Penny was giddy when she got home after her date with Jenny. She plopped on a couch with a giant grin on her face and sighed deeply. She was happy she could spend the entire day with the woman who, as it turned out, she loved. Penny spend an hour basking in her happiness, but she couldn’t just stay like that forever. She had work to do and projects to design, research and build. But maybe there was a way for her to ease her burden.

-A.I.C.A. research media for a magic equivalent of an Artificial Intelligence. Golems, automata and magic networks. Prioritize ones where it is explained how they are created and with what magic. Avoid ones from system integrated worlds and things needing sacrifices and such unpleasant things. If I can make a magic artificial intelligence that can research and cast magic I can cut down on the work I have to do. And if I can integrate other schools of magic from other universes to this one… the possibilities are endless.-

-Penny, there are scarce amount of media with magic artificial intelligences in them. The only one I could find that matches your search parameters is Magi Craft Meister. There is also a high probability of you being able to learn their crafting magic system. May I suggest when you dimension travel there, you bring with you soybean seeds and recipes for soy sauce, tofu and other Japanese foods and seasonings. It will help you with negotiations. I also recommend you learn Japanese before going, because you don’t know how dimension travel interacts with poorly thought of language systems in fantasy isekai stories.-

-Those are excellent suggestions. Please download beginner’s guide to learning Japanese and then the advanced and so on. While you are at it, download guides for languages for countries with the best sci-fi and fantasy writers. Meanwhile I will start writhing some of my dissertations and then go to bed. Tomorrow promises to be a long day.-

For the next hour Penny put down her thoughts on superconductors and how they worked and her breakthrough on room temperature ones on paper, so she could later orderly arrange them into a scientific paper worthy of magazine covers. Then when she could hardly keep her eyes open, she went to bed still wearing her goofy smile while reliving the day in her dreams.

The next day Penny started her day exactly the same with the only difference being that she was listening to audio lessons of Japanese language courses. With almost perfect memory and her processing speed, the information was quickly being stored in her mind and put to use. She was learning fast, but not fast enough for her tastes. She spent the majority of the day learning conversational Japanese, and then kanji, hiragana and katakana, while also working on writing several science papers on robotics, miniaturizing electronic components and scanning equipment for the medical field. There was one about the application of acoustic levitation in the heavy industry and how it can be achieved and another on chemistry and how he was able to synthesize a perfect replica of spider silk and variants of it. She was even almost finished on a paper which when applied to modern AI technology would shorten the time needed for the creation of next generation AIs by 10-15 years. All the papers needed more work of course, but the foundations and the science were all on point.

-A.I.C.A. what is the average time for learning Japanese and what are your predictions for the time I will need?-

-The average time needed to learn the language with proficiency is 88 weeks or 2200 hours spend in a classroom. Polyglots have been able to learn the language in the span of a year. Someone with your memory and learning capacity could probably master the language in 3 months. Everywhere I have searched it says that for a native English speaker the language is harder, because some of the sounds are not used in the English language. For the writhen part the most difficult is the learning of kanji, which have multiple different meanings and are more than 3000 in number.-

-I don’t have the time to dedicate to the proper study of the language. Okay. We are going with plan B. Research knowledge transfer devises in fiction. Prioritize ones with no side effects that can be used by anyone and are easy to operate and program.-

-I have the results of the search, Penny. The top candidates are the Learning Machine from Battlefield Earth, Memory Upload from Resident Evil The final chapter and the machine that transfers memories from the movie The 6th Day. Some that didn’t make the list are from Chuck, Total Recall, Dollhouse and Bloodshot.-

-Hmm, let’s go with the Learning Machine. The one from Resident Evil is controlled by the Red Queen and I don’t want to deal with her and the one from The 6th Day is going to take time to study and learn to reprogram. Okay, download the book and the movie Battlefield Earth and show me the appropriate places for dimension travel.-

-Right away, Penny.-

Penny didn’t take long to put on a breathing apparatus and dimension travel to steal the machines from both the book and the movie. She carefully studied them both and in the end decided to go with the one from the book. It was a machine that stored the information on disks that could be read by it and when the knowledge was learned it could be changed to another one. Penny studied how the disks were made and the knowledge programmed into them. How the machine read the knowledge and she especially studied the light emitter of the machine. With a little more study, she could minimize the tech and revolutionize the way people study factual information. Things like language, history, geography and trigonometry could be learned in a matter of hours, instead of the weeks and months that it took. “Maybe when the world is ready.”

Penny designed a machine that could program new disks with information and asked A.I.C.A. to program all the languages she had downloaded guides for. It was time for Penny to become a polyglot. Or it would be, after she calmed her nerves down.

