"Generally, if it involves combat or the risk of combat as the most salient feature of the job. Being crew on a sailing ship doesn't count if you actually do sailing work yes we check, is one contentious one that comes up a lot. Though of course you'll defend the ship if it gets attacked. Being a passenger doesn't make you owe anything either. Skilled adventurers tend to get free ship passage, by the way, another perk of the Guild! I'll get you a copy of the full definition."

Then miss receptionist gets Eefina's signature.

Eefina pins the tin guild-plate to her dress and heads back out. She doesn't stop to talk with the other adventurers who're hanging around. Not yet, anyway. She has something else to do first.

Is getting into the city as straightforward as advertised, now?

She still has to wait in line. But she doesn't need papers or her property given more than a cursory inspection or to pay an entry fee!

Excellent.

City!

Now, which way is Cupil's missing bit leading her, and how far away is it?

The bit is that-a-way into the city, about half a kilometer away!

Eefina heads that direction at a leisurely pace, on a circuitous route, trying not to look like she's headed anywhere in particular. Its not hard. Cities have so much stuff.

This city totally has stuff! It has apartment buildings and shops and museums and restaurants and fighting rings and slave markets and shipyards and big workshops and churches and government buildings and parks and giant murals and a distinctly poorer area with a much higher proportion of nonhumans!

At least two of those things are concerning, but all of it is New Stuff that Eefina is Getting To See In-Person For The First Time.

Eventually she makes her way close enough to Cupil's droplet to see what sort of building they're keeping Tax-Evasion Woman in.

The droplet is in a depressing-looking blocky stone building a short distance away from a building labeled 'Rotula Guard Chapter House'. Second floor.

Eefina doesn't do anything obvious like stop and stare, but she doubles back to wander by several times while window shopping, until she's memorized every wall, every window, every door, and all visible security, sketching an incomplete floorplan in her head as she goes.

It's a big square, hiding a lot about the internal floorplan. Four aboveground levels. Visible security is vigilant guards on the entrances, of which there are three. They're fairly busy with servants and more guards coming in and out, and the servants are scrutinized with a device every time they pass but the guards aren't patting down every servant or directly investigating them particularly closely. The windows are too small for (humans) to squeeze through.

She stands out wherever she goes due to her unusual clothes.

She knows she stands out. That's why she's not getting a closer look. But brains take time to process information. The more she sees now, the lower the odds she trips over something stupid later.

Can she see or derive or sense anything about the servant-screening device without getting closer?

It looks like the things they use to verify the ID cards at the gate and the Guild. Not the exact same, but similar.

Not impossible to get in in person, then, but also possibly unnecessary, to achieve her current goal. Is the woman's cell outer-wall adjacent?

The dot moves down and to the center during her observations, then back up to its original spot after about an hour. She seems to be in one of the outer rooms, yes.

That'll make this easier. Having confirmed that, Eefina wanders around until she finds a shop selling writing supplies.

This two-story place located near the impressively sprawling Academy campus markets to rich students and has a lot of writing supplies. Scrolls, notebooks, loose-leaf, a format of palm-sized papers billed as 'seals'. Ink pens of varying fanciness, plus brushes and paint, pencils, chalk. Vellum, papyrus, parchment, or paper, plain or colored or scented.

It also has such conveniences as always-full pens, fancy book covers and scroll cases with protective magic, magical photocopiers, notebooks you can index and then search through, paper that will copy the entire contents of a blackboard onto itself, paper that cleans itself on command, an excessive variety of subtly different inks in little glass bottles, a sturdy scroll that draws a map of your surroundings on itself as you walk and shows your path in trailing dotted lines, Dragonfire Resistant* paper, underwater pens/paper/ink, a pen that takes dictation with supposedly excellent accuracy, and a slate you can write and draw on by visualizing what you want to appear at it.

All this stuff is so much less useful than a light screen and an analytical engine but if anything that just makes the sheer variety all the more amazing and fun.

After a minute or so, Eefina remembers why she's there in the first place, and wrenches herself away to buy the simplest, smallest amount of stationary she can in a material that'll endure being folded or rolled up real small, and the cheapest writing implement that does not need a separate ink well to work.

Once she's away from the shop, purchases in hand, she looks for a nice bench to sit down on. It must be a bench with approximate line of sight to the prison and it must be placed on non-paved ground. Can she find something like that?

The city is built pretty densely this far in, but the prison has a fair amount of space cleared around it so there are most of four streets to choose from. As far as options go, there's a few people's front gardens, a small park that's too far to have a really good view, and a restauraunt where the tables sit on stone, but there are flower gardens around.

...the park is probably safest, though if she picks that one this is going to take a while. Though 'a while' is relative. The alternative is waiting for night, and that'll definitely take longer.

Sitting down in the park, she writes, I WANT YOUR SIDE OF THE STORY, across the top of a sheet, and then, smaller, I will destroy this after reading it.

Eefina wraps the note around the writing implement, making it as small as possible. Then she feeds it to Cupil.

Cupil stealthily snakes his way down her leg, hidden by her dress and the bench she's sitting on, and then he burrows into the earth at her feet. Cupil is not designed for this. He's not actually that strong when not holding a rigid form, but he can manage.

Eefina leans back and pretends she's watching the clouds, hands folded demurely in her lap. Cupil definitely wasn't designed for this part. His artificial Spirit Field was never meant to not overlap with Eefina's biological Spirit Field, and as soon as he leaves their mutual range, a wave of disorientation washes over both as their unity is shattered. They're still connected, and indeed, that is the whole problem. Their senses are fighting against each other, dragging Eefina's perception back and forth between Cupil and her own body.

Cupil was never meant to be a remote drone, and it is only barely possible to use him for the purpose, thanks to this side-effect that the Shrine's artificers still haven't reverse-engineered. Aside from her self, of her peers only Kalirez was ever able to manage it...

Cupil's senses aren't anything like her own, either. He only really has the one: a sort of Spirit Field echolocation.

Slowly, over the course of an hour, Cupil burrows under the street, all the way to the prison, right up to the wall directly beneath Tax-Evasion Woman's window. Eefina waits for an opportune moment, then has Cupil slither up the wall and dart into a corner of the ceiling of the woman's cell.

She's unrestrained, sleeping on a bed. She has lost her hood and boots somewhere along the line. The cell is a bit cramped, but not deliberately cruel. It has a solid metal door with a large barred shutter, currently closed.

Oh, that's nearly ideal.

In that case, Eefina has Cupil take his friendly sphere shape and Tax-Evasion Woman can then be awoken by the application of parcel to forehead.

"Ow! Wha- Aaaah! It's that fuckin' suffocating goo thing!"

The fuckin' suffocating goo thing simply floats up by the ceiling with a guileless :) on its... front.

That's kind of creepy. She stares at it suspiciously, backing against the far corner of her cell.