"Yes, that's very high. One in three survive? ...Hmm. Mechanized plows, seed drills, pumped irrigation, automated weeding, mechanical threshers and harvesters, ammonia reactors for fertilizer, pesticides... Oh, I could engineer nitrogen fixing wheat... I'll need equipment but really, seed engineering is great because it could spread without me personally or even anyone who needs to know what they're doing. With appropriate cautions so it doesn't run wild."

"Yes. Wizardry is really dangerous, in lots of ways. It isn't necessarily that you die, if you're not one of the lucky ones, but a lot of really bad things can happen to you. And anyone nearby. Blowing yourself up is one of the best ways it can go wrong." That's a sad thought so she's going to try not thinking it! "Your odds are much much better at Silvermoon, though, don't worry! There aren't a lot of safer places to be than the same room as a friendly archmage! We can see what kind of aptitude you have - it's not just cleverness, but that helps a lot - I bet since you already know your own world's magic you'll be fine. Anyway don't we want it to run wild? Also what kind of equipment are you looking for?"

"...I suppose we'll see." 

Here's some photos of lab equipment on the wall. She rattles off a list of lab equipment. Incubators, centrifuges, fume hoods, spectrographs, thermocyclers, dryers, vapor deposition...

"...But really, these are all fairly specialized things your society would have little reason to build."

Good, she thought of a way to say it without saying "primitive".

"I'm going to have to make all of it myself from whatever's available locally, and run everything off my implants, so, components... Glassware? Alcohol, as pure as possible, or I can make a high proof distillery. It's for sterilizing things. Things for precisely measuring and handling liquids. Magnets. Copper wire. Shelves, trays, cabinets. Quartz. Chemical precursors like benzene, or am I going to have to mix those up too- Lots of glassware- I can do some computationally expensive math to pay for this if that's useful. Is cryptography useful? Knowing about large prime numbers? Anything where you need to check a hundred million variations on the numbers and find one that works, really.

As for the seeds, it would be a dark sort of victory if my new strain of potatoes outcompetes all over plants and ruins natural grasslands or forests, replacing them with endless fields of wild potatoes. For instance. I don't know what I'd be destroying if I made highly resilient crops with extreme natural spread and just let them loose. So I'm thinking something simple that farmers have to do to the seed to make it take, maybe. Or, well, there's a lot of ways to put guard rails on."

"...I don't recognise any of those devices but if you tell me what they do then we should be able to help. Wizardry uses a lot of... specialised things, and we can make new ones very very quickly. The question is going to be," now it's time to be delicate, "getting funding. And faculty support." 

She glances at the Professor, which is still drifting eerily through her room, and doesn't seem to have said or done anything either way. It's making her increasingly nervous. It's really really annoying sometimes to try to detect the subtle moods and whims of, basically, twenty tons of rock. 

"I don't know what 'benzene' is, this translation Spell is very weird, that sounded like a compound word in old Elvish, but everything else is fine. When you say as pure as possible - do you just want normal alchemical spirits for cleaning things, because those still have lots of water in them, or do you actually want Dwarvish whisky? It's all right if you really just want to drink it, that's a completely reasonable use of a research stipend! Cryptography - sounds potentially very useful? You could, say, check a hundred million Spell formulae, except that's a horrifying idea I shouldn't have said out loud sorry Professor please don't do that there are a lot more Spells that do horrible random things than useful things because there are more horrible random things than useful things, is one of the many many problems with that idea, I should stop talking and change the subject now. How exactly does the "checking" work? Could you, maybe, find the lost name of the Old Kingdom? Or the location of the Great City itself? Or, there are bound to be interesting encoded things in the Library, I bet someone must be working on it. Also has the thing with potatoes happened before?"

"I mean to use it for cleaning, not intoxication," she drawls. "I might want distilling equipment anyway, for other chemical processes. The potatoes thing has happened before with some of Arasaka corporation's custom fish farm species infesting waterways throughout Russia and eastern Europe, driving many local species extinct and causing other issues with algae and pollution... And yes, I do understand the need to procure or justify funding. I could fund myself by synthesizing chemicals, maybe? Dye? Artificial flavors? Medicines. Wizards seem like they would be extremely, perhaps unwisely, interested in nootropics and stimulants... There exists a pill that lasts about four hours and makes you extremely awake and alert, improves reflex speed, boosts memorization, improves ability to pay attention, and has a relatively gentle come-down... In humans. Not tested in elves. Much more dramatic than the active ingredient in tea and coffee, if you have those. And as for the mathematics, it's really more for, mm, I need to understand the rules and be able to state them in formal logic. Finding the name of a lost empire isn't the kind of thing it can do, unless I had tens of thousands of books in a computer-digestible format maybe. Finding, say, the fastest possible path to visit twenty towns once each if you know the time to travel between each one to its neighbors, that I could do."

