There's a sort of main boulevard winding along near the edge of the river. Much of the shops and establishments appear to have signage on the assumption that their patrons are illiterate; the signs consist instead of symbols or literal objects hung from the lintels. If they walk for a while, the Nail and Anchor will be obvious enough. 

Cheliax is the only place she's ever heard of where most people can read.

She goes into the Nail and Anchor, with Detect Thoughts up again.

It's crowded and loud and smoky. The main floor has a dozen tables, each dimly-lit by a lantern; some have a bit of extra lighting, which seems to be magical. 

The barkeep at the counter is gossiping with a regular patron about how the price of bananas is up this year and this is dumb, and thinking about rent being due next week and whether they should tell security to keep an extra eye on that group in the corner, there's nothing specific they just look sort of suspect. The barmaid serving drinks to tables is wishing she were a mage herself and could tell whether other mages were any good just by looking, because mages are hot but sometimes they just tell you they're Adepts when they're in their cups and actually they're only Journeymen.

The man at this table is a Master mage and looking for work that is anywhere except a ship, please gods can he never be on water again, 'seasick' used to be just words but it's all too real now. The woman sitting across from him is mulling on what question she could ask to determine he's not like the last mage they hired on, who was fine at defensive wards but turned out to be scared of fire, who ever heard of a mage scared of fire, seriously. 

This is really overwhelming and Mhalir hopes Carissa has a better idea of how to approach it than he does. 

It's a tavern! Adventurers are the same worlds over, probably. She orders a drink and sits down and makes herself a crumpled paper map to look at and waits for people to come around and make conversation.

Shortly later the young Master mage talking to the woman hiring determines that no the mercenary company she wants a guard for is going upriver for their next contract and barges are TOO CLOSE to ships, and he politely extracts himself, mills around a bit and orders another drink, and then looks around and sees Carissa. He can't tell at a glance if she's hiring or looking for work herself, but either way she's hot, so he heads over. Smiles. "Hey." 

"Hey. I'm new here, who's hiring?"

"New, huh?" He sits across from her, raises an eyebrow. "Where're you from?" 

"Cheliax." Despairing gesture. "It's way east of here and no one's heard of it. I originally meant to go north of here, but apparently they're having some kind of trouble?" It's a guess; maybe they have that much defensive shielding for no reason at all.

Shrug. "I wouldn't know, I just got back from out west, you know, other side of all those mountains. You could ask Maude?" He points vaguely with his chin at the woman he was just speaking to. "She's taking her company upriver. Wants to hire for mages first, if that's your line of work– you an Adept?" He's thinking that most people aren't and he certainly doesn't know how to read Gift-potential at a glance, but she gives off an undefinable aura of competence. "If you've the stomach for mercenary work, the signing bonus she's offering for Adepts is pretty damned sweet." 

"I can take care of myself but we have different names for mage levels, where I'm from, I don't know which of yours I'd be. What's the mission, did she say?"

"I, uh, didn't get that many specifics." Because he bailed as soon as 'river barge' was mentioned, but he's embarrassed to say that now. "She mentioned hazard pay, though. So - could be risky, but you'll get your gold for it."

"Is she reliable?"

"Uh, haven't worked with her before, but Jiav–" gesture at the bartender, "recommended her, said she's all right. She's pretty new as a mercenary captain but she pays her people on time." 

"Mmmm. Have you ever been upriver? What country even is that..."

"I've been up a ways, but never out of Acar Province. She's going a lot further north than that, said the job's in–" his brow furrows, "Rubhani Province, I think, it's still part of the Ceej but it's over five hundred miles. Got some sort of trouble on their border." 

"Maybe I'll talk to her." That doesn't necessarily suggest teleportation isn't widespread, if you're moving adventurers and their support staff to a location none of them have been before it might make sense to go by boat rather than pay someone at seventh circle with Greater Teleport to shuttle them. But it's a little bit of information, at least.

"Well, good luck." He shakes his head, then smiles at her. "What's it like where you're from, anyway?" 

"Cheliax?" A sudden twinge of pain which doesn't make it onto her face at all. "It's all right. We say we've got the best schools for mages in the world, though I haven't seen enough world to know if it's true, yet."

"Wow!" He's a bit intimidated now, she sounds so smart. "You went to school for it, then, not just an apprenticeship?" 

"Yes. In Cheliax we think apprenticeships are inefficient, you only learn one approach and you take the same amount of time even if you're very promising and it's hard to compare people objectively across teachers. I think you need a high density of mages to make schools work, though, otherwise they're not that different from apprenticeships and without even the part where you picked someone off a recommendation." She's had this conversation, before, at the Worldwound, though there everyone was looking at her with what in retrospect she can identify as pity.

He isn't looking at her with pity at all; he's impressed, and wondering why he's never heard of this place before, and he's now thinking less about how she's hot and more about how maybe the clever thing here would be to get tips from her. "What sorts of, er, approaches did you learn?" 

Unless there's some really good reason not to I'm going to show him some spells and see how impressed he is or isn't, she tells Mhalir.

<It seems worth it for the information it will give us. If it draws a lot of attention we should find an excuse to leave, probably, but we will change our appearance afterward anyway.> 

Yeah. 

She doesn't have the slightest idea what'll be impressive here. Possibly even third-circle spells they haven't invented won't be that impressive, because they'll be able to see how you'd do it - but that's information all by itself -

She casts Hostile Levitation on him, because it will also be informative about the local mages's Will saves.