"My version is touch range. It's pretty comprehensive and near-instant, but for historical reasons it only works on humanoids and birds and it's also not selective - uh, within scope; I can technically heal injuries without also removing poison and such if that's ever desirable. Natsuko's is more time-consuming and it consumes a resource that we have no shortage of but not in arbitrary locations, so she'd need to go refill if she were doing a lot of it. It's mostly less good but it can be selective if a skilled wizard is doing it and isn't limited by species. Cassiel can transmute matter into other matter and that has healing applications pretty much as you'd expect from that description. The low-grade one is a magic song - they have to be composed in specific worlds but work anywhere, including if recorded and sped up, but even at top functional speed they're only good for minor injuries or as a first aid measure while waiting for better help to arrive."

She nods.

"How does it know what health is?" asks a person who had to define health in what was only barely not assembly language.

"Well," says Nelen, whose spells definitely describe health in something somehow even worse than assembly language, "Natsuko's transforms generic magical energy of the correct sort into what is called 'positive energy' and that has healing effects for reasons we don't fully understand - the world that the system comes from is inherently hostile to science. Mine is Loki's, same as all my other spells, so I suppose she defined it but I certainly can't explain it. The song literally sings about health in natural language."

"We'll want to schedule experiments, but right now -"

"I think we'll stick with what we've got."

"Of course. We do have some precogs, if you have reason to be worried about the results we can consult them, but the spells despite their - unmechanical nature are safe for basically everybody."

Sorimer would like to give a speech about how this is, frankly, nonsense. He is four hundred years old (depending on how you count, give or take a few decades), and he knows perfectly well that there is no clear dividing line between "healing" and "reversion to a past state," nor one between "healing" and "editing." Making the word Heal required careful specifications of what every system in the human* body did, and he knows exactly how his systems failed in atypical cases. It was a large project - almost as large as their first two immortality projects, and better-funded, and he is basically not going to trust that he will not be stripped of all his magical powers if he's ever subject to one of these spells.

Sorimer is also four hundred years old, and has in these four hundred years brute-force learned an absolutely minimal amount of tact. He does not say that.

"Precognitives?" That sounds fascinating!

"They're really useful! They don't work if they're outside their neighborhood, but they do work on information that will be sent to their neighborhood, so they report remotely."

But - but that - 

- How have they not triggered a precognition?

Is this good news or really bad news?

Ari's odds that these people are lying is going way, way up.

"Do you by any chance have a cached prediction for what number I'm thinking, that the precognitives told you in advance?"

"Uh, no, we try to reserve it for higher priority things than guessing games, though if you want to set up something like that I can ask."

So that is the most archetypical "they are lying about their powers response," right?

Ohhh yeah.

Absolutely.

"Oh no, not if it's at all expensive." So far they have boasted about many extraordinary powers, demonstrated teleportation, and offered to show off transmutation and healing, which is respectable but not hugely impressive. At this point, Ari is really not convinced they're anywhere near as powerful as they think they are.

She will, however, pull a small copper coin out of her pocket. "For a much cheaper test - Cassiel, can I ask you to turn this into iron?" She presumes they have some kind of way to pull that off, but best to establish a low bound anyway...

"Sure." Cassiel doesn't even take the coin, just blinks at it. It's iron.

She looks at it. Looks at it. Tosses it to Sorimer.

He looks at it. Nods.

"Huh. Iron. Fair enough."