She's going to need to come up with something to keep the alchemists out, too. "Wizards do sometimes create new creatures - that's said to be where owlbears come from - but I've never heard of them driving other things extinct, we should be careful with that! If you can do dyes and ??flavours?? at scale, then yes that might work, but for now I think you want other wizards' help." Also, it means she can distract all the other faculties, make them believe the medicines are the point... Maybe she'll finally get an actual study out of this. "We do have tea and coffee! The tabaxi sell them, the Academy gets through a lot of tea, there's lots of drugs that can help with wizardry but tea is one of the only safe ones. If you have a better alternative that should definitely be our first priority. Let's test it on an elf right now!" The Professor can't eat things, which means by rights she will be the first wizard to try the magic pills, which is as it should be. 

"Owlbears! How would that- Oh, I can't go off on every tangent. I'll find out later I'm sure. I can probably make some with enough glassware and precursor chemicals. Do you have chemistry suppliers here?"

The word implies different things than alchemy; Pure physical matter, no magic involved. She is digging in her jacket pocket and, yep, here is a little orange plastic tube bottle labelled with an 18-character name and '150mg'.

"As, of course, a responsible and safety-conscious doctor, I must remind you that this may go sideways. Beings as similar to each other as, say, rats and humans, or dogs and humans, sometimes react differently to the same drugs, so being able to eat the same things humans can is no guarantee it is safe for you. So I must ask that we go somewhere where you can be comfortably monitored and treated if there is an adverse reaction."

"Nobody knows how! It's just an example I remember reading about, there are lots of things like that! Ah - background information, I keep forgetting -" It's harder than she would have expected to remember that this is an alien creature from the Far Realms, and that she has to explain the world from first principles, but happily changing your entire way of thinking on the fly is part of the skillset for a wizard. "- Wizards... generally don't like to share, for a number of reasons... and writing magic down isn't trivial. Also modern Wizardry is mostly cobbled together from what survived the Doom, hundreds of years ago, a lot of your questions don't have answers yet but I bet we can use your magic to find them. 

This translation Spell isn't commonly used - Naevys found and learned it, during her apprenticeship, after a painstaking search through the library, for the niche use-case of understanding a language that might never have been spoken on this planet before, for talking to things that might utter horrific truths in alien tongues that cause you to go mad, without involving telepathic contact. It's handy for that, but it does have its limits. None of the languages Naevys speaks actually distinguish between "magical" and "physical". There are extraordinary powers that aren't well understood - "magic" - and one subset of those, certain things mortals can do, is "wizardry". "Alchemy" means doing weird things involving material properties, often as part of the School of Transmutation, but technically what blacksmiths do is another subset. She hasn't ever actually heard anyone talk about a clear distinction there. Naevys is not understanding any of these nuances just yet. "Chemistry" is coming across as "special-alchemy", and not very clearly. 

"...I'm not actually sure if we have suppliers, but we definitely have supplies. They might just come out of a vault somewhere. If you need to know where they come from you'd probably want to talk to, I don't know, the Secretary to the College Council?  But yes, glassware and lots of precursor substances won't be a problem at all."

Wizards very often manage to hurt themselves in the course of their experiments. Actual physical injury that can be treated is, honestly, looked down on as amateur stuff, but it still does happen. 

Also, as may become clear to her when Dr Baika turns her attention outwards, the Academy occupies an interesting sort of place in the world. 

But for now, it suffices to say that they have a Chapel and it has some attendant clerics, in case you make a silly mistake with the kind of lesser wizardry that only causes physical injuries when it goes wrong. 

"Those are very reasonable terms!" For magic pills that make you a better wizard, this is the best horror from the Far Realms ever, "let's go to Chapel and maybe you can also talk to a priest there if you're interested!" There, now nobody can say she didn't warn them. "Supposing we can get you basic equipment, do you know how long before you can make medicines? "Industrial processes"? Augmentations?"

"In order, days to weeks, months to years, weeks to months... I've been presuming but should spell it out clearly that some sort of accounting for all the favors back and forth will be had eventually? There's a lot to gain here from academic exchange." 

If she isn't magicked away from all her shit again once she's built it. She'll have to repeat her thermite-mines-next-to-the-hard-drives trick.

Ah, fair enough. Apparently there aren't actually any wizards on any plane who'll just tell you all their secrets for free. "There certainly is! Your case is actually slightly strange. Usually a visiting wizard will go to lectures, have conversations, swap bits of knowledge and Spells and things as they see fit. I don't know if there's ever been a visitor with a completely new magic system before! But the fact that the Professor is still here -" and it is, floating eerily and saying nothing, it's getting really annoying - "is pretty good proof you're very interesting and going to get a lot of attention and resources. Er, now that I say it out loud that sounds like it might not be very reassuring from your point of view! As a show of good faith I... could just teach you introductory wizardry?" Which is brave, she's overstepping her bounds, but you have to do that sometimes if you ever want to be a really good wizard. "It takes a while but a day would be enough to get an idea of what kind of talent you have! Or - what would make you feel better?"

