"Why are you so concerned with doing what's neutral? Do what's right."

"If I have to choose between the two I'm obviously going to choose what's right but it has not escaped my attention that they have legitimate grievances, and as long as I can reasonably claim not to take sides without sacrificing anything important I might as well."

"When a war endures five hundred years, everyone has legitimate grievances."

"I know about the Ice. The war hadn't been going on five hundred years then. I haven't gotten your side's side of the story, and I'm assuming there are mitigating factors I don't know about, but I would really not like to give your great-uncle stress ulcers if I can reasonably avoid it. Also, my sister has gotten fond of one of your cousins, and if I can avoid adding drama to her life that would be nice."

"I think bringing back Eöl is far too high a price to pay for feeling like you're not being unfair to each side. I think you should bring back who you want to and tell everyone you're the one with the resurrection powers and they can live with it."

"Oh, I'm not bringing back Eol. At all. Anyway, if I start saying 'I'm the one with the magic powers, I do what I want, deal with it' then people start thinking of me as something to plan around, not someone to plan with, and they're not tactically wrong."

He nods. "That's fair. You just don't have to make your whole self negotiable."

"Damn straight it's not."

He smiles approvingly. "What do you think of this for armor?"

"Gorgeous and incidentally politically confusing."

"That's the politicians' lookout. I can do it in a week. Weapons from your world?"

She explains the basic idea behind cannons and crappy guns and not-crappy guns and "I think making gunpowder has something to do with something called saltpetre, but I just realized I don't actually know what that is."

"I'll ask the Dwarves."

She nods, assuming that this is a thing that it makes sense to do (she should probably investigate Dwarves more at some point, but that point is not now). "So I think the thing that was left was why the different molecules behave differently..."

"Oh! Yeah, I don't have a good answer on that but together I thought we could figure it out by tweaking. Like, okay, take this as a base and then swap here.Or instead swap here. What differences are we getting in the material, can we reason to there from guessing how the molecules sit together..."

Fascinated chemistry experiments!

He clearly is delighted to have her capabilities to aid in the experimenting.

Her abilities are so convenient. Magic is great.

And after a while they have enough material for ten groundbreaking chemistry papers, or so he tells her. "After the war."

"After the war there is going to be so much stuff happening, as everyone does all of the things they've spent centuries telling themselves they were going to do after the war."

"People will get married, have children. I know people who've been waiting five hundred years."

"Why are people waiting to get married? I mean, the children part is obvious, you're going to have such a baby boom, but if you can't have kids by accident...oh. Is it in case the other person gets killed?"

"Yes. No remarriage, no hope of ever seeing your spouse again."

"I'm going to fix that."

"So I've heard."