"Anything else you can think of that'd make a good payment - other than local currency, of course..."

"I could offload local texts on a linguistics obsessed prince I know. But diamonds and technology schematics will do."

"If any local texts count, mass printed books are pretty cheap, though they're heavy and take up a lot of space compared to diamonds and blueprints. Probably should get you some science textbooks at least, though, to go along with the technology schematics, especially since I'm not sure how much like a circuit diagram helps if you don't know anything about electrical engineering..."

"Ooh, cheap mass printing."

"Yeah! We've had some kind of mass printing for a couple centuries, but I think it only got cheap a century or so ago, and all the history books make a big deal out of it."

"Copying books can be done fairly quickly with the spell I mentioned but you do need a wizard for it. Not-even-first-level wizards, or sometimes first- or second-level ones, do that or laundry, put themselves through more school."

"I think the printing machines need someone tending them still, but the early printing presses didn't take much training to use, and the current ones are... I think you just need to change out the paper rolls and sometimes maintain the machine? And turn them on and off."

"Yeah, that's way better than what we have."

"They're pretty fast, too, I think."

"Cool."

"Not sure if they still have the thing where they work best for languages with an alphabet - I think old movable type printers had a problem with languages with logograms?"

"I know one of those but it's mostly alphabets."

"Yeah, shouldn't run into that problem then."

"Be inconvenient for the monolingual - oh, you know what should be in my phrasebook, names for all the spells, let's squeeze that in before this wears off -"

They can work on that next, then.

They just barely get that in under the wire and then Belmarniss adds transliterations.

"Do you want to wander around the city today at all? Me and Emma are probably going to spend most of the day cooped up with the cipher from earlier, in case there's more information now that we've started cracking it and so we can ease into leaving."

Headshake.

"Do you want to go with us to the library, then?"

Nod.

"Okay. We'll have to sneak you again - library's restricted access, even if we could explain knowing you and you looked human-ish."

Nod.

Then off to the library it is.

She'll put up with being toted in Bellona.

Getting to the library's relatively painless, then. Emma talks to the two guards about how they're getting to a point where they're mostly stuck, so they're going to spend today making a list of books they remember being in their teacher's library on Xingian alchemy and language. It's possible the cipher is referencing those, they think. (The guards mostly do not seem to have the technical vocabulary to poke holes in this.)

"That Fox's Cunning spell would probably help us a lot with the ciphers," she says as Emma pulls out their work from earlier. "And we should figure out what we're doing once we're ready to leave..."