"Huh. No, you can have light while I sleep, just don't be noisy unless there's an emergency."

"Of course." Tanya doesn't really have enough to do to occupy her for eight hours with only her illusions for company, but she can review her notes and take new ones and replay her recordings to catch anything she might have missed.

"You can read my books if you want if you're hanging out in my room." Thisaway.

"Thank you, I would appreciate that. Do you have any books that would be helpful to someone from another world?" Tanya doesn't think she'll get very far without being able to ask any locals to explain something every other page, but anything's better than wasting time. Maybe Belmarniss has Taldor: An Economic Overview or Law Codes For Immigrants or Dangers Of The Road Upstairs: A Bestiary on her bookshelf. She has been preparing for this trip for a while, right?

"I've got an atlas and a book of monsters, but the rest of what you'll be able to read is just novels; my surface books aren't written in Drow."

Ah, right, the spell does one language at a time. Tanya should really figure out how to get started on properly learning a local language - Taldane, probably - but she can't do that at least until they're on their way. She could try memorizing Drow while she can speak it. What a weird experience, to try to memorize something you already remember but magically won't remember tomorrow.

"Those two sound excellent to start with, thank you."

"No problem. If we have extra space in the bag of holding I might bring some of my books up instead of selling them down here, I won't be able to get drow literature upstairs."

"That makes sense." If Belmarniss isn't planning to come back anytime soon she might be taking all her personal belongings with her, on top of the provisions and water for the journey. Moving out for the first time always involves painful tradeoffs.

They have an uneventful walk through the city into the neighborhood of Belmarniss's cave.

There's a couple of haflings asleep on the floor in the kitchen when they come in; Belmarniss lowers her voice. "If you need water there's the dipper and there's our reservoir of it. If you get super hungry I have some dried mushrooms in my room and you can have those, you'll scare the halflings if you wake them. Anything else you might need while I'm asleep?"

"The toilet, or chamberpot. And the books?"

Nod. "In my room."

The room is down the hall and has a hammock, a chair made of bones at a desk, and a bookshelf with books. Belmarniss pulls the books that Tanya wanted, points out the chamberpot, and takes off her shoes for bedtime purposes.

Bone throne chair it is. What does the atlas have to say for itself?

It's got maps in it of surface places! Bits of Taldor and its neighbors. The Inner Sea region. An approximation of the whole globe projected onto the page.

That's useful! Tanya can record the images in her orb. Does it have any information about Taldor and other countries, or only borders and names?

Just borders and names for the most part. There is a sparse legend corresponding to things like how big the cities were at the time the map was made and how porous borders seem to be.

Important information!

Taldor's capital Oppara is - small for a modern city, big for a premodern one. It has a defended and possibly-hostile border with Qadira to the south, and more peaceful borders (along natural lines of mountains and rivers) to the north and west. The eastern two-thirds of the country don't seem to be densely settled, or at least the map doesn't note any large towns there, and are marked 'the Whistling Plains'.

She doesn't know where in Taldor they'll be coming up. From Oppara in the southwest to the Castrovin Sea in the east is over 2,400 kilometers. A few hours' flight for Tanya, but not if she has to carry Belmarniss because she can't shield her from the wind and if they solve that by e.g. wrapping her in blankets she'll still be terribly unaerodynamic. So it might be a journey of many days to Oppara, if that's where they're going. Tanya can at least fly by herself to find the nearest people and ask them where they are. Or maybe Belmarniss knows more than 'somewhere under Taldor'.

She makes some notes about the surrounding countries, but there's only so much to be learned from placenames and approximate population sizes. The monster bestiary, then?

The monster bestiary has sparse knowledge of aboveground monsters (it includes "wild orc" as a type of monster which can be found there) and better depth about underground ones, but covers both!

That is quite a hefty tome! This world seems to have many beasts menacing travelers. (The book thinks only a few of them are 'beasts', but Tanya isn't interested in taxonomy.)

