Very reasonable!  There's "In the desert and the jungle" with a lion on the cover, "Captain Blood" with a pirate ship, "With Fire And Sword" with a battle scene, "Winnetou" with a long-haired man on a horse, "The Three Musketeers" with some fancy-looking noblemen, and whole shelves more.  These people really like putting very detailed colorful pictures on their books!  And they really like adventure novels.

Back home the little paintings in front would've probably cost more than the rest of the book cut together. It's not the sort of thing you could do with a woodcut, she doesn't think.

Are any of the books about woman adventurers, as far as she can tell from the covers? Back home that sort of thing wasn't too hard to find, but the Asmodeans said that other countries women were hardly allowed to do anything, and she doesn't know how much of that was a lie.

... Yeah, it sure looks like the Asmodeans were right about that one.  She's not finding any books about women in the adventure section.  There are some in the "fantasy" section, some in history, more in "novels of manners" and romances.

Well, if the romance novels here are anything like the Asmodean kind, she'd rather avoid them. (Probably they're not exactly the same, but still.) Novels of manners sound like they could be useful for learning about what sorts of things get you punished, but not that interesting to read, and she's got no idea what fantasy even is. She'll take a look at whichever story about adventurers has the prettiest cover, not counting the ones that look like they're obviously about nobles.

The pirate one it is!  It starts with the main character peacefully practicing medicine and being sentenced to death by an evil judge for healing some wounded rebels against the government.  Instead of being hanged, he's sold into slavery on some island colony because the Crown wants the money.  When a foreign ship attacks the colony, he and several companions in a similar situation attack it, capture it, and sail away to a long and successful pirate career with the ex-doctor as their captain.  They do a lot of entertainingly outfoxing evil nobles, freeing slaves from ships they capture, planning daring missions to save their friends from certain death, and the like.  The captain has a slow and very un-Asmodean romance with the niece of the evil noble who originally bought him.

Oh! It's a story about a Chaotic Good adventurer. That's... probably a good sign, she thinks, if the Church and Crown are letting people write books about Chaotic Good people who help people that are fighting the government? And it seems like when the judge says that anyone who helps the rebels is also a traitor even if they don't fight themselves, the book is saying that that's bad — which is kind of confusing, actually, she'd have thought basically any country would think that, it doesn't even seem false, but the book was just sitting out in the open, so probably it's not illegal to imply that the government is wrong to think that?

She will happily read the book until they have to leave, if no one stops her. The romance makes her feel kind of weird and twisty (which is kind of stupid, the books is pretty clear on the fact that even though the woman is related to an Evil noble she isn't Evil herself), but the other parts are pretty good.

There isn't enough time for her to get through most of the book, but Marek doesn't mind letting her read until they have to head back to catch their train.  (She looked happy for a while there!)

"We should get back to the station, but they might have this book at the library?  Or some of the other adventure ones, definitely."

She didn't think he was a scholar, or for that matter that a library would keep books like these around? ...Maybe they have more kinds of libraries here, and some of them are designed for adventurers or something, and he's... a retired adventurer? Someone with connections to retired adventurers?

She nods, sets the book gently back where she found it, and follows Mr. Dąbrowski.

He does maybe seem more like a retired adventurer than the people around them.  Something about the way he moves, something about the way he reacts to people.  But it's a faint difference.

They can make their way back to the station. "You like reading?"  He sounds like that's a good thing.

"It depends on what I'm reading, sir." That should be safe enough, and not likely to make him think that she enjoys reading the Asmodean Disciplines or something.

"It usually does, yes."  Amused.  "We have a public library and there's another one at the school, you should be able to find things you like."  He doesn't tend to spend much time in libraries himself, but he's pretty sure they have adventure books.

"...What's a public library?" 

"It's... a library anyone can go to?  You have to get a library card - hmm, I think maybe you need to live or work in the town or somewhere nearby, I'm not exactly sure what the rules are - but anyone can get a card for their nearest library or a few of them and then borrow books.  For free.  There's a lot of books about all sorts of things - to read for fun, or to learn about whatever you like."

He gets more enthusiastic about the topic as he goes on. It's a pretty great achievement of humanity, and he's proud of it, even if he doesn't personally take advantage of it much.  It really does seem like she's been deprived of the last few centuries of humanity's achievements, and unfortunate as that is, it does make him happy that he can show them to her.

What stops someone from just stealing all the books to sell — no, that makes sense, you have to live in the town, so the library would know who you are, so they could just hunt you down and cut off your hand. Or, uh, lock you in prison, she guesses.

"If it's free to borrow the books, how does the person who owns the library afford the books in the first place?"

"The government owns the library - that's how nearly everything that's public is, it means the government is responsible for it, like the roads and the parks and the trains."  This makes him wish they could afford free trains.  (...He used to just straightforwardly think they should do that, make as many of the important things as possible free for everyone, but it seems that the world doesn't quite work that way and he is now not sure which things should be free and which ones shouldn't, and why.  But he doesn't get the impression that the librarians want to start going on strikes, so that at least is probably fine.)

