"Boats sound expensive. Do you have several platinum coins? I don't."

"Platinum."

"Nope. North it is, then. Shall we?"

"North it is! We'll come to a city sooner or later and we can find a map and I can find a tome for shadowhorse and we can make a more detailed plan."

Off they go.

They'll keep to a sedate walking pace for now. Recovering the old Demon Lord's knowledge isn't actually time-sensitive, probably, and there isn't any reason to set a faster pace if they don't have a particular destination in mind for where to sleep tonight.

And if they're gonna be moving at a sedate pace anyway... once they're well out of sight of Traver Hollow, Ame gives Elizabeth an assessing glance before moving ahead and reaching out to cast: "I offer sixteen mana from my core in the form of viric to the spirits of creation so that they might create a monster with a body of slime altered to replace its property of corrosion with a property of restoration, which will be sustained by mana from my core and unerringly obey my command!"

"Oooooh, summoning! My reckless decision to grab on to you is vindicated already! I think I heard 'restoration' is that a healing slime???"

Ame laughs. "It is a healing slime. My first (well technically second) spell. Is summoning magic rare? I really wouldn't know."

She has the gallon-sized green healing slime roll along beside them as they walk. It's good exercise for her mana.

"Rare-ish. It's not a path most wizards choose to level because it takes a while to get powerful enough to be worth the effort. What's the other spell?"

"The regular slime," Ame says. "I modified the incantation to make a healing slime, because a healing slime just has so many more uses. It was really frustrating having to figure out how to do that from a cold start, though."

"If you can modify incantations, you'll make a pretty good wizard! I don't know how to do wizardry but I worked with some so you sort of learn what makes a good one, you know? So how many weeks did that modification take?"

Ame stares at her blankly. "...weeks?" she repeats.

"Weeks."

Pause.

"So, do you just have incredible talent, or what? How'd you learn to summon slimes?"

"This is probably going to end up being the kind of secret that it's really dumb to share with someone I just met, but... I learned yesterday. In the dungeon. I would appreciate you keeping that to yourself."

"Thanks for trusting me with it I guess?" She waves her hands a bit. "If you learned summoning in a day maybe I could teach you sorcery! But maybe you'd have no reason to keep me around then... That's... It sounds like a really big deal? Maybe it's whatever taught you that's responsible for such quick learning, or maybe not. I don't know much dungeon lore and it sort of seems like there's more to it than that anyway."

"There's more. Maybe I'll even tell you some day. But no, the thing in the dungeon was a terrible teacher. I was just very very stubborn; stubborn enough to do systematic experimentation on the incantation before I was willing to try casting it for the first time, and then I got a Skill level in something, I don't know what, and suddenly I had a decent idea of why the incantation worked the way it did and what all the parts meant, and from there it only took a couple of tries to find a variation that the... spirits... didn't reject. Speaking of which, what even are the spirits and why do they listen to incantations."

"Nobody really knows who the spirits are." That word doesn't seem to have an equivalent in a more common language. "There's lots of theories - but whoever first discovered incantation magic is long, long dead. Of course I want to know everything and maybe experiment on it but - it sounds like you don't have the requirement most wizards do, to have a detailed understanding of every word in an incantation! Vocabulary is one of a wizard's biggest limiters, I remember hearing."

Ame shakes her head.

"I do have a detailed understanding of every word in the incantation, though. I'm pretty sure that's actually what I got a Skill in last night. I can imagine casting with a memorized string of sounds without knowing what they mean, but that just seems... like it just inherently could only work by accident? I hate doing something when I don't know what I'm doing."

"That's the thing, you can't cast with memorized string of sounds without knowing what they mean. So, you're somehow absurdly good at learning the wizardry language and had a good reference - and also good at arranging the concepts and understanding how they're linked together- You'll probably be able to pick up more spells pretty easily. So jealous."

"Really? Huh. The thing sounded like it expected me to just memorize the incantation and the gestures and it'd work if I repeated them correctly, I was the one who insisted on... so it was an even worse teacher than I thought. Holy fuck."

"Wait, does that mean the spirits hear our thoughts when we cast? Does that mean we can just think an incantation without saying it out loud?"

"You keep thinking I know anything at all about the spirits! ...I know chant shortening is a thing. An advanced thing that I will be very surprised if you can just do. Not sure about silent chants."

"That was possibly rhetorical... Guess it's just another question for the pile."

Ame has her slime minion switch from rolling to hopping, for a few moments, before going back to rolling.

"Before all this, I lived on the streets of a dying city; have since I was twelve. There's gonna be a lot of basic knowledge that I've never heard before."

She looks surprised and slightly wary suddenly.

Ame shrugs.

They walk in silence for a while. Ame's mana slowly replenishes against the drain of her slime, and when its full again, she summons a second healing slime identical to the first, to see if this puts her mana recovery into the negative.

Her mana recovery is negative when sustaining two relatively large healing slimes.

"I don't mean to judge you. Or - it's kind of unconscious, you know? Flinch reaction. Everyone around you growing up just knows that this or that kind of person is bad, and it sort of sticks until you think it over for yourself? I'm curious about basically everything and that includes your background but I won't push if you don't want to talk about it. And I'll be happy to try to explain common knowledge but I'm not sure how good I'll be at guessing what you need explained in advance?"

"It's fine. I'm numb to it by now. Where I'm from, prostitutes were... lower than criminals. Lower than animals. So-called good people would cheer when the... law-men... broke into our homes, beat us and raped us and locked us up, and then called it 'rescue'. We're stigmatized past the point of insanity. They call us trafficking victims and talk about saving us even while they deliberately work to make the hardships and dangers we face actively worse. And yet."

Ame gestures to herself with a shrug.

"I've never had a moment of doubt, not about that anyway. I'm proud of what I do. That my society considered me a blasphemous blight on the aesthetics of virtue is just proof that my services were all the more needed by every broken soul being crushed beneath the boot of that aesthetic. If you want my story, I'll tell you, but how sure are you that you do?"

"Yeesh... I mean, I only regretted reading that dhar corruption case-study for, like, a week. Maybe not here and now though. Don't mess with dhar, by the way."