She summons another monster! This one looks like a four foot tall tornado with the suggestion of eyes, though the eyes sometimes whirl around with the rest of it and blur until they settle again on looking at its summoner.

What a weird... thing. She blasts it with light across the whole of its 'body', again gradually ramping up the intensity to calibrate how much it takes to kill it.

It takes about 13.

Basically the same as an ordinary big animal. Tanya can shoot those all day long. "If this is representative of the challenges ahead then we'll face no problem in a direct fight. ...you did say some 'monsters' may have magical shields and offensive abilities, and I intend to take that very seriously; I would appreciate any descriptions you have, if you can't summon examples. Other than that, our main challenges will be to find a route, stay safe while sleeping, and bring any gear we might need. I hope flying obviates climbing gear but I don't have experience flying through very narrow cave passages; you'll know better what we might need."

"Things I can summon are not very strong in the grand scheme of thing. A lucky enough bunch of farmers with shovels could've beaten up those elementals. But that you can do it efficiently at range is still promising for anything that's tougher, fighting back, weirder, etcetera. We should do the flying disk experiment - I don't think raiders can usually be taking very squishy passages since they need to haul all their loot, but maybe more of them than I expect have bags of holding, and we can't guarantee we'll wind up on one of their routes by guessing."

She really shouldn't underestimate shovels!!! Tanya can't exactly teach her the value of a good shovel the way she taught her men on the Rhine. "Do you have the disk prepared now?"

"No, but if you don't want me to prep more summonses I have space for it, or we could ask Rynaeri."

"I don't see a benefit to more summonses if there isn't something that can't be taken down with light or a bullet, or something tough enough to need so much more of it that I should practice to calibrate."

"Not at my circle there's not." She glances around, assessing the fishermen - they've largely ignored the proceedings apart from a little rubbernecking - and appears her spellbook. "Fifteen minutes."

How does that work? The spellbook doesn't just disappear, she can get it back someplace else?

Tanya won't bother her while she works. They'll have enough time to talk magic trivia on their trip, even if they don't before. She picks up her spent cartridge.

Fifteen minutes later she disappears the book again!

"...what happens to your book when you do that?"

"The spell stores it in the Ethereal Plane. So I don't like to do this too many times a day, it's a spell slot every time."

"Can you do it to other things? What's on the Ethereal Plane, I assume other people can't easily go there or pull your stuff from there or you wouldn't do this..." Aether is the fifth element, right? Was Aristotle actually on to something? Tanya didn't have a normal (*) childhood with a classical education and does not know much about Aristotle's theories, and she is regretting this for what is definitely the first time in her life.

(*) Tanya's idea of a normal childhood as translated from her social class and education level in her first life. Not representative of the average Germanian, even those who did not grow up in orphanages.

"Secluded Grimoire is spellbook-specific, and yeah, nobody else can in any way I know of get ahold of things I send there, though there's always somebody with a trick they don't tell everybody."

"Can't whatever makes it attach to a spellbook be applied to other objects? Hiding things, and moving them without carrying them the intervening distance, sounds like a very useful general tool."

"It's related to a fifth circle spell called Secret Chest, I don't think I've heard of anyone getting it down lower than that for anything but spellbooks but I don't know everything."

It makes sense that a specialized, narrow variant of a spells would be easier to cast. "Do you know roughly how many people can cast fifth circle spells?"

"...my completely wild guess would be better than yours but still wild. There are certainly more than a hundred? I doubt there are more than... ten thousand. On the planet. Can't speak for other planets."

So something like elite A-rank mages. "How many people are there on the planet?"

"Again I'm guessing! Hundreds of millions. Maybe a billion? It might get numerically weird if it turns out there are like enormous numbers of ant sized people on another continent or something."

Not that much less than Earth, but population needs to be concentrated and have good enough technology to build a civilization... "Maybe the libraries upstairs will have better answers. Shall we test the disk?"

"This isn't a good spot to wedge a floating disk so I can sit on it, we can test that someplace smaller." Back whence they came away from the river.

Tanya follows.

Belmarniss finds an alley between a fish restaurant and a workshop of some kind that she deems suitable, casts the disk, chases it into the back of the alley, and boards it.