The inn must have some kind of sound-dampening, because the Uzushio merchants, once the thin wood-and-paper door is slid open, are suddenly quite loud, when they'd been inaudible before. The topic of discussion they walk in on seems to be a spirited debate about calculus.

The proprietor makes what seem to be very formal introductions. The merchants seem somewhat more outgoing than the locals, at least, going by how quickly they welcome the newcomers into their circle. They're mostly possessed of varying shades of brilliantly red hair, with eyes ranging from grey to purple, and tanned, weather-beaten skin. Most of them have difficult to place ages, somewhere vaguely in adulthood, though there's one teenager. (Apparently trade, like friendship, must take place over food.)

Ertan seems a little less nervous here, and Raafi is right at home. "Hello, gentlemen. I hear you buy copper? We use it for coins, where I'm from, and I have some with me."

"Ah, yes! The seal masters like it, and sometimes do impressively bizarre things to it, so there's always a demand for more. Pure copper's worth most, of course, but alloys are workable," says the lead, a vaguely older woman. Her hair's done up in a complicates series of buns and braids, decorated with slips of paper with odd, unreadable writing on them hung from gleaming metal hair-sticks. Her robes are silk brocade, showing patterns of waves and spirals.

"Not alloys, no, though I'm not sure about impurities in particular." He takes a small bag from his belt and offers her a coin from it. "Like that - with various stamps, but I expect the value's in the metal." The coin in question has a face with odd pointed ears on one side and a bird on the other.

She takes it, and a soft distortion in the air - rather like water, or a heat wave - surrounds her hand and it. "Pretty good quality," she says. "Metal coins aren't too common, here. Mainland pretty much uses beads or commodity money. I can offer..." And she names an amount of certain kinds of tea blocks, beads, or mixture, for a given weight of copper.

He nods. "Can you give me an idea of what I can expect that to buy?"

Tea and silk are more valuable, by size, than beads - one bead of this particular size and quality will get you a simple meal for one, most places. These beads are worth about half that; there's beads worth up to about ten times that. A night at a safe traveler's inn usually costs two of the larger beads. The cheapest tea block is worth around twice that, but the tea blocks are meant to be easily divided, and nicer ones are a denser way of storing worth. This particular copper coin will buy five of the simple-meal-sized beads.

(She's low-balling her prices, but seems to believe she's still giving him a good deal.)

This comes out over a meandering conversation, mostly involving her but with the others chiming in as well. This inn charged such-and-such but had the most wonderful food, and exquisite company... Tea and silk are rather valuable in the Land of Iron, did you know they don't even have ninja there... Copper's mined in this handful of locations, and she's been all over the continent this trip, and is set to head home soon... Of course, she'd also love to hear where he's from, and what sorts of things they have there. Exotic trinkets always go over well in Uzushio, since travel off the island's so hard. And if he's looking for something else other than just basic commodities, well, she does have assorted trade goods unique to Uzushio left over.

He's a curious and attentive conversationalist, more interested in hearing her stories than telling his own and not in the least impatient about any digressions, but willing to talk when prompted - he doesn't mention that there are gods, but doesn't otherwise hide that the magic is different, and will answer any other questions that they have.

After some forty-five minutes, he finds an opportunity to mention that he needs to take a moment to refresh his translation spell before it runs out; he can step outside to do the required few seconds of chanting, but if they'd like to watch he's happy to demonstrate.

She's interested in watching, certainly. Her own schooling in magic is really just the basics, but it's all so interesting, isn't it?

It really is! He's not a theorist, unfortunately, but he's sure some will come through eventually.

He chants and gestures, and there's a strange feeling in the air for a moment, and then he's done.

Interesting, certainly.

He's expecting more trade between his homeland and here, then?

Probably not soon; it'll take a while to figure out what went wrong with the spell that brought them here and duplicate the effect in a targeted way. But now that it's known to be possible he's sure it'll happen eventually.

