Nick started teaching Petra what little he did know. Let's see...H2O is water. He gave Petra abbreviations H for hydrogen, O for oxygen, C for carbon, N for nitrogen—and he really hoped he had guessed that one right—and Merc for mercury. He knew mercury had some weird-ass abbreviation like Hg or something but he wasn't sure he remembered what it was, so he went with Merc. It wasn't like there was anyone from Earth around to complain about it. Al for aluminum, Cop for copper, and for some reason 'Fe' felt like the symbol for iron, but he wrote I for it instead.
Feeling uneasy about it, Nick drew H—O—H, then H2O, then labeled it as water. Next he wrote CO2 and labeled it as carbon dioxide. Let's see whether Petra can figure out chemistry better than I can.
Petra could.
Both displays got flooded with chemical formulas. Most of the elements got assigned symbols starting with Q or X. Apparently Petra had figured out that English didn't start a whole lot of words with those. Petra drew a bunch of versions of the same thing, and asked me to pick the version I liked best. I went with the holograms.
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It turned out that you could draw in the air using the holographic display, but Nick had a bear of a time trying to figure out the controls. He stuck with using the tablet for input unless something was genuinely hard to sketch flat. The hardest part was figuring out what to draw.
After what felt like forever, he got Petra to show him chemical ingredients instead of elements. He presented her with his last snack bar and got the alien device to save the recipe without actually having to sacrifice the snack bar. The result was a much longer list.
Nick had no idea what any of these things were, but he figured that they should all be safe to eat. Most of them just needed carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, though there were plenty of exceptions.
Nick crossed his fingers and started printing out samples of each.
A lot of them tasted disgusting. Nick was baffled as to why. The snack bars weren't revolting to his taste. He played around with the organization scheme Petra was using. She was giving the list of ingredients in increasing order of number of atoms at first. Nick managed to switch it to sorting by percentage of the object being copied. The disgusting stuff must have only tiny amounts, he guessed.
His guess was right. He couldn't just trust the same amounts of all the different chemicals to taste good. Everything that tasted vile was only present in trace amounts.
“All right,” he said aloud, for the practice. “The kitchen is open. Now I gotta learn how to cook.”