So is the magical girl! "Wow! I'm not philosophically opposed but I'm glad you warned me!"

"So how’s your gem? It worked, right?" Relu bounces excitedly.

"It looks like it, yeah!"

"That's good enough to go to Ling Wen with, I think!"

"Good!" Relu twirls.

Ling Wen returns. "Is the alien technology also magical?" she asks.

"Well... no in the sense that if I provided blueprints and software and you constructed a device based off of them, it would function exactly the same as this one, no wishes or gender necessary. But yes in the sense that if I say no and then explain exactly how it works you're not likely to be satisfied that saying no was fully explanatory and not misleading."

"Does it have a limited power source?"

"Only in the sense that my device has batteries. It could be made to work with any batteries and you can probably get a net positive loop from using magic to generate electricity."

"So, my understanding of magic is that it requires emotional intensity. Is that involved in any way in producing this device?"

"It could be made in a factory by robots, in theory, although I don't know of any robot factory plans and this was made by one person."

"And the species responsible for it is called 'Elves'? Do they, as a species, have emotions?"

"They claim to, and they pair off reproductively and say that they're excited about their partners, and when members of their species have been tortured - have been imprisoned and repeatedly injured - they act different afterward in ways that suggest they're impaired by unpleasant emotions, and they engage in pointless behavior like parties or flying that they describe as leisure and say makes them happy, and they invented the thing that makes people happy and to my understanding they described it as a thing that makes people happy and did not claim it had any other purpose."

"They didn't design it for this purpose at all?"

"I am pretty confident they didn't originally design it with gem clarification in mind originally and it worked without having been designed for it but there might have been subsequent revisions since they became aware of the use case that might have been targeted toward gem clarity in particular. The specific one I brought was optimized for my purposes here but not really with an eye toward improving the end result, it was more about tweaking the form factor."

"What's the usual form factor?"

Relu grins extremely big. "It's something that's not deliberately obfuscated to make it harder to reverse-engineer, of course. I am sorry about that, I'm really more concerned about keeping it away from the Kyubeys than I am about keeping it away from you and I'll teach you a simpler version you can make yourself with materials you probably already have."

"I can see Kyubeys and there aren't any in the room."

"How confident are you in the security of any computers with microphones nearby - your phone, your security system, I would really not expect them to have a hard time hacking any Earth technology..."

"Well, it's all Earth technology. If it helps I was only just convinced you were worth paying attention to."

"Yeah. See, my worst case scenario here is that I give you enough information to maybe figure it out, and that information is recorded somewhere, and they use their head start on understanding the relevant technology to beat you to it, and then it turns out that your Empress in her prudence never saw the need to bargain or fight for the power to actually give me what I want and I need to deal with the Kyubeys anyway."

"You don't seem to like them."

"I have temporarily-secret intelligence suggesting that they're the ones who caused this planet to be plagued by witches, they grant wishes specifically so that some people will be so disappointed or overuse magic so much that they succumb to despair - at which point they become witches - and that they sow some of the filled grief seeds to respawn the same witches again if they don't think there are enough. I have temporarily-secret intelligence suggesting much less confidently that they might be planning to end civilization. So no, I don't like them."

"Can you tell me why the intelligence is temporarily secret? It's a pretty serious accusation."

"Because saying it will open five new cans of worms, not help you very much in quickly verifying anything I'm saying, make it easier for the Kyubeys to guess what and how much I already know, and tip the Kyubeys off to a theoretical possibility that I don't really want them to know about right now. If it's really important to you I will text my lord and say so in case that's decisive."

"I'd like to know what your lord has to say, yes."