Sensible. What sorts of things can they do with their magic, if he doesn't mind sharing?

A pretty good variety of things! He's partial to movement magic and summoning, personally, and of course healing, but there are eight schools, which he gives a brief rundown of.

Huh. That's not much like theirs at all. They have different known applications that people specialize in, but they're not really discrete. Nothing stopping you from using medical techniques to injure someone, except another skilled medic watching you. Chakra's in everyone and everything, and it's made up of mental and physical energy, so you can move it around by, well, moving or thinking, or ideally both. Most people've figured out combat applications, and throwing rocks at people is a fairly basic way to use earth techniques, but there's nothing stopping you from using earth techniques for building - the Lord Hokage reportedly built the whole city in a day with wood techniques - or fire techniques for cooking, or the techniques to summon nin-animals to summon humans around. Her own people specialize in sealing, which is pretty much putting things in other things and increasingly abstract applications of that.

Oh, that's very different from his. Spells in his system are discrete objects with specific effects, like a cart or a sword. He can do harm in ways that are similar to his ability to heal, but it requires preparing different spells; he can't choose freely between them in the moment.

Inscribed techniques can be a bit like that, in that you have to decide ahead of time what they'll do. Does his magic affect everyday life much?

Well, for him it does, being a cleric, but most people can't do any magic, and people who can cast powerful spells are fairly uncommon. So, less than here, it seems like.

Outside of Konoha (this city) or the capitol, or similar places in other nations, there's actually a wide variance. Technology makes a bigger difference in most people's lives than chakra, since training's so rare on the mainland. Can't exactly teach magic from a book, and Konoha's the first here to try teaching civilians' children in a long time. But it'd be hard to compare without traveling all over, and it's hard to travel all over and stay safe if you don't know the land and its dangers.

He'll have to have a look at their technology, to see how it compares to what he's used to. And the kind of magic Ertan does can, actually, be taught from a book - his kind too, technically, but it's not something people will reliably pick up that way even if they have the aptitude for it.

Technically a genius could probably follow directions right, but it's easier to feel your own chakra with a teacher's help, and if you run out of chakra, you die. Students don't have a good sense for their chakra levels, so they need to be monitored. Are there risks to learning their magics?

She has samples of smaller technological items, but she unfortunately doesn't have blueprints, and doesn't know for sure who on the mainland would be willing to sell any.

He's interested in the technology anyway; he knows people back home who he expects can reverse-engineer them.

His magic isn't dangerous like that at all - spells come in tiers, and each person will have a certain number of spells of each tier that they're able to prepare at once, and that's it; once all those spells are cast, they're out of magic for the day, but nothing else happens in particular.

Huh.

Her technology is mostly trade good type things, and mostly clockwork - she has music boxes, and wind-up toys, and wind-up pocket watches, and the like. She's aware of other technologies - people have been very excited about trains and electric lights, lately, and her homeland's recently started making arithmometers, a sort of clockwork piece that does math. There's a entrepreneur up in Lightning that makes these wonderful little images with a box and some light, she had her picture taken by him - isn't it lovely? He called it 'photography.' Someone up in Iron - lovely girl, very dour though - was also talking about finding a better way to print books than movable type, getting people to switch to a simpler writing system didn't take hold and moving all the little symbols around is awfully inconvenient apparently...

(She doesn't know much about practical stuff - oh, sure, there's machines farmers use, but she's never looked at one - and there's an assortment of things she's assuming are just basic that get off-handed mentions.)

Some of those don't even translate; they must be quite a bit ahead of his world. He's definitely interested; it might even be worth selling one of his magic items, to get enough local currency to get samples of whatever's available here.

She's rather interested in hearing about magic items. Of course, not all of it may fit what she's looking for to buy, but it sounds like such an interesting story...

And Konoha doesn't have any trains - they're a very large way of moving people and goods, and she doesn't know of anywhere outside of the Lands of Earth or Iron that has the infrastructure - but should have most of the other everyday things.