-What chances are there for me to fry my brain with the new disks we programed?-

-There is a zero chance for that to happen, Penny. The Learning machine will either not transmit the data if it could damage your brain, in which case we will have to look at the programing, or it will transmit the beam, but the information will not travel through your optic nerve. The human mind has its own defense mechanisms that the machine can’t bypass. Are you reassured enough to try the machine now?-

-Yes, I am ready. Activate the machine.-

For the next 36 hours, Penny sat in front of the machine, staring at the beam of light, learning languages she would take month to learn the normal way. From time to time, A.I.C.A. deactivated the Learning Machine, so Penny could eat, drink and use the bathroom, but otherwise the entire time was spent learning. When the program ran its course it was nighttime again and Penny collapsed on her bed exhausted. During the night, the absorbed knowledge continued to integrate itself, becoming organized and orderly. When she woke up the next day, Penny was refreshed and could fluently speak, write and read a dozen languages and there wasn’t even a headache from the process.

After doing her exercises and having a shower and a breakfast. Penny visited a currency exchange after which she teleported to japan. She visited a number of specialty shops, purchasing soy sauce, fish sauce, curry, different kinds of tofu, rice and other Japanese specialties. She visited a place and bought soybean seeds, melon seeds and rice seeds then returned home. She was ready to make a transaction for magic knowledge and magic technology.

Penny researched where in the story she should dimension travel and came to the decision that Volume 8 chapter 20 Quinta was the place to visit. She prepared by downloading and printing different methods to process soybeans into sauce, curd, tofu, oil and paste in Japanese, then put all her purchases in the pocket dimension and then dimension traveled to Hourai Island.

-There’s a lot of things to do, but which one should I start with? Huh, who are you?-

Penny appeared before the Japanese man just when he was discussing the defenses of the island and without any warning, so it was perfectly normal for him to be surprised and assume a defensive pose. Penny bowed politely to the man and introduced herself in fluent Japanese.

-My name is Penelope Roslyn Ankster and I am a dimensional traveler.-

-Why are you here, on this island?-

-To propose an exchange to the Magi Craft Meister. I am running a series of magic experiments and am in need of a magic study assistant. While I am here I can try and learn from the magic system of this dimension and try incorporating it with my own.-

-What kind of exchange do you propose for this assistant and the magic knowledge?-

-You go right to the point, don’t you? I just returned from a trip to Japan, before traveling here and stocked up on a lot of local products. I will give them all to you in exchange for building me an assistant like your Lao Zhu with a body that can cast magic and teaching me the spell Transfer Info and a crystal with all the knowledge about crafting magic, formulas, automata designs and magic language. And I don’t mean the ones using Japanese language in the. The original magic formulas and language.-

Jin thought about the proposal for a while, but in the end decided to accept the proposal, because we all know what kind of protagonist he is. Am I right or what? Eh, it could very well be because I am making things easy for myself, but so what. A little suspension of disbelief never harmed anyone or their story. Except for that one time, or that other time and that one movie and the other one and… let’s hope it doesn’t harm this one story.

The next few hours were spend with Jin explaining the magic system, its rules and writings. When it came time for Penny to test her aptitude with the spell transfer info, she scored level 7. Next, while Penny was busy reading the information stored on the magic crystal, Jin got to work creating an assistant with the specifications Penny gave him. A few more hours passed while Penny was experimenting with the magic she learned. When Jin came out of the laboratory with 2 automata transporting a metal sphere with a seam in the middle where by the looks of it was the place to open it and another one carrying an unresponsive automata body. Penny carefully opened the sphere and studied the control cores and other components inside. It looked like the assistant was programed to obey her and only her. She took out all the purchases she made in Japan out of her pocket dimension and then carefully inserted magic power into the circuits of the assistant and the automata body to start them up. There was a little delay while they activated, but then they greeted Penny with the typical golem and automata responses. Penny was happy she now had her magic assistant to help her study magic phenomena and learning new and exciting magic. She transferred the body and the sphere in her pocket dimension, then said her farewells to Jin and dimension traveled home.

Penny took out the sphere and automata out of her pocket dimension and carefully observed the two magic machines for any defects that could occur in this dimension. She could learn and use the magic in its original dimension, but the question was, would it work here, where a different magic system may govern the world. She studied the magic runes etched into the magic crystals, observed the levels in the mana drive, the efficiency on the ether converter. Everything seemed to work normally, so she went ahead and tried to cast engineering magic. By the end of her experiments, she could cast all the magic she had learned and that left only one more question to be answered. Did the magic work because she was the champion of the god of pranks or could she awaken the magic power in another human being and they would be able to cast the same spells as her after she taught them?