I don't know enough about how magic works to know, she points out, and starts looking through one of the introductory magic books - it is indeed all stuff he's either figured out or at least noticed he might want to ask the kobold about.

Then advanced stuff, I guess.

Okay.

Scanning the table of contents and reading a couple sample paragraphs is generally enough to get a good idea how good a book is, and they've soon found four that they definitely want - two on plant modification, one about advanced tricks with all the elves' spell forms, and one about complicated spell triggers - and another six that look interesting. The ones on other species' magic are mostly speculative, but there is one, arguably a misfiled adventurer's memoir, that's an attempt to catalogue every single spell form.

Yeah, worth grabbing just in case.

Yup.

Animal care section, next: since the only animals they have are horses and Ila, they can focus pretty well - Nidela does briefly consider suggesting they get some chickens or rabbits or something for the city, the kind of livestock you can basically just give space and food and not worry about too much, but she decides against it. She finds a couple books on equids - one solidly intermediate, one advanced and comprehensive - and a similar pair on big cats. I don't need the intermediate one myself, but if something happens to me it'll help you take care of Ila - up to you whether it's worth getting just for that.

More useful than just asking Ila?

For some stuff, yeah. She can tell you if she's sick or hurt but I don't think she'd know what to do about it, especially if it's something new, and this covers that.

Okay, then yeah.

Nod. ...actually we should probably get something on medical care for elves, too...

The section on elf care is much less comprehensive than the section on animal care; Nidela is frustrated.

Why is that, religion?

Mm, sort of? That explains why the section on animals is good more than why the section on elves is bad, though.

Why's the section on elves bad?

I don't know. Compared to the animal section, it's probably that looking after animals is part of our job and looking after ourselves isn't, but I was still expecting it to be better than this.

Stupid outlook, if that's the reason for it.

Yeah.

Elves start wars for dumb reasons, I guess you can't care too much about people if you're going to do that.

But even if all you care about is animals, you have to take care of yourself to take care of them.

Do people wonder what it's like to be a kobold? Or does that not count?

...sometimes? But that's... I'm not sure what you think that'd mean but it's not a good thing, usually, it means they think they're not people.

It seems like it'd be harder to randomly murder people if you understood what it was like to be them, or were really trying to.

Which is probably why they don't. The religion says we're supposed to start those wars, lots of things are set up for that.

Well. Now it'll change.

Mmhmm. And back to the books; she finds three that could be at least somewhat useful and sets them with the other possible ones.

Anything else?

Stuff on humans.

Hmm. What kind of stuff?

Anything, honestly? Medical's important, but...social and political stuff too, if they have that.

Hmmmm. Let me see what I can come up with.

Medical stuff is even sparser for humans than for elves; the only book that seems useful at all is a short work comparing elven and human responses to various drugs. (She adds it to the 'definitely' pile.) The other sections are more fruitful: there are books chronicling the histories of two nearby human cities - it looks like there's one commissioned every fifty years for each of them, going back a little over a thousand years - and a scattering of other works on various aspects of local human society.

Nidela goes through the history collection and finds the ones that cover how the humans handled various events - a plague, a famine, a sudden jump in the availability of metal tools after they learned new smithing techniques from the dwarves, a period of general poor rulership and civil unrest - and suggests that they also get one or both of the most recent volumes to get a better look at how they usually live.