"Not when anyone but you is near. Nobody's close enough to hear right now. But Christ, this anxiety is worse than when I was an Ostmarkite in London, how do you deal with it?"

"A huge ego and an unhealthy amount of confidence. It really really wouldn't occur to most people, the imaginarium about them is monstrous and no living person fits it, you'd need to be much weirder than just hanging around with a dictionary golem for the possibility to even come up."

"...I'll just go back to reading travel guides since there doesn't seem to be any history, then."

"Oh, is that what you were looking for? Yeah you probably won't find that in a library this small. We'd need to find a Guild of Explorers or Historians for that."

"I want to catch up on this place since I'm going to pretend to be part of it. Incidentally, it occurs to me that if-when they do send a rescue, it will probably be an exceedingly-weird-by-local-standards one."

"I think the part where they're obviously from another world and have completely unfamiliar magic will help, though, people will be more willing to not assume the worst."

"They might be... Trigger-happy. I'm not sure what to do about that."

"...do you have intuitions about whether they'll appear on the same spot? Because we could leave a message there or something."

"The two options I see are 'same spot' or 'next to me'. So maybe."

"Yeah, we can leave a note there, then, and if I see anything indicating their arrival prior to it happening I can, I don't know, hide?"

"Hands in the air would be enough."

"Sure. But that's if I have warning. If I don't—welp."

"I don't think they'll come out shooting unless you're standing over me with a knife or something. Just, not entirely impossible given what I know about 'em."

"Let's hope for the best. If you do want history books though we can go find some."

"History. Geography. Novels might help, show me colloquialisms... It can wait a little while anyway."

"Yeah then get your fill of the latter two, we can go to a bigger town tomorrow."

"Sure." She wanders back over to the seat near Vasil with her small stack of travel guides and reads.

The first travel guide is about a few south Laokaban beaches. It talks about the best ones and the ones with ruins and the ones where you can go fishing and the ones where you can go diving...

Skim, skim, skim. Laokab has coastline, point made.

That one book is specifically about those so she won't find much else.

That's why she got a bunch of them!

Then she can learn a lot about various cool ruins and cities with nice art museums and stuff. Nothing from out of Laokab, though.

Eventually she asks the librarian for a novel recommendation - something particularly Laokaban. Adventuresome stuff preferred.

Oooh she has just the thing hang on—

—and she finds a series of novels about an enchanter adventurer who wants some peace and quiet to work on her art but keeps being called by duty because she's a genius mage.

"Ooh, that sounds fun." And it kind of parallels the course of Witches in her society. The army needs magic...