"Oh, of course - any gnome town will have at least a few who can teach you the basics of magic. But making creatures is a fairly rare specialty even among wizards, you won't find that just anywhere, and if I know what else you're looking for in a town it'll help me figure out if there's someplace to start out that has everything, or if you might want to learn the basics somewhere more interesting and then move when you're ready to start specializing."

"Hm. Well - what am I going to eat there with no spren on the planet?"

"It seems like the obvious thing to do would be bring some spren over - we'll be interested in that anyway, new kinds of livestock are always welcome, and then you'd know you had something to eat even if you got stuck somehow. Another thing I'd want to do at some point would bring a couple of people to meet a druid, that's another kind of spellcaster who specializes in animals and nature, and see if they think you can eat any of the species on my world; we might have something close enough. And then I don't think we're going to want to have spren living wild in our world - that can cause all kinds of problems, a wild species going where it doesn't belong - but there's a few ways I could set it up for there to be a high-enough-tier cleric around for you to get magic spren at least sometimes."

"Oh, you know what, I bet it would be really easy for other talkers to farm spren. They're scared of the way people smell but you wouldn't smell like us."

"Huh! Yeah, I'd expect that to be something we can help with. You'll want to figure out how to let us immigrate without having bank problems or whatever, though, the kind of portal you can bring cargo through is very expensive."

"Yeah, I bet they'll figure it out sooner or later! But hummun and whatever could also come here to farm the spren and just not have any people working the farm."

"Mmhmm. I think they'd want to know that they could go to town and buy things if they needed to, but I don't see why it'd be a problem to have the farms just run by humans."

"I guess they'd need startup capital to buy a farm with."

"In the long run, yeah. To start with the people who own the farms now could keep doing that and just pay the humans to work on them until they can afford to buy them off of them, I've seen that work well. And poorly, sometimes, but it's worth a try."

"Zoi's aunt has a farm! You could talk to her if you want."

"Oh, that's convenient. Can you set that up?"

"I can tell Zoi to hint for an invite. I haven't actually met the aunt."

He nods. "Thank you."

"No problem!"

Uamok's commute to school is about the same train ride Bav took the previous day, going two stops further. She has cash and can pay fare for both of them. It turns out that there is not a driver in the train, and most adult women know how to drive a train; Uamok does this herself for part of the way. (Raafi can see her through the windows of the two cars.)

Huh! "Are there classes on driving the trains? That seems like something I'd like to learn," he says, when they meet up again at their destination.

"Yes but they're not sized for males and the controls are in the females' car," says Uamok, leading him toward her school.

"I'd still like to know. It'd be pretty embarrassing if I was stuck somewhere because I didn't and there was no female around."

"You can look at the list of what circles are drop-in today," says Uamok. "I have a regular circle in second period and in fourth but I can drop in on anything in first and third and fifth."

There's a list on the wall of the school building.

"Hm - does the school have a library? I might want to spend a period there if it's not expensive as a visitor." He peruses the list.

"The school has a library. I'm not sure what they'd charge you though, it's included in my tuition."

"Hm. Well I like the look of these three, actually - the art history one here and this - I think this is forestry, am I reading that right? and the home budgeting class, that seems like a pretty well-rounded glimpse into things, and maybe we can ask someone about the library for another day."

"Forestry, yeah. I'll introduce you to the head teacher." They are getting quite a lot of stares. She opens the big door for him to let him in the building and shows him to an office belonging to the head teacher, who is confused to see him but has heard rumors of his existence since yesterday.

As is to be expected. "Hello!"

"Hello! What, uh, brings you here - are you going to drop lunch on the entire student body -"

"I could. I was hoping to sit in on some classes, though, and we thought there might be some interest in having me teach a language circle at some point."