Belmarniss sticks her head out of her room and calls for breakfast and presently a halfling appears with two bowls of mushrooms.

Is this diet related to the mushroom-woman Tanya is not going to bring up the mushroom woman in polite company, it's probably lewd or something.

Om nom nom mushrooms. "You need anything before I go do some shopping? I'll leave notes for Rynaeri and Sovi."

"I don't need anything, thank you. How much do you want to tell them about me?"

"They're going to know that you are a powerful adventurer I'm letting sleep over and that they should not wake you up or bother you. Rynaeri might introduce herself if you bump into her, Sovi might be a nuisance because she's a kid, but probably nothing much will happen."

"If they ask what my relationship with you is, how much do you want me to tell them? Do they know you're planning to leave or should I omit that, or that we're going together?" Hopefully this is a tactful enough opener before asking whether it'd be all right to tell Rynaeri that Tanya is from another planet and so has a lot of questions about this one. "They'll see I have unusual magic but I don't know what someone might conclude if they assume I'm from this planet." Also hopefully neither of them is eavesdropping from the next room and neither is the halfling, but Belmarniss should have warned her if that was a concern.

"...don't mention we're going to outright leave. They're not good at keeping secrets, it'd be fine for them alone to know but I don't want it getting back to my grandmother or great-aunt at this point. Tell 'em we're thinking about doing some adventuring, that I'm interested in your magic, that you got here in a teleport accident, if that comes up. Also remember that the constant floating is a very useful signal."

So she plans to tell them at the last moment? Well, Belmarniss's family is none of Tanya's business, even it's unfortunate that she won't get to speak to anyone else.

"I understand it's a sign that I'm magically powerful, but I don't know what specific things it might indicate about my origin or other abilities to someone who assumes I'm local."

"The Golarion spell that'd do that is fifth circle and the wizard who'd use it casually for no reason all the time would be sixth or better. It says 'there's nobody in Noctimar who should be sure they can take me' but it does not itself threaten anyone at all, it's basically perfect for your use case."

So she is to tell Belmarniss's parents, if it comes up, that they are planning on going on a camping trip, no she won't tell them where she met their daughter or how long they'll be staying, no she is not at all sketchy as fuck, look at her pretending to be such a powerful wizard that Belmarniss could not be sure there were more than a hundred such on the whole planet! So powerful and yet so incompetent as to arrive here in a magic accident which was definitely not any kind of enemy action that might endanger their dear daughter by proxy! Ugh. Belmarniss is an adult entitled to her own choices and yet this feels wrong.

"You are planning on telling them before we actually leave, though?" That's as strong a hint as she's going to express about her actual preferences advice here.

"Before we leave I'll tell Rynaeri and she can tell her mother and aunt."

Tanya still doesn't like planning to lie to them until then if they question her, but this is acceptable. She applies herself to her mushