She wants to read about Dangerous Fauna! And Safe Weapons! And magazines!

She'll read about fire.

There are lots of dangerous fauna! Vicious alien pack predators with sharp claws and beaks and huge solitary alien predators with poisoned bladed tentacles uncreatively called 'bladesquid' and these red and orange spiked things called 'fire floaters' that tend to explode and sky whales, which are more dangerous for their massive size than anything else.

Safe weapons are mostly crossbows and slings and pneumatic harpoon launchers and pressurized-air rifles and the like. The magazines are very eclectic, no one series seems complete. There's fashion magazines and gossip rags and restaurant reviews and political treatises and popular science magazines with flashy illustrations and a couple History Of Our Noble City type things. They're all beat up, and it doesn't seem like more than three are from the same place.

Fire prevention is a hard job! Ship fires are nasty even if you use helium as a lift gas because there's nowhere to run and nowhere to get water. Honestly a fire on a ship without a very excellent suppression system is a death sentence unless you have escape pods or something. It's better on a large town, but most native life is, er, highly flammable, so always be careful! The best thing if you can manage it is to toss whatever's burning overboard, not your problem anymore. The chance it'll land on someone else and still be burning is very small, but such a thing has ever happened before.

She will remember about fauna and weapons for Mia. She will bookmark political and science and history of noble city for Xeyr. She will read science! Illustrations? And fashion and gossip.

What do they have for suppression, and escape pods? Does the material the islands are made of catch fire, or explode, or something else dangerous?

There's foam and water and compressed gases, for fire suppression. The top layer of floatstone will burn, but it won't burn all the way through in most fires. Some islands are made of many interconnected clumps of the stuff, held together by roots, not one solid piece - those fare worse.

Do they - fall apart?

The fire burns hotter faster because of air channels and readily available soft green matter. But that too, yes.

Escape pods?

Signs loudly declaring LIFEBOAT all lead to metal-and-plastic baskets with four seats and a bundle of equipment and fabric overhead, and what looks like a hatch out. There's no instruction manual on the lifeboats, though.

There's also a runabout in a sort of loading bay. Another, smaller ship inside the big ship, with its own engine and so on. Maybe ten people could cram into it if they had to.

Maybe she can offer to help make instruction sheets, later. 

She takes further reading material from what Jewel bookmarked.

Meanwhile: science? Gossip? Fashion?

The magazines are clearly flashy summaries that don't go into technical detail, but they have vaccines and understand genetics and used to be able to do genetic engineering (most crops are heavily engineered) but can't anymore. They have fancy chemistry and radios and computing and mathematical theory and aerodynamics. The magazines lament that so much has been lost and probably will continue to be lost as time passes.

Nobody knows how the Stargate worked, and it's broken beyond repair, probably. Even if someone could build a rocket ship and go check it out in geostationary orbit, even if they could fix it, the other side might have been taken down by now anyway! What a tragedy. Maybe we should build a giant radio beacon and point it at Earth asking them to send another. (But who will pay for it?, someone scrawled in the margin.)

Gossip is potentially illuminating on local culture. It all seems to be from different places that work fairly differently, too.

The richest man in town has three mistresses, and one is pregnant! His wife wants a divorce and all his money. Their son took a sack of gold and left in the night. What a delicious scandal all around!

We caught the serial killer by tracking down the source of the poison he was using! His trial is scheduled for next week. The editor hopes he will be imprisoned for life.

The outbreak of flu was successfully contained by an aggressive quarantine. Two people were shot for trying to break quarantine. Their bodies were burned and returned to next of kin. Those idiots put us all in danger!

The Assembly of Houses voted 8-2-1 on a highly controversial measure to legalize prostitution with a lot of limits, which is a pass. There's high-context commentary on the political alliances involved and how this vote affects them.

The flying sports star Ken Lamone broke his leg in the middle of a game. He may be out for months or never play again. This writer is devastated for his favorite team's chances in the finals! ...And Mr. Lamone's health, of course.

Fashion tends to favor either loose baggy clothes and bright colors, or tight-fitting and revealing things in patterns, for 'city folk'. Pants, gloves and boots, tough looking leather, big coats, and so on are ship folk clothes. A touch of shiny metal as an accessory or embellishment is good for any fashion as long as it's not overly gaudy or gemstone-festooned or something.

:( things being lost. She wants to build a giant radio beacon! This will probably not be allowed. Xeyr's traveling thing and the other things are mean.

Computing?

She bookmarks the prostitution thing for Xeyr. 

If they have enough money maybe she can get pretty clothes! If they don't she can still have looked at pictures of pretty clothes!

Meanwhile she'll look at some political treatises and city history.

Each big city seems to have its own government and laws. Mostly various kinds of democracies and oligarchies, a few explicit dictatorships and monarchies and communist societies.

What does 'communist societies' mean here?

What kind of laws are common here? How much do they vary. (She looks at the bookmarked prostitution law question. What are the limits? Can she know what laws other cities tend to have?) What kind of justice systems?

How common is government turnover?

This collection of magazines is not exactly a comprehensive reference library.

The two sets of communists she can find are a planned economy where luxuries can still be bought and sold, and a semi-anarchic place where the guiding principle of law is group ownership of just about everything.

There are several references to courts and lawyers and tribunals and so on, but none are explained very exhaustively.

Only two of the Houses is allowed to profit off of prostitution, it can only be done in certain places, nobody under the age of 16.

Most of the crimes mentioned are fairly straightforward - arson, murder, rape, theft, fraud, etc. Though how authoritarian places are varies widely. The place that shot quarantine violators was on the high end of that.

It's not at all clear how common government turnover is from these magazines.

Houses?

There's only one magazine from that city, but it sounds like there's an oligarchy and the Great Houses each have areas of rule, and vote on city-wide issues and also do complicated nepotistic political maneuvering with each other.

Mia checks in; they exchange information. 

Have any ship-locals seemed to have any interest in something other than leaving them alone for now? Seeing what they're doing? The aforementioned quiz or tutorial? Explaining how the mealtimes part of room and board works?

Most all of the ship locals are on the island below, chopping down the trees or gathering up the floating seeds. A few of them have been not-very-sneakily watching them.

Cook, who refuses to acknowledge any name but Cook, explains how mealtimes work: Food comes out when he yells that it's ready, if it's gone by the time they get there not his fault. At least for them, that's how it works, anyway.

What do they use the floating seeds for, can one see? Or, what are they doing with them, if not that?

Right then.

Who's watching them? Anything else about the watchers?

The floating seeds get fed into a machine with a tube leading into the upper part of the ship, and empty husks fall out. Probably extracting gas.

A man and a woman in overalls, carrying toolbelts. If they get watched back much, one will approach and ask how familiar they are with ships.