The knots are not easy to read - Page doesn't have a preexisting scaffold for the information, and she often has to twist them around for it to get a good look - and they're even harder to reply, so maybe she should sign answers to someone who can scribe for her?

Scribes exist but none happen to be lying in wait to ambush her with coupons. One of the people sorting letters can explain how to find them, at least.

She will go hunt for scribes.

She can take her pick of mostly teenagers and young adults who mostly have other jobs. A college student, a technical writer between gigs and a teenage mage all charge rates she could maybe make enough to afford or maybe barter for. If she wants to hire this other scribe who records court proceedings, she's probably out of luck.

This is important, why does she have to figure out the use of money to buy goods and services instead of to buy miracles for the first time in her life about this.

Are any of the questions actually urgent.

Someone wants to know Sing's decision procedure for suicides who left ambiguous or incomplete information about their resurrection preferences. Someone wants to know if Sing is going to take issue with the beyond-human intelligence they already have. Someone wants to know how much weight they can expect their college degree from Sathend to carry on Mars. Someone wants to know if Sing will object if they want to keep scouting for worlds with lots of habitable planets that don't have any inhuman agents capable of destroying humanity if they so chose.

Also, someone wants to know how many moons Mars has.

Okay, the urgent ones are the ones she doesn't know.

She can figure out how to tie the knot for "two" and send it back to the moons person.

Then exactly one of these people will receive a satisfying answer.

She spirals vaguely out from the spot, looking for ways to entertain herself while waiting for the vote.

A woman with art supplies on hand and a sign advertising caricatures is waiting near but not in the way of a busy thoroughfare. She sees Tarinda, freezes for a moment, and then awkwardly attempts an inviting smile.

Smile!

"You, um, I wasn't at your hearing but I heard about it, uh, it's fine if you're desperately hoping to not be a spokesperson for a minute - I just had questions otherwise - "

She will call this conversation a success if she can successfully steer Tarinda toward someone with any social skills at all, preferably her husband who actually has things to ask Tarinda.

"Go ahead and ask! Though I've seen some stumpers today."

"You were involved with bringing people back and getting them oriented to your world, right? We're probably going to have a lot of people to orient and we were wondering if you had tips - I mean, you wouldn't do it yourself, I figure you're not that well positioned to talk to our ancestors, but none of us really know what we'd be orienting them to."

"Oh, yeah, I can help with that! I haven't been working for a bit, I picked up a girlfriend in the course of waking people and have been focusing on her. Usually people want to ask questions and I find it works best if I answer them in order as best I can, it helps them feel more capable of orienting to the situation than if I just dumped a lot of information on them in an order that makes sense to me, do you want to pretend you just woke up on Mars and I'm answering your questions?"

"That sounds like a pretty sensible way to do it - I bet my husband will also want to try that and have different questions, suppose I pack up and ask questions about Mars on the way to my place and then we have you over for dinner and more questions and maybe to stay the night?"

"Sounds good to me!"

Her art supplies and camp stool fold up neatly and quickly. "So. Mars. What is Mars, anyway, why is there room for humans there?"

So Tarinda explains how planets work and that Mars was already there and just needed to be terraformed. Its ecology is managed more like the local one compared to Earth, which has wild stuff.

"Wild stuff! I've read about that idea in novels, very cool that it really exists. Hm. Which species live on Mars, then?" Lia could herself rattle off all of Sathend's species. It might take her a couple minutes.

"I don't have signs for most of them in this language! I could use signs from other languages but that would hardly help."

"That is maybe a problem we need to figure out at some point but I guess for the non-mages it'll be as simple as drawing a bunch of pictures and pointing to them, at least to start out with. Is there already a convenient collection of those we could use?"

"Not here, but yes. There might be more species than you're imagining, though."

"Might be cool if there are. Maybe we can start with things you'd see in the... Sathend-sized area around where they wake up, or something... anyway, putting a pin in that for now, what are Martians going to think of us?"

"I think you'll be very exciting! It's never happened before, finding a pocket of people who were this totally cut off. And then on top of that there's magic, though it seems possibly not like maximally exciting magic."