"Hmm. So, money, tools, materials are one thing but it can be so easily lost again. Knowledge is much harder to lose, unless you lose your life. But I've been told that students sometimes explode, see, and I'd really rather only explode when I decide I'm good and ready to. There's also, er... My weapon malfunctioned when I acted in haste and fired it at the Conjuration professor earlier. Which makes me wonder if my techniques will really all work smoothly here. But there's no point yammering on and dithering about it forever either. I'd like an introduction to the basics yes, and I can offer around as much introduction to high technology, or at least the same amount of invested time. In addition to a sample alertness pill."

"Your weapon- you attacked-" she doesn't glance at the Professor, with some effort. "...Well that was brave!" Faculty generally make a point of never making clear exactly how tolerant they are, but she hadn't expected you'd get away with an actual attack. Maybe the Professor is just flatly immune to material harm or something? 

"Magic does sometimes behave strangely in other planes, but the malfunctioning might have just been some kind of old ward or something like that. It's exciting, anyway! If there are things that work differently here we can use them to learn! Come with me, and I'll give you the kind of gentle introduction that can't possibly cause you any harm unless you're extremely irresponsible on the way, and then I can try your pills when we get there!" 

"Well, from my perspective I had just been kidnapped. But, yes, my apologies again. That sounds good, thank you."

All right, here are the ancient secrets that are the seeds of wizardry. Pay attention and try not to have any stray thoughts, mortals are not really designed to tinker with the inner workings of the Cosmos. 

"Wizardry" is, fundamentally, the weaponisation of thought, awareness, soul. Ever heard a song that made you cry? Made someone do something by choosing the right words? Said the right thing to get out of trouble? Wizardry is basically the same principle. There are words, phrases, lines, ideas that have mystic consequence: a Spell is, in a sense, a kind of spirit, a fragment of sentience, bound and shaped, and "preparing" a Spell means making your own mind into a vessel that can hold it. Get good enough at that, and you can do simple magical workings all by yourself. There are rules, some of them mathematically precise, but they're more like the rules for composing a symphony. Magic is alive.

More simply: magic means visualising the unimaginable, feeling transcendent thoughts, perfectly, without getting lost in them. 

Canonical Wizardry is the set of traditional arts taught here, codified by ancient archmages to be relatively safe. Relatively. 

Since you're already a wizard of a sort, we can skip the usual initiations and riddles! You already know what Conjuration is; there's also Abjuration, creating shields and protections; Transmutation, altering worldly qualities; Evocation, controlling the elements; Divination, seeing the unseen; Illusion, creating images - oh, Dr Baika already has that one, sorry - and Enchantment, affecting the minds of others. Conjuration, Divination and Enchantment are the most dangerous, in that order. Any of those speak to her?

More mysticism... It's not all bunk, surely? The emotional resonance theory of powers... Hmm.

Her head practically snaps to attention. "Transmutation sounds like it could have some very interesting synergy with crafting!"

"It certainly does!" From her diaphanous robes she produces a long white wand, carved with quite startling intricacy. "Basic Transmutations change minor properties, like colour or smell or the like -" she chants something in a language that doesn't translate, and the flagstones turn blue and Dr Baika's shoes turn yellow and the air smells like a pine forest for a moment - "and they usually aren't permanent, though there are exceptions. Do you have a favourite animal, by the way?"

((Hey, electronic chemical sampler, what changed in the last six seconds, if anything? Does that pine smell correspond to actual molecules?))

"I'm a little fond of pigeons as I have a pet of sorts." At first she was just a dummy to practice on, to make a prosthetic bird leg, but the silly thing grew on her.

...'Chemical'? It's air in substance, pine resin in accidence?

Electrochemical sensors: yep, terpenes. 

Though, of course, your nose is also a kind of electrochemical sensor. What tests are actually being run here?

"All right! I'm going to turn you into a pigeon. Don't try to resist, just try to notice how it feels. See if you can separate out the feeling of being a pigeon from the feeling of being hit by a Spell! Ready?"

She kicks her Kerenzikov up to max mental acceleration, looking alarmed and snapping into a slightly more combat ready posture.

"-I would really rather more explanation of how that works first! Where does the brain go!"

"...In... its head?" she says uncertainly. "Why do you - oh, of course, you have 'augmentations' in your brain? Usually things on or in your body just meld into the new form, but they'll come back when I drop the Spell. Your brain like all the rest of you is just temporarily turned into the pigeon! It works just like your soul controlling your normal body, except it's a pigeon instead."

"That sounds profoundly unpleasant and I don't want to attempt it."