The books on teleportation are all in English!

The first book of the diary doesn't try to kill her or anything! It opens with "To whoever is reading this, if you have found this book I have failed in my mission to impose a new and more just world order..."

"Wait, you can read this stuff, Ame? What language even is it?"

Ame hesitates to answer for a long moment.

Really, she has two separate excuses for being able to understand English, but really, both hint toward the same conclusion in different ways.

Ame snaps the diary closed. Looks at Elizabeth. (And at Abyssia and Theodore.)

"I have a mysterious ability to understand languages... not limited to incantations," Ame says. "So yeah. I can read pretty much anything that's readable."

"Oh really. Well, that's convenient."

Liz is inordinately amused by something.

"No wonder my gods think you're important."

"Probably related, yeah," Ame says neutrally.

Liz is more amused than seems called for. Ame quirks an eyebrow at her.

"We are going to get fam~ous together at this rate," she sing-songs. "Are any of these books I can't read about teleporting?"

Uh huh.

Anyway, "Yeah, I think those ones are. This one's a diary, that's why I grabbed it first."

"Seems like a lot of the work is on you here. I'd be fascinated by a Demon Lord's magic, if it isn't corrupt. Bys and I can explore, look for anything intact or anything she hears whispers about, while you read?"

"You know what they say about splitting the party but the alternative is you sitting around listening to me read out loud so... yeah, go ahead."

"We're not in a dungeon or expecting serious combat right now. I suppose it might still be a good idea to stick together, though. Maybe we should just rest. This place feels less creepy than outside, honestly."

"Yeah, it's mostly ulgu and shyish down here. No dark magic. What do you think, Ame?"

"We probably should in fact set up camp down here. I don't want to miss anything so we're probably going to be here a while."

"Fair enough. We have two major secrets, now. And we can't get rained on down here. I could use more sleep, honestly..."

She and Elizabeth start setting up the bedrolls and moving crumbling shelves out of the way.

The incantation for the light spell is simple enough that Ame can drop one of the lines and change one other word to create a little ball of heat to substitute for a campfire. She casts one where requested, then turns her attention to the diary.

Ame settles in and starts reading.

The diaries, titled "My Struggle", paint a picture of the Witch of Spacetime (who never refers to herself with anything but that title) arriving in a barbarous part of the world, where tribal horse raiders murdered and raped across the barren countryside and were often slaughtered by monsters. She fled south, learning and adapting like the genius she is along the way, until she found a more stable if still backwards kingdom. After some quick conquering, she replaced the nobility with an enlightened centralized leadership and built infrastructure on the backs of summoned monsters and captured barbarians, mostly demihumans of various kinds. Then, she steadily expanded, bringing peace and unity to more and more of the surrounding kingdoms and trying to teach her political philosophy of unity, purity, and the guidance of barbarians and primitives into a more civilized society.

Ame's incredulity and disappointment slowly grows the further in she gets, until she finally shuts the last volume with a sour grunt.

"Well, for one thing, this Witch of Spacetime would fit right fucking in back home. Sanctimonious cunt." Ame sighs. "Even worse, nine volumes of praising herself and no useful information to be had."

"Well, she was a Demon Lord. They're evil pretty much by definition."

...dangerous territory, responding to that.

"I don't think she knew," Ame finally settles on, which is true enough. "She wrote like she thought history would remember her as a hero." Presumably because she was also told she was the Hero. "She was righteous, and only evil to anyone who questioned her righteousness. Which was a lot of people, because she was a self-centered bigot. But saying she was evil because she was a Demon Lord is... giving her more credit than she deserves."

"Huh. You know, nobody knows much about the cycle. Mostly because the pair tend to destroy... Most things, when they really get going. I sort of feel like we should copy that for posterity even if you say it's drivel, just because- Like, the name of a city or a king or even a landmark she mentions could have great insights into lost history, you know? I find it hard to believe there's nothing useful in there."

"I think she did mention the relevant proper nouns a couple of times," Ame admits, flipping open the volumes where she remembers seeing that. "I can note down those bits in my Quest Journal. Shouldn't take more than a page."

Ame does so.

"I'm feeling kind of - sheepish. This is a piece of history. Feels like I don't belong. And I'm no good with magic like you two either. -You three."

(Theodore rolls his eyes where he's lying on the hard ground)

"And the whispers are telling me that something about teleportation in this place is still working, and there's many others like it. I couldn't get much detail about it, though."

"Still working? Alright, in that case I know which books I'm reading next."

Ame puts the diaries back, then grabs the books on teleportation. What can she get from these?

It seems to be documentation on how her teleport network works! The Witch of Spacetime herself is the only one who can set up new nodes, but anyone can use them if they know the master password, 'snowflake'. There's illustrations and diagrams and arcane talk about the nature of magic.

One of the illustrations looks familiar.

"Hey, didn't we see this in one of those other rooms we passed?"

"Come to think of it, yeah... Some sort of control panel? Large pillars like that with a circle around it tend to be the anchors for major artifice."