"The money comes from the taxes everyone pays.  It's worth it for everyone to pay enough in taxes to have libraries, because they're much cheaper than if everyone had to buy their own books, and because everyone benefits when people who couldn't afford books can still learn things, and because - books aren't like food or trains, where it's really obvious that it's useful.  Everyone will buy food and train tickets if they have any money at all.  But with books if you never see them it would be really easy to miss how important they are, so it's much better for everyone when they're free and people don't have to think about whether reading a book is worth paying for it."

...He hasn't been in a Young Communist discussion club in years, why is he still like this?  She probably only wanted the first half-sentence, not a long explanation of why he thinks it's important for the government to do things.  It's just that she sounds like she doesn't know.

She's pretty sure most people would rather keep more of what they grow than be able to borrow books without paying for them?? For that matter, she doesn't really see why the "president" or "ministers" would care whether it's good for people — or, well, it could be like the schools back home but a bit less Lawful?

"If people can get books from the library for free then why does anyone buy them from the bookstore?" No, wait, that's a stupid question, probably people who are really rich are happy to spend extra money rather than borrowing free books like a regular person.

"People like to have all sorts of things they don't really need, if they can afford to, and books aren't very expensive.  And not all the books are in the library, if you want a specific one, especially if it's new."

Well, sure, books aren't going to cost as much as the clothing people here are wearing, but that doesn't mean they're cheap, especially when they've got those little paintings — or, actually, they're not making them with wizards, she doesn't actually have any idea how much they cost.

"...How much do they cost? And, uh, how do you make them if you don't have wizards, do you have to just... copy by hand, with lots and lots of practice to make all the letters look the same?"

"The cheaper ones are fifty to a hundred thousand.  ...Uh, do you know how much anything costs?"  The next question definitely doesn't sound like it.

"I know how much things cost in Chelish dollars? And I know the train ticket was five thousand gold. But I think gold here must be a different size from gold at home, or something, fifty thousand gold is a lot more than anyone I've ever met could've possibly afforded to spend on anything, even the lord."

Their weird cult was big enough to have its own money??  He is so confused.  But really it's best to just - explain the world to her, no matter why exactly she wants the explanation, rather than try to delve into what could possibly be going on with her, which will make his head hurt and likely not help anything.

"I've never heard of Chelish dollars, so that won't help much.  But yes, it's not gold, it's just what the money is called, it hasn't been real gold in centuries.  Five thousand isn't much at all.  All the numbers are so high for... complicated historical reasons... but really just think of a 'thousand' as the normal unit of money and it'll make more sense.  So - people earn about two million a month, maybe three if they're important.  A train ticket or a loaf of bread is five or ten thousand, an egg or a bag of potatoes is two, a kilogram of meat is fifty and you can buy a cheap book for that, especially if it's used.  So it's not something people buy every week like candy, but most people can probably buy one every month, if they like books more than they like having better food or new clothes."

She's not sure that those numbers make sense all together, but there were kind of a lot of them, and some of them were really big, and she doesn't have paper so she'd be trying to calculate it out in her head. She's pretty sure either meat is really cheap here or bread is really expensive, but she's not sure, and the person she's pretending to be would definitely know, so it's probably safer not to say anything about that.

(Regular people in Cheliax do buy books sometimes, if they want to, but it sounds like they're still cheaper here. Things were kind of weird back home, since most people working at her lord's manor were getting paid partly in room and board, but that wouldn't apply to the person she's pretending to be either.)

"...How much is new clothing?"

"Well, it depends a lot, but - twenty or more for a shirt, about a hundred for shoes, I think.  I don't really buy new clothes."  Bit of a rueful smile.

Blink blink blink. "A shirt costs the same as a couple loaves of bread???"

"It does!  Maybe three or four, but yes." 

He has to think a moment about why she's surprised, but--  "Oh!  It's because weaving cloth is done by machines.  And spinning, and a lot of sewing.  We can have all the clothes we want and nobody has to sit at a loom or a spindle all day."  He looks happy, talking about this, even more than about the libraries.  "And it's the same with books - nobody's writing them by hand, we have machines to make thousands of copies, that's why they're so cheap and the letters are all the same.  But people still make bread by hand.  Machines do the harvesting, mostly, so bread is easier to get too, but the machines make more of a difference for clothes than for bread, I think, and that's why the prices come out like that."  He doesn't know much about prices, but it would make sense, in comparison to how things used to be.

... And then there's how things used to be ten years ago, when they had all the same machines but a lot fewer clothes, and he thought everything was going well and it was just the best they could do, but it wasn't...  That thought makes him less happy, but he's not going to try to explain it, when he doesn't really understand it himself.  They should stay in the present for now, anyway.