"Memory's going to be popular with us paper pusher types, poison resistance almost certainly with the alchemists, endurance with laborers and adventurers, but you probably know that."

He waves them towards an elegant-looking marble building. 

"These are the city archives. I don't know what you're looking for, but we have histories, copies of founding documents of the city, copies of all the treaties and laws, autobiographies of important people, everything you can think of related to the running of a Walled City. It'll take me a while to rustle up the people you need to talk to, so Sacrra can give you the tour and assist you with your research."

"Thank you. Did you want to take a vial with you, in case you have questions for me or anything while you're doing that?"

"Oh, can you do that? Of course you can do that. Yes, that would be convenient."

"Here you go." He's been paying attention to local fashion - his own avatar is dressed relatively smartly as travelers go, though definitely as a traveler - and can make a decent attempt at a vial-and-necklace design that matches the senator's outfit without matching it so closely that he won't be able to wear it with anything else he might own.

"Stylish," compliments the senator. "And I suppose I don't need to make the parting pleasantries, as you're also coming with me."

"Mmhmm," he chuckles. "You can ignore me if you're busy, though, most of my attention is on other things." Such as the library his avatar is now heading for.

The senator heads off down the street again, and the secretary, Sacrra, a blue-scaled Drake, can take him into the archives.

"What kind of document are you looking for, here?"

"Old ones please, the older the better, describing what the world was like at the time they were written. If they have old newspapers that would be a good place to start."

"If you're asking the very oldest substantial records we have, those will be the incomplete founding documents of Manus, dated between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. They write about the geopolitical landscape of the time, major threats and resource constraints, discourse on governance and law...?"

"That might be a reasonable place to start. Do you know what's missing from them?"

"I don't particularly remember, but the index will probably tell you."

And she can talk to the archivist to get access to the materials in question.

"These are all copies, so don't worry about incidental damage—not that you're allowed to damage them, I just mean they're not priceless historical artifacts."

"Thank you. While I'm looking at these, can you try to figure out what the oldest document like this is - one about daily life, fairly broadly - that I can see the complete original of?"

"How are you defining a document? When I say incomplete documents I mean—we don't have some of the documents we know once existed, but the remaining ones are individually complete. For example, we have the full text of the founding constitution of Manus, though that might not be 'daily life', as you say."

"Something weird and magic-looking is happening with the thing I'm trying to find out about; I'm worried that the topic will be missing from anything that's been copied or had parts removed. And unfortunately if I tell you what I'm looking for we'll run into the magic. So - something with a complete enough view of the world that if the thing I'm thinking of was around - and it would have been a pretty big deal if it was - then it'd be strange for it not to have been mentioned, and where any mentions definitely won't have been lost."

That sounds incredibly concerning?

"Would the autobiography of a notable historical figure work?"

It is incredibly concerning, he's just expressing his concern elsewhere.

"That sounds promising."

"...I'll see if I can dig something up."

And he'll read the founding documents, or rather go through their index to see what's missing and whether there are any suspicious patterns in that.

It is wholly unsuspicious. No, really. Archival damage is just what happens when your documents are over twenty millennia old, and your city gets sieged or spellbombed every few decades, and internally couped every couple of centuries, and once-in-a-thousand-years disasters happen once every thousand years. They've only preserved as much as they have, which is actually a lot, because the Walled Cities keep separate copies and corroborate with each other now and then.

The missing bits are fairly miscellanously distributed and cited as "destroyed in the fourth-floor collapse of the Second War of the Plains" or "damaged in the Great Fire of XXXX" et cetera. Some sections are entirely destroyed, but they're mostly things like addendums on civil law, or minutiae of inheritance tax policy, or treaties with cities which no longer exist.

That's good news. Is there any mention of gods? If the index doesn't mention them he'll start by scanning through their diplomatic records.

There is an index by topic, yes; gods are not in that index, no. Diplomatic records chronicle relationships with other cities, with small towns and settlements under Manus' aegis, with the Gnoll tribes, with Dragons and Dragon-cities, with emissaries from other continents...

Despite this being ostensibly the founding of Manus, it's clearly understood that the physical city of Manus predates the city-state being founded in these records which the modern Walled City of Manus claims continuity from (there are archivists' notes for the reader in the more popular articles!) so the diplomatic situation isn't starting from scratch.

The records do not speak fondly of the prior rulers of the Manus, of which "Manorachtt", also named the "Dragonlord of War" and the "War-Tyrant", is most mentioned, and said to have been expelled from the city but not slain.

The overarching challenge at the time seems to be diplomatizing the states previously allied with Old Manus who are now being petitoned by the tyrant in exile to condemn and declare war against the new Manus government's treasonous seizure of the city. (The writers sound assured that the latter is unlikely, but the former may be problematic for the city's long-term diplomatic and economic prospects.)

Manorachtt sounds plausibly like a god; is there any clear indication that he wasn't one?

The authors probably think this is extremely obvious and so don't specify by default, but some careful reading will turn up multiple sentences which unambiguously imply that Manorachtt is a Dragon. Further reading suggests some states are ruled by Dragons, some are not, and many Dragons do not rule or reside in states.

So, not a god, probably a dead end. He'll look more into dragons later. What about trade relationships, that seems like another promising avenue, even if this region wasn't claimed by any gods maybe they were trading with someplace farther afield that was. He'll pay particular attention to the place names, see if any of them seem like people names. (Places that aren't people are often named for their features, after all, and even when linguistic drift means the meanings have been lost to mortals, he can tell.)

Manus is named after a person! Its original name was essentially a conjugation of Manorachtt's name (which is itself is also a localization) to mean "dominion of Manorachtt", which drifted over time in common usage and has been officially, legally declared as "Manus" only with the recent regime change.

A lot of important cities around here have similar etymology. Smaller towns are indeed often named after natural features, but still sometimes after people, though not usually using the dominion-of linguistic construction (there's actually multiple such constructions).

The north side of the continent has more boringly named federations, but there are still some city-states or cities named after people, some of them in the dominion-of style, some of them not.

Does he want intercontinental trade too? Gnolls tribes?