"Uh, sure? If those are just crystals same as the array I did in your room. We do batteries differently in my world, they're mostly lithium and stuff, but there's no reason I couldn't do crystal batteries."

"Yeah, they're just unusually elaborate normal arrays, and they trade off pretty steeply on output to get the longevity, and they're basically not ever worth considering at all on the scale of grid power unless you can make crystals from nothing, but since you can I think that solves it!"

"So the nice thing about some of the other designs I was considering is that they don't require fuel, and get energy from tides or wind or sunshine, but maybe batteries are in fact the way to go if we can't figure out how to convert my volts to your magical crystal electricity, though I'd be surprised if we couldn't since, like, electronics I conjure do still work here and that means the underlying physics didn't need much adjustment to accommodate them."

"Crystals aren't fuel but I think I see what you mean.  I could read up some to figure out whether our infrastructure would work for your ideas - "

"I'm already on that, actually!  And about niche battery designs with good output which require rare enough crystals that they were previously untenable.  And about sorts of arrays that can't even be constructed without conjuration - 3d batteries suspended in resin that can't safely exist in some of the intermediate states it would take to put them together, stuff involving truly massive hunks of rock - Ellie, it's possible to derive the properties of crystals no one's encountered before, right - "

"In principle, yeah.  When you say you're already on that, what does that, uh, mean - "

"Oh, I have twenty-eight bodies and all of them but this one are back in the wilderness with a bunch of reference material!  It's very exciting."

"Stots."

"Tangent, what does 'stots' mean."

"It's like a less ambiguously-swearing version of 'stars'?"

"Fascinating. Okay, sounds like I can put the electrical project on the back burner while battery specs are drawn up?"

"Sure!  Um, if - now that -

um."

"Go on?"

"If.  This is a thing that needs planning, and I'm.  Actually qualified to have a go at it, or would be useful to have on standby, or, yeah, then - possibly I should in fact, not - um?  Keep doing what I was doing with my life??"

"...I mean, uh, the thing you were doing with your life was experiencing slavery, so insofar as I get a vote, which, as part of my anti-slavery belief package, I don't think I should, yeah?"

"Right, so.  Yeah."

"Yeah. How expensive are you, where do I go to turn you loose?"

"I think I had it paid down to thirty-some gold but the last few months - I'm not exactly sure right now.  City hall has my account."

"Where's city hall, will they want to know who the fuck I am or anything...?"

"They will probably want to know who the fuck you are.  It's, uh, lemme think - thaaaat way?  Wait no," she points a quarter-turn off her first guess, "over there."

"I'm trying to think of established people who we can bribe or sponsor into manumitting her themself, to skip on a bit of bureaucracy for now even though we shouldn't expect that to work in the long term - I'm somewhat loath to contact people my components knew personally, for the time being - "

"Well, I could phone Jesus? Since I should do that anyway."

"Sure!"  The hotel room has a phone on one of the nightstands.

Cam dials Jesus's number.

"Hello?"