"Oh, I thought perhaps it was just delicious. I am Albrecht, the Professor of Necromancy." 

He would be fairly tall if he weren't hunched over, and long robes hang loosely from his frame. You could almost persuade yourself that he's just an extremely elderly man, and it might make you feel better if you do. 

Looking more closely at her soul, it's definitely not only spellburn. It's not what he'd expect to see in a warlock, either. It's almost reminiscent of what happens to people who talk to gods, but not quite. 

"Your friend here brought you along for me to have a look at you. Do I surmise correctly that these augmentations of yours correspond to the bits of machinery inside you? Exceedingly clever. So sharp you've cut yourself, I'm afraid! It's little studied these days, unsolved problem of wizardry, but colour me impressed that the copying process worked at all, and didn't kill you. No Spells still in you, and no sign of any other effects, which would be quite extraordinary luck!" If it weren't clearly an Intervention.

He rambles for a little while about the history of magical notation while he prods at the woman's soul and its connection to Something Else. It implies vaguely concerning things about the nature of reality, which is the best kind of experimental result. 

"Anyway, proper wizardry on your first day is quite the achievement, intentional or not. What you're feeling now is called spellburn. You've overstressed your mind and soul, so you'll need a few days off doing something nice and relaxing and - well, human. You'll work it out."

He glances at Naevys, then back at Dr Baika. Maybe she'll just tell him about her patron! Wouldn't that be nice.

"Anything on your mind?"

It looks back at the thing looking at it. (Is that a communication attempt? Unclear. Observe/Ignore.)

She doesn't need her power to be online to wonder what the fuck is up with this guy's biology. Power mediated, obviously. Or, well, 'magic' mediated. She's pretty convinced it's a distinct phenomenon, by personal experience.

She's tired. And the meds are only making it worse. Can she turn her implants off of Safe Mode? Better not risk it for most of them... She'd probably shudder to see her current neuroinflammatory panel... But her eyes, at least, to seem normal. And her other implants she can work on one at a time, later. Maintenance and double-checking things is 'relaxing and human', right?

Her irises go back to a nice amber, and start moving normally again. She relaxes by increments as the pain control hits her bloodstream.

"-I think, I need a proper sleep. And I need to make some sort of program to - block out recordings of magic. Stop them from being saved to disk... Just turn off recordings entirely for now, though. God."

To enhanced optics, he's very clearly not breathing. 

...Program isn't a word in Common, but he has better translation magic than random graduate students and knows Old High Draconic and also many things he absolutely shouldn't, and that word implies the sort of thing somebody should really do something about, if history is any guide.

Interesting! Well, he has what he needs if and when he wants to make contact with the alien abomination plugged into her brain. 

"Sleep, yes, and food! I'm sure you can be sorted out. Do come back when you have more questions. Or if you're interested in lectures! Receiving or giving or both."

This has been embarrassing and frightening beyond belief and Professor Albrecht is standing right there and now he's very clearly making moves to steal a research project from her Faculty. She'd be excited that a suspected Ninth Circle archmage was interested at all if it wasn't, first, this one, and, second, so annoying.

Later. She can think about all of that later. 

Dr Baika must be struggling. It's been a long day for her, too.

She squeezes her hand again and helps her up.

Up she goes. (She's still massively heavier than an ordinary human, for all that she doesn't look it. Naevys probably notices this. It's the high entropy alloy reinforcement mesh, and the ballistic skin weave, and the laser components taking up space freed up from some mild lung refactoring, and her artificial liver slash second heart... Among other improvements.)

"They say you don't really understand something unless you can teach it, and I certainly aim to contribute and not just take. Later. I'm done for today. Sorry to alarm you both."

.....Off they go?

She does notice, yes. Augmentations? But she's mostly thinking about getting the hell out of the Necromancy Department and not coming back if she can help it. 

"Oh gods don't you apologise! I really should have noticed what could happen with your implants, we don't even get spellbooks in front of mirrors. The good news is you're a wizard now! Which makes things much safer. I'm really impressed, that's very rare. We'll need to see about how you want to specialise, and an arcane focus, and..."

Dinner time! 

This is mostly what the Academy is for, really, the magical research just fills the gaps in between dinners. 

You're going to need your formal robes and pointy hat, but those can be acquired at short notice. 

Most places in the world can't afford to teleport in fresh ingredients from three different countries on a whim, or perform viticulture in custom-tailored realities, or get kings and emperors trying to bribe them via the snack trolley, but such are the advantages of wizardry. 

Albrecht and many almost equally eccentric-looking people make up high table. 

It might not be noticeable without enhanced optics, but it doesn't actually seem possible to count people, or even the number of tables. You get a different answer each time, if you get one at all. 

There are pre-dinner drinks, and staggering - concerning - amounts of wine. Something that doesn't smell exactly like tobacco smoke is casting a blue haze across a dark huge stone room lit by oddly-coloured arcane fire.

And of course there's student politics. 

Many people (humans, elves, someone who looks a little like Naevys but is seven feet tall and the colour of black granite in water, short stout bearded people, and so on) are going to want to talk to Dr Baika. She noticeably does not resemble any of the humans around here. How forthcoming is she feeling? 

The fresh plant-based ingredients are nice. Real bread! Vegetables! Fruits! Sweet syrup on fried dough!

None of the meat is SCOP, which makes it a step up in some ways and down in others. She thinks synthetic meat, grown in her own custom vat, actually does better on the taste and texture axis, and it's also less disgusting since it was never part of a living thing that had emotions and memories and a digestive system and so on. So she avoids the local meat, mostly.

She doesn't drink alcohol. And let's skip the coffee too. She tucks the, apparently required, garments in to closer match corporate-office style, and lets her eyes slowly cycle through rainbows. She'll show off little tricks- Her hands can move very fast, her hair can style itself and get longer or shorter and change color, she can pretzel and un-pretzel the silverware, she can do large arithmetic questions instantly and catch thrown objects while blindfolded. And she'll talk about her interests in medicine and biology.

It's probably good to meet more than one contact; If only it had happened before she got greedy and nearly burned herself out in the process!! What kinds of people are showing interest, here? What are their roles and interests? (Too bad she can't risk recording, and has to just take rapid mental notes and the occasional careful screenshot instead.)

These are mostly apprentice wizards. Naevys has chosen where to sit fairly carefully, but there's no keeping Dr Baika secret for long. 

(She is an apprentice studying Conjuration. Naevys seems to be dropping hints about helping her.)

"I do not believe it is like anything, to be an animal. I have spoken with spiders. They are not exactly conversationalists."

(She's not saying very much about who, exactly, she is, or what, exactly, she does.)

"Cows lack rational souls. I checked once. And the gods would have told us, otherwise."

(He's actually a cleric, a very low-ranking one. He was born in the mountains not far from here, and got lost and almost died searching for sheep one day and felt the transcendent glory of the gods in the marrow of his bones. He really didn't expect to then spend most of his time healing fat old wizards' gout, but he listened in church and knows what humility is. He was only sitting here by chance, or perhaps divine will. Maybe there is to be more to his life.)

"Ah," he says, not terrified because there is Someone out there who believes in him, "the Prophet specifically ordered us to cultivate our own goodness, not to rely on such things, and, I think there are animals it's forbidden to eat, or maybe only a few it's permitted-"

(He's an alchemist. He badly wants to interrogate Dr Baika about her world's alchemy, but it looks like it will have to wait.)

"There's both," he drawls, "but the specifically forbidden list is apocryphal, it's all probably-fictional foreign monkeys and giant fish. And magpies, for some reason. You should read more. But then, everyone should."

"I don't know that I'd believe that! We already know there's something we don't understand about souls! Why do you think animals are people? Also wine is supposed to be good for spellburn and I'm quite worried about that. And guilty."

(Dr Baika got quite lucky, again, it's not a bad case at all. Spellburn on this level just feels like - a sort of jittery nervousness, a sense of something wrong.)

Fine, fine, little decorous sips of things. It's not like her liver can't handle it. She just hates being slow. She's off balance, probably because her implants are kinda fucked. Over half her data storage is gone!

"It's not that animals are people... Though some of them are cleverer than you think. It gets to be a question of 'what is a person, anyway'... But regardless I'd rather grow my meat in a vat. So it's never been exposed to shit and rot on a farm. It's cleaner."

"I too try not to think about farms. Elves don't have them."

"How do you grow meat in a vat?"

The Visitor knows Necromancy. Oh dear.

"It's technically a type of algae that you alter to grow meaty kinds of proteins. Just like you can- Well, if you selectively breed plants it's like making slightly different copies of the same book, but instead you can take a few paragraphs, the ones that make a flower purple instead of colorless, say, and add them to a whole different book instead and get purple corn. I'm oversimplifying massively. You have to really know what you're doing, how life works. I need to get my hands on some local seeds and see if I can make them better."

"...Can you do that to people? Can you take the paragraphs that make someone a talented wizard, and copy them? If so you're going to either take over the world, or destroy it."

...This is starting to make her wonder about the nature of the elven forests, but she's going to hold her tongue for a moment.

"Possible. Much harder. And ethically thorny. Things like general intelligence aren't neat paragraphs, more like... Thousands of sentences embedded in other things? Tone? Pacing? Some secret code where any change you make also might end up causing anything from a stomachache to a seizure? Eh. Well. Fucking complicated and easy to mess up, anyway. I might end up giving some biology lessons. If you're unable to eat dairy without getting sick and want that fixed I can do that, though."

Wow, humans can have so many weird things wrong with them. 

"...Ethically thorny?" He's heard some alarming things in this conversation! Maybe that's why he's here, so he can report them.