The arthropods on this world all seem to come in giant carnivorous versions. Scorpions, centipedes, spiders, really gigantic worms and more kinds Tanya can't confidently identify with anything on Earth. Lizards and mammals seem to hold their own, though. (It's surprising how many of them are recognizable. Convergent evolution, or mass theft of Earth species in the mists of prehistory?) In fact, one winged (?) lizard is noted to come in 'any size / color' and have 'any magic (arcane)' and present a serious risk to, again, 'any circle' of adventuring party, depending on its size. Well, at least it doesn't live underground, since it is a flying creature. Tanya feels confident about her ability to handle giant flying lizards as long as she is also flying.

The book does have meticulous notes on typical weaknesses and suggested tactics, but Tanya rather feels she reduces all the 'magic resistant' and 'cold iron' and 'weak against good people' (???) to 'immune to fire' and 'not'. So far the former list is restricted to fire elementals and a truly strange lifeform that apparently lives in volcanoes. And the flying lizards, possibly, since they also 'can be immune to anything', although Tanya suspects the book is playing up a mythical creature. It may be an unfamiliar metaphor or reference.

Several of the monsters described are frankly weird and Tanya has no idea how or why such a thing can exist. Saying 'it is a magical beast' does not resolve her confusion but it at least moves it to a bigger bucket of more general confusion? Anyway, none of them are immune to fire, so moving on.

The weird part of the book isn't any of these, it's how it describes humans. (Humanoids? Hominins? Fishes pretending to be humans?) 

Sometimes they have horns, or bat wings, or the heads of various animals, or simply 'no face'. Sometimes they have the lower body of a spider, or a mushroom. Sometimes they're half-reptile, or half-cow, or half something Tanya doesn't recognize. Sometimes they're three feet tall, sometimes twenty. They have clothes, use tools and weapons and magic, set traps and hunt prey and have their own socities. They're also described in terms of how many spear-thrusts it takes to kill one, or what 'loot' they're likely to have in their pockets.

Tanya hadn't internalized quite what a xenophobic society meant until she read this.

She can believe something like some of these might exist, although she has no idea why. (She draws the line at the Spider-Men and the mushroom women.) She can definitely believe the drow inhabitants of this city think of them as beasts to be killed on sight. She just hopes they won't attack Belmarniss on sight, as well.

Belmarniss talks in her sleep.

Tanya continues not to have a silence spell! Does it sound important enough that she should leave the room or try block her ears?

Nope, when the words happen to be in Drow they sound totally random.

...alright then.

Tanya has some time to consider her situation. She got a useful corrective today, but while she needs to move to a more civilian mindset there's no denying the society that produced this book is no place to do it in. Hopefully Taldor is better, but if it isn't then Tanya will fly to other countries until she finds a rational, peaceful, advanced (or at least advancing) civilization to settle in.

Tanya still doesn't know much about this world's level of technology (other than magic). A small underground (secret?) xenophobic city is probably a poor measure of what's up on the surface. Maybe she can help them invent... radio or fiat currency or something.

She isn't sure how to best use her free time. It would be unfortunate to find out later she missed an important opportunity. Belmarniss herself will be available to talk to during their journey, so that leaves... her mother, who Belmarniss didn't want to introduce Tanya to because Tanya was being scary and rude. Maybe she can convince her to rethink it? Tanya doesn't really want to push her on it.

When she first talked to Belmarniss there was an offhand mention of a way for Tanya to return home. She hunts in the orb records... 'two plane shifts or something', she said. Tanya has no idea how she got here except that it was magic and so should not assume she can't go back, although if interworld contact was known to be possible with local magic surely it would have happened already? For now this isn't actionable. So she doesn't need to think about everyone and everything in Germania. Indeed, there is no rational reason to do so anymore, and if this feels unpleasant that's another reason not to.

Eventually, eight hours have passed. (Tanya isn't going to wake Belmarniss up; she wasn't asked to.)

Belmarniss awakens on her own after about eight hours! "Food and then the hammock's all yours?"

"Good morning. Yes, by all means." If she goes to bed without eating she'll wake up tired.