"I think it's mostly just silver? Some illusion and necromancy spells use jewelry gemstones but I think mostly not the common ones, and message uses copper wire but it's pretty cheap. If more of them were as useful as diamonds are I think they mostly wouldn't be used in jewelry due to that driving up the price, but Rathimus might know more about that or what nobles would be interested in buying jewelry from you."

"Are diamonds useful as a spell component and I should be talking to you, or for industrial stuff and I should be talking to Rathimus?"

"...Diamonds are used by powerful clerics and wizards to raise the dead or heal things or do unusual magic."

What is an industrial stuff, and why does this person expect her to know it? How does one become a powerful spellcaster without knowing what diamonds do, or if they do know why would they pretend they don't? Maybe this conversation would make more sense if she had gotten more than a few hours of sleep last night but she didn't and her tiredness is not helping.

She's seen mentions of raising the dead but it's still SO COOL.

"Sorry, I got to this planet yesterday and am learning everything in the wrong order. Do you want any diamonds, now or with the silver tomorrow?"

Possibly she should just go away and bother the poor priest when she's not so busy, but there are so many dead people in town today they've got to be bottlenecked on either spells or materials and if she's lucky it's materials.

"I can't raise the dead. You need to be 5th circle for that and that's like, Jhoran, Rathimus, maybe Ramien or Terendelev? If there's someone you want raised you should go to them, and if it's been more than a few weeks or you don't have a body you'll need to go to Absalom or Lastwall or somewhere like that for a stronger cleric."

"I don't actually know anyone who's dead. If you don't want any diamonds or anything I'll go away and stop bothering you. Thank you for explaining and for helping out with the clothes." She hopes this woman gets some sleep soon, she looks exhausted.

Unfortunately she is way too busy and understaffed for that at the moment.

“Inheritor bless you.”

"You too." Off she goes.

She kept mentioning Rathimus; Brenda will go check if the temple of Abadar wants anything. (And keep an eye out for any demons to kill on the way, because even with Time Enough For Love making the side conversation with Ember a nonproblem she is spending more time on this than she had intended and she said she'd help with mop-up.) She ducks into an alley along the way and emerges carrying a wool coat and with a powdered silver container and a diamond the size of a raspberry in a pocket.

Once she's outside of the hallowed grounds, someone makes their way over to her. It's nobody Brenda has ever met, but based on the way she carries herself Brenda's social instincts are pretty clear that there's one obvious candidate.

"I must say, you certainly worked faster than I expected - I very nearly didn't finish working the Nahyndrian crystal in time. Congratulations."

None of her companions seem to be reacting to this occurance.

GAH what the fuck, what is her DEAL

"Thank you. It did the job very well." 

(Are they not reacting like they think this is a regular nonspooky conversation, or not reacting like they can't see or hear Areelu Vorlesh at all?)

(Like they cannot hear or see her at all, or notice Brenda reacting unusually in response)

"I'm glad to hear it. Is there anything else you anticipate the need of? Between how much you angered Deskari and Minagho's ignominious return you're the subject of rather a lot of abyssal rumors, though they mostly seem to think you're a 7 foot tall paladin of Iomedae so I wouldn't exactly expect a well-informed response when it comes."

(Well that's fucked up and mistrust-inducing.)

"I'd like to know what your goals are, if that's something you're willing to share. Everyone around here seems to think you're on the side of the demons, but your recent actions that I'm aware of have been very helpful against them." Her tone is casual, neither accusatory nor afraid.

"I'm mostly between goals at the moment; I've succeeded on my current goals, and while your books are very helpful for giving me ideas I haven't exactly finalized a new plan yet. As for the working with demons, well, they're right as far as it goes. I needed help with some things, Deskari made me an offer, and I took it. But we aren't exactly friends, so I don't feel any need to help him succeed of my own initiative and I don't need anything from him now."

Ah fuck, she totally did give books on advanced science and technology to the first person she met, didn't she. At least it sounds like the demon invasion was a means to an end more than an end in itself.

"I've been enjoying your books too; arcane magic is beautiful. I'd love to hear more about your recent successes." Come on, monologue informatively or at least drop a cryptic hint or three, Fantasy Novel Logic knows you want to . . . 

That'll earn her a smile.

"Aside from summoning you? Mostly advancing the boundaries of soul surgery, particularly with Nahyndrian crystals, so that the subject can obtain abilities otherwise impossible for their species - refining the process I used to ascend myself, I suppose you could say. Aside from that, I also had a breakthrough on interplanar routing that allows me to extend the usual range of a calling or gate, and I suppose managing to fit an enhancement of evocation spells onto the dagger without compromising it might also qualify."

It sounds like she's trying to invent a version of Dragon Fairy Elf Witch built in this universe's magic system, which would be So Cool. Unfortunately there's no way she's doing it with exclusively consenting subjects, is there.

"That all sounds fascinating. Is the range extension work you're doing with Gate about interplanar Gates or about distance within a plane?" Or is it something cooler than either of those? She did ask Isekai Roulette for somewhere she could get the ability to wander the greater meta-multiverse, after all. She wants to go back to the book collection and learn if Gate works by folding space like an FTL drive . . .

"More the latter than the former, though that's not exactly right. I've been able to get from here to the deeper parts of the Maelstrom and the Abyss in fewer gates, but moving outside of creation itself still eludes me. I had to use a custom Mythic Wish to call you here, and that's both too expensive to be practical for most purposes and frustrating to reverse engineer."

Nod nod. "I'd love to do research that cool someday. I still need to spend a long time learning what's currently known, of course, but that's exciting too."

"A sensible attitude. Much of my own work on planar interactions is built on the foundation established by an elven archmage who worked for Nocticula a few thousand years ago, though I have extended the principles beyond what they recorded. Perhaps I'll look into putting my findings to paper more understandably than my notes, though I've never had the same enthusiasm for dissemination as for research."

Brenda's closest experience to this is middle school assignments, but that's already so relatable. "Yeah, I'm not surprised writing things up is the boring part. But if everyone does it science goes faster."

“Indeed. I see you seem to have picked up some sorcery in the last few days; was that because it’s your preferred style of magic, or simply a question of easy availability?”

"More the latter--all magic is exciting, but wizardry is definitely going to be my favorite once I have time to really study it."

"If you use your sorcery to empower your wizardry, you can make use of the arcanist school techniques, which are a tad more flexible than standard wizardry, but it does mean you have fewer spells at each circle than the alternative since it doesn't let you cast as both a wizard and a sorcerer. You're splendid and intelligent enough to make either approach work, so it's really a matter of preference, but the longer you keep them seperate the more you'll have to relearn."

"What sort of flexibility do you mean? The range of things standard wizards can do is already pretty impressive, even if clerics do get all the best healing options."

"The primary difference between wizardry and sorcery is less what magic they can cast and more how they can cast it. A wizard, through careful preparation, learns to hang almost-completed spells with the magical energy stored within to trigger later, the number and potency of which depends on their skills and energy channeling capacity. A sorcerer, meanwhile, has something more roughly equivalent to a pool of energy that they can shape, but only to cast spells they grasp intuitively enough to to shape their magic into reflexively. Thus a sorcerer and a wizard might both be able to teleport, but the sorcerer can do it as many times as they have 5th circle spells to cast and a wizard only as many times as they prepare it, while a sorcerer can only cast a handful of spells this way and a wizard can cast anything they can discover or learn from someone else. Arcanists, meanwhile, use a slightly modified wizarding scaffold that doesn't contain more than a whisper of magical energy inside that they then channel the power of sorcery through to cast the spell, which unlike the rewarding equivalent doesn't destroy the scaffolding and it can be reused multiple times. So an arcanist is like a sorcerer in that they cast cast any combination of spells of a given circle that they know how to, but unlike a sorcerer can freely change which spells they can cast this way."