"I'll certainly be planning to do something like that.  And not as stupidly as the people who sold the patent for insulin for a dollar, rather than setting up a licensing agreement."

Redweld nods. "Sounds like a plan." He chuckles. "It's looking like you're going to be making two splashes in the near future. And, what's insulin?"

"A chemical; part of human biological function, produced by the...pancreas?  Involved with the intake and metabolism of sugars.  There's some people who don't produce their own, and some for whom their response is dysregulated in other ways, and both of those cause diabetes, which can go...pretty badly for people, if untreated; blindness, circulation issues on the level of gangrene, looming threat of death via sugar-imbalance, other shit I don't remember.  I don't know the synthesis, unfortunately; perhaps I'll be able to speed y'all towards it regardless, though.

"...Most of the random knowledge I have is hobbyist-level, honestly; my professional training, however abortive, was, funnily enough, in stuff like writing scripts for echonet devices - though I imagine you don't have anywhere near the available level of abstraction I did.  ...Still do, actually, with my phone, come to think of it...though that's not a general purpose computer and I don't have the tools to make it so unless I figure out something magicky to let me safely test, disassemble...experiment, generally.  Let alone the consideration of electricity."

...She then mutters "I'm not inventing the TIS-100, nuh-uh," like she's warding something off.  "...but would it actually work, infrastructurally speaking..."

"Huh! We knew a kid who died of diabetes, back when we were just kids ourselves. I never knew what the actual mechanism of the disease was, and certainly we don't have any medicine for it. And, that's perfectly understandable, It sounds like there are quite a few fields where your world is at an advantage, so there's no way you could be a professional at all of them, nor is there any particular reason why you would be a professional at any of them, right? Unless you were sent here intentionally, but if I'm honest you don't seem very prepared for this if you were."

"Maybe whatever grabbed me couldn't give me time to pack," she quips.  "...Hey, any comment?", she directs at thin air.

<No- no- no comment.> Maria's own mental voice says, emanating from a new 'mental direction' which Maria did not previously realize was there.

"...Apparently, their comment is 'no comment'," she says, the words spilling out of her mouth in abject bemusement.

<...Who are you?>, she sends back.  <Why did you pick me?>

<I'm Echo! You're interesting.>

Redweld watches her with fascination. "Really! From another world and Recognized...I suppose it makes sense, anyone brought over from another world must have the winds' attention. You're communing with it now?"

"Yes; apparently, Echo believes I'm interesting."  ...There's clearly a part of her that doesn't, from the seeming disbelief in her voice.

<Is there a preferred presentation I should undertake when referring to you?  I don't imagine you to necessarily have much concern for petty mortal genders, but you do have sapience as far as I can tell, so I'm asking.>

Redweld nods again. "It's the echoic, then? That makes some sense, I suppose, to bridge gap between worlds?"

<Anything is fine!>

"I really can't quite imagine what else would have; theoretically it could have been a spontaneous or wind-directed poetic effect, but that seems...a stretch, though it's also definitely not impossible, because you can describe a human in finite space, information-theoretically speaking."

<There is more of all of us in each of us than none! It wouldn't be entirely wrong to say your recreation was poetic in part.>

"I wonder what your-- You probably don't know what an invocation is. So, when I said that each wind has rituals and has inscriptions, there's also a sort of third thing? But only the Recognizant have them, they're invocations. Or, I guess technically rituals and inscriptions are just 'types' of invocations, but there isn't a third word for these that's separate from just invocation. Anyway, they're sort of like rituals? But, also pretty different. They're usually just a short phrase, or even just a word or sequence of sounds or hand-signs, rather than a long script for a bunch of people to all do, and their power isn't based on how difficult and complicated they are the way it is for rituals. Every Recognizant only gets one, unless they get Rexognized by a second wind anyway. They're part of how new rituals and inscriptions get made, since each Recognizant can sort of, mold and grow their invocation, and then have their invocation studied and scanned and whatnot, which gives the elements that anemonomasticists use to invent new replicable magic."

"Oh that's interesting.  I'll see what I can do."

<...So I heard there are invocations?  That I could learn-define-grow-shape?  Who, uh, starts that process?>

<You are not at the right stage yet. Probably it will exist by tomorrow morning, maybe soon if we focus on it for a few hours. For now though we can do more things that are not exactly invocations! Like how I gave you the local language.>

Redweld nods once more, seeming to have exhausted his supply of ready topics. Then he turns to watch the trees blur by outside the carriage.

"Oh, that's interesting...'for now, we can do more things that are not exactly invocations, like how I gave you the local language.'  Quick, get me untranslatable books.  ...Dunno if that would actually work, but heck, I want to at least try it."

"...How fast is this car going, anyway?"

"Wait, what? I've never heard of-- I've never heard of someone coming from another world, either. You're going to be a lot of firsts, I guess! And, uh, probably about 60 miles an hour? We're another 10 or 15 minutes away from the facility at the moment, I think."

"Damn, you have really good engines and-or roads given the fact that your cars' aerodynamics are, frankly, shit.  Wind resistance actually starts to become a problem at speeds like that.  That, or the units aren't converting by math but directly."

"Oh we'd be going half that or less if we weren't on the Old Road, for just what you said, yes."

"...Hmm, now how would I do roads if I was working within this system...

"...how did the one example do it, let me think it out and tell me if I'm wrong...

"It's not etched, unless there's something on the underside, if that even works.  I do actually think it might work that way, but still, that's a lot of etching and if these roads don't predate industrialization I'll eat my nonexistent hat.  So it was done by either a ritual or a recognizant.  Not sure which, at this time.

"Now what wind would...

"...It would be truly elegant to use the onrushing motion of a vehicle to throw a pedestrian out of its way, and these roads...if they're a master's work, they would be - and it can't be poetic.  These roads are metabolic, which has me wondering just what the metabolic can metabolize.  Can it consume frictional forces?"

Redweld nods along. "Ah, right, sorry. The Road-Builder is not just a, uh, title for an unknown creator. He's actually relatively well-documented in the historical record. He was definitely a Recognizant, and definitely of the metabolic wind, though depending on who you ask he might have been Recognized by as many as three, and I might be misremembering, but if not then anemonomic scans of the Old Road itself indicate all four winds being present, to varying degrees. They also aren't consistent. which implies that the metabolic component, and probably the echoic as well if I had to guess, are actively modulating their own and the other two's influences."

"As for what the metabolic can metabolize, I don't know the exact limits? I know that it's not, uh," he gestures vaguely, "very abstract? You can't, say, convert an emotion into energy. An angry person isn't actually any more energetic than a calm one, despite the common sense."

"That makes more sense than anger being energetic, to me; emotions are just different patterns in the brain.  You'd want to gather not from the anger itself, but what it makes someone do.  ...You could probably stop a surge of anger with chorism, though, in at least some part, because it's hormonally-mediated...The human body is a bunch of - hm, you probably don't even have duct tape - but still, pitch, baling wire, and some metaphorical arsenic - a fever is the body trying to kill the very tiny organisms that cause disease by having more heat tolerance than them, fun fact."