"...huh?"

She glances over at Em, who's looked up from her own work at the crackle of alchemy.

"...Infohazard," she says, slowly. "That I need to think about before sharing."

"Okay. I don't think I can magically fix disintegrated notes, I hope those are replaceable."

"I have enough of the information to reconstruct what I need later if I want, the important part was the conclusion."

"Okay. Spell wears off soon."

"Alright. Thanks." She tilts her helmet back, thinking, until it does, though she doesn't spot any holes in her earlier logic.

"Translation spell also doesn't last forever if there's anything else we should talk about, though again I can cast one to understand you with more cheaply and I do have another couple of this today."

Pause. "I think leaving the city and going to find Dante sooner rather than later's probably a good idea, at this point..."

"You didn't want to do that before."

" - I think it's fairly important to get a look at the philosopher's stone array, but also I've updated significantly in the direction of not letting the government know whether we have it."

"If we stop working on decoding Marcoh's notes and just take off they'll figure something's up."

"Eh, tell them we just need some of our Professor's old reference books, maybe."

"If you can wait till tomorrow I can prep spells with this more closely in mind, especially if you're going to lie to people, Eagle's Splendor is good for lying to people."

"More time working on the notes will also probably make it less suspicious, I guess? And we can talk to the guards about probably needing the books before taking off." She sighs. "Though Em's also good at lying anyways."

"Okay. We should probably talk about what all I have available."

"Yeah."

"Giving a coherent overview of our abilities is a bit hard, but we should also share what we commonly end up doing..."

"Besides spells for straight combat, I can detect magic - it's effectively free to do that if you want me to see if it works on alchemy - make little illusion sounds or send messages, got a thing that stops me from tripping, I can detect poison, I can do light telekinesis. I can clean things or mess them up, change their colors temporarily, temporarily create small objects, make things slightly warmer or cooler or change their taste. Those are all spells I can use all day long if I want without it trading off against anything but my time, cantrips. First level spells I have two sets, which trade off within but not between sets. The language one, one that lets me reliably hit things though not any harder than I normally would, and one for being comfortable in extreme weather, is a fixed set. The set I have to prep things for can include some defensive spells, an invisible servant thing that can do simple tasks, a couple things specifically useful against magic I don't think you have here, a thing where you count as fully rested without actually sleeping as long as you don't do anything effortful, short invisibility spell that ends if you do anything aggressive, a - oh, that only works on me - a floating disk mostly used to lug stuff, something for falling safely, thing to make someone drop a metal object. I can do Fox's Cunning, in particular, several times a day, doesn't trade off against anything. I can prep the other ability boost spells - Eagle's and Owl's, plus ones for strength, dexterity, and constitution. Longer invisibility spell. Nonlethal ray, knocks people out if it hits them hard enough. Sticky web over an area. Another one that probably only makes sense in context of more people from my planet being around. And in another basket, spell for flight, spell for wrecking or sometimes countering magic effects which I again don't know if alchemy counts, unusually costly use of the basket to paralyze people temporarily, one to speed up people and it works on several at once fine, one for sucking the air out of people's lungs so they can't talk which is more useful if they're going to cast spells, the one I can use to not be purple all day, one to lift people in the air and hold them there, buncha straight combat spells. Opaque hemisphere that protects against the elements but I, specifically, have to stay inside or it ends. And the spell for speaking your language."

"...Things that specifically do damage in a way that 'nonlethal' makes any sense might be really hard to test on me, I'm mostly inconvenienced if my armor gets destroyed, but I also haven't been unaware since getting stuck in this, so I don't know I can fall unconscious."

"The two of us can effectively turn anything into anything else that shares a base element with it - element as in 'type of atom,' where atoms are a very small unit of matter - for instance, pure gold is one element but water is a combination of two elements. We could theoretically turn something into another element but it takes a lot of energy. Doing that quickly is hard, and sometimes figuring out the chemistry or controlling the reaction is hard. We haven't, for instance, put enough time into figuring out controlled flame alchemy, which turns air or water into a combination of elements that easily explode, but we can fairly arbitrarily rearrange solids. Large or complicated effects take more time than small or simple effects. Most alchemists need arrays to do alchemy, and need to prepare an array ahead of time for a specific reaction. We don't."

"When fighting we usually rearrange the landscape some to help us. Trapping someone in a cage is pretty easy, and stops most people short - even an alchemist will have to stop to draw an array to get out of it. I can also fill the area around me with toxic gas, including stuff that knocks people out with few side effects, but it's unsafe to use around people who need to breathe. If someone flat out wasn't going down and was a major threat I could deconstruct them and turn them into their constituent ingredients, but I'd need to touch them or trap them in a deconstruction array to do that."

"Enemy alchemists who're actually threats are usually either rogue state alchemists, with a specialized array focusing on combat-useful reactions, or alchemists who've had time to prepare the field and set up traps or make alchemical creatures to fight for them."

"We don't have any kind of limit on how much alchemy we can do, except that it's kind of mentally tiring to do a lot of and if we get tired we might make mistakes."

"...can you turn things into diamonds?"

"Yeah, cheaply and easily. Diamonds are just carbon, which is in most organic things, including charcoal, and a significant number of rocks. Colored diamonds can be tricky to get right, since you need to balance the impurities or structures well."

"Okay, that... doesn't matter in practice since I don't have the spells that chew through diamonds on my person, but some of the really good spells require them as a component."

"When we figure out how to get you home, we can give you a bunch of diamonds before you leave as part of the trade for helping us?"

"That would be neat."

"Probably also at some point get you actual blueprints of technologies your world doesn't have, since only the precision manufacturing stuff actually uses alchemy at any step."

"Yes please."