She nods. "Do you mind if I do a few things to verify?"

"I would like you to be more specific."

"That's fair. I want to use Sympathy to find things out about your physical structure that corroborate or refute your story."

"If this amounts to a medical exam, that is fine."

"Essentially, yes. It's more thorough than a nonmagical exam."

"We don't have this kind of magic where I am from and I would appreciate more precision."

She nods. "What knowledge of magic do you already have?"

"Odette has explained the Sympathy/Effort/Conquest division and the side effects and some of the uses."

"Essentially I would be using Sympathy to compile an average human body based on examples in range, with standard variations, and comparing your body to that for where they differ, down to the molecular level."

"That sounds fine."

She tilts her head for a moment, before blinking in shock.

"What?"

"...You're...more inhuman than I was expecting."

"I'm an Elf."

"I can see that. Would it be rude to ask how you have a piece of metal embedded in your spine with no scarring if you don't have magic?"

"It grew there."

'That's interesting. Our bodies can't--manipulate--metal like that."

"We're a designed species. It might be impossible to evolve chips like this."

"What do they do?"

"My chip stores my mind and sends instantaneous backups to a person called Mandos who could print a new one and make a new body around it if mine were destroyed."

"...Goodness."

"It can also be user-modified to, for instance, improve my memory, and we can communicate telepathically chip to chip."

"Well, this is definitely enough to be bothering Atennesi Cohen with," she says. "If you'll excuse me a moment...?"

"Of course."

She leaves again.