparative reference for if I'm using them.  Have I not said that before?!"

...Megapascal divided by a hundred kilopascals for one atmosphere = 10 atm per megapascal. Atmospheres are close enough to something the locals have measured to add 50% on top and be done with it, from an engineer's standpoint.

Well, maybe. She hasn't done large-scale machinery design. But surely!

"Not that I understood it that way, no. What is the value you know as a target?"

"I'm not actually sure of the precise value.  Unless I was, in the past, and wrote it down.  But I'm pretty sure it's either one- or low two-digit gigapascals, to compress sufficiently to reach our metastable allotrope - my brain keeps producing 'five', actually - and I've already got Kelvin worked out, or close enough, from, you know, freezing point of water which is basically negligibly variable under atmospheric conditions iirc, but just for reference we're trying to reach - 1500 Celsius, plus 273.15."

"...I think I mentioned once before but I think one atmosphere is around a hundred thousand kilopascals. Which would make a gigapascal... Ten thousand atmospheres, or so."

"...For Earth's reference atmosphere.  Which we do not know if that's the same for this planet.  Though it might be good enough to get on with if we build in sufficient margin..."

"50 kilo-atmospheres of force, probably 75 for some margin.  Aie ye yi.  How much force that is we still don't know, but maybe if we can...  Ah, hell, millimeters mercury still depends on the damn meter!

"...Wait, no, okay, we might be able to work something, but how are you proposing we measure the atmosphere?  I've gotta admit, I don't know how we did that back on Earth.

"...Displacement?"

"That, I'm almost certain academics of this world have worked on, and we can look up."

"Oh, good.  ....Do you know if there's a practical difference between yellow diamonds and Not Yellow diamonds, for that matter?  Need to know if we need to clear out the atmosphere before we actually forge anything."

"I... Do not. This also seems look-up-able, though. Or we could just see if anyone legitimate is selling them as magic supplies."

"I'm going to start from the assumption that we should minimize inclusions.  Though how I'm actually going to do that, I Don't Actually Know Yet.  Need to figure out how to isolate the carbon.  Although that actually sounds like a job for chemistry as much as magic, come to think..."

"Well, let's not talk any more about it in the road- I know I started it, sorry- Aaaafter I write down what we just concluded..."