"Bacon is delicious."

"So I've been told!"

Beam! "So when I am..." When am I going to meet the other members of this household?

"Household?"

Do you not live with your parents? I had been under the impression you did.

"No, our parents have a house."

"Oh." Pause. How old are you?

"Nineteen."

And nineteen-year-olds live alone?

"Not necessarily alone, but it's typical to move out of the house when you go to college. We could've stayed at home, we go to the same one Mom teaches at, but we decided it would be better to get used to living alone while we still had the ability to see our parents regularly."

"What is 'college'?"

"Hmm how does education work where you're from."

Young people typically either learn their parents' trade or apprentice at various places. Various Guilds offer apprenticeships, too. There are public libraries and there are the public lecturers typical of Laokab—they just go teach people about things in plazas and such—and the private tutors typical of Bezanab—usually hired by nobles to teach their children, sometimes hired by whole towns to teach a few people when they had a particularly profitable year—and the lecture halls and universities of Teinnab—you need to enrol and have various classes and there's complicated political stuff involved in it. Your translation magic made 'college' sound a bit like these universities but not exactly like them.

"Okay, so here there's primary education, where from the ages of approximately five to thirteen you take mandatory general education, although some of it's skippable if you do well enough, and then there's secondary education, which is from about fourteen to about eighteen, and which is not mandatory but there's social stigma for not completing it. Either or both of these can be replaced by 'homeschooling', which is supposed to teach you all the same things but in a less institutional setting. Then there's college, which involves attending more selective schools where you start specializing in earnest, although some nonzero level of specialization is usually available in secondary education."

Huh. Why is it mandatory? Who mandates it?

"The government? And, like, to make sure you don't get people deciding that education was bad for girls or something and not denying their kids a chance to learn stuff."

That's a thing? The girls thing? Why is it a thing?

"It is not actually a thing, I guess except maybe outside of some really conservative religious people."

...why?

"Does your world not do sexism?"

Very little? Mostly amongst poor people, townsfolk and stuff, but not a whole lot, not to the point of denying girls education.

"It's really not a problem, not in this part of the world--I should have used a different example."

I think I get the gist of it anyway. So education is seen as some fundamental inalienable right here or something?

"In practice, less than it should be, but yes."

Interesting. I suppose it works.