"Ah, well."  Friendly small talk then?  She can do friendly small talk.  She's not disappointed.  "It's so different from Osirion, it was an especially hot summer when I mastered Ray of Frost and I likely spent hours just hitting the walls and floors with it to cool the house."

"It gets hot in Cheliax in summer too. If I muster out before I've got another circle I'll have a drinks cart, I think, better than scrivening or laundry."

"Oh, that does sound better, people could just come to you instead of you going to them... what would you do in the winter, just switch to warm drinks?"

"Yeah, exactly."

A burst of raucous laughter comes from the card game as Tariq stands up and cheerfully shucks off his coat and shirt in one go.  Khalida jumps at the noise, then relaxes when she sees it's harmless and rolls her eyes at him.

"How'd you fall in with your party?"

"Hmm?  How did I join them, correct?  The usual way... I suppose I don't know what's usual outside Sothis."  She shrugs.  "We passed time in the same taverns, they sought more talent to accept better-paying jobs, I sought- a more stable situation.  The taverner recommended us to one another, I spoke to some former compatriots and Omar's landlady, we took on some short jobs to make certain we worked well together."   To a decent Sense Motive check, she's not actually lying lying but she sure is leaving some stuff out.

"Well, usual for a Chelish wizard with any talent is the army," shrugs Txell. "Hold the Wound."

Khalida nods.  "Have you come here straight out of school?  In the Sothis taverns people talk of going to the Wound someday, but more as- a thing to do once you have a few circles to your name and a party you trust?"  And usually some less than Good deeds to try to make up for.

"Yeah, I was straight out of school," says Txell, and there's some nods. "But it's one thing when your country does its part with the forts, right, and another when you'd only come as an adventurer."

"I did a few years on a ship first," says a guy.

"I was a laundry wizard for a bit but had to get out of town in a hurry," says another.

Khalida glances away, suddenly crestfallen- she was absolutely planning to come here as an adventurer in a few years, not entirely selflessly but she'd thought it was a perfectly decent goal, and now it just seems... insufficient. 

"I've never been on a ship," she murmurs for lack of anything better to say.  Why do Chelish people all have to be so hard to read, she can't tell if hurriedly leaving town guy is hoping she'll ask so he can tell the story or if he's not and it's rude to pry, and she's already trying not to ask about their god or their country or any of the half-dozen other things she's desperately curious for...  "What was wizard school like?"

"Better than farming," says Janer.

"Tougher than regular school, since everybody in it was bright enough to be a wizard," says Txell. "Couldn't count on being tops in everything just for being the smartest of forty idiots."

"Forty?  Goodness, I can scarcely imagine a school of forty, how did you ever focus enough to read?"

"- what would stop me? Kids breathing?" says Txell.

"Ohhhh, if they set you all to reading at the same time that makes sense... but then how did they tell what you'd learned, if they were trying to ask forty children questions in half the time?  Did they have many teachers, and speak in small groups?"

"They had tests, and called on us one at a time to answer questions."

"Oh huh!  So it's- I don't know the Taldane- a subset of the things you should know, not chosen in a skewed manner?"

"Well, if you can solve a random arithmetic problem, probably you'd have been able to solve a different random arithmetic problem, and if you just got lucky, the test will show that."

"But arithmetic runs on principles, right, there's a technique to it, there's no technique for law or history or poetry, I suppose you could say there's technique for embroidery but it's not really the same thing..."

"We didn't really study poetry. I guess we learned law a little but all of the kind where if you don't know it you'll bleed sooner or later."

"Mm, lucky.  I was acceptable at memorizing poetry but my middle sister was better at composition than me by eight years old, and I was embarrassed enough I simply stopped instead of trying to outpace her.

...I suppose law does operate on principles if you step back to think on it, it must be forbidden to set fires in a city or the city should have burned down long before, one doesn't need to memorize the penalties to know that, but it's not... it's not like arithmetic, it's not like looking at your abacus and knowing that thrice five is the same as five times three and it must be so and could never be otherwise...."

"Normal kids who are just going to go back to the farm? Don't think about math like that," says Janer.

"Huh."  She wrinkles her nose.  "I suppose my sisters didn't, but I just attributed that sort of thing to them being younger.  But you follow my meaning, though, it's about skills more than facts?" 

(She's intending the slight emphasis on 'you' to distinguish Janer from the normal kids, but realizes too late it might come across as switching flirting-targets.  Hopefully Txell doesn't mind, but she's too invested in the sudden prospect of math discussion really for real for it to throw her enough to break her Taldane.)

"History is too," says Txell. "After a while I stopped trying to memorize the history books every year and started just getting the answers from how they wrote the questions, they weren't good at not telegraphing."

"Hm, I suppose that would be a drawback of written tests.  But history isn't so important for wizards regardless, not past the basics at least, not like it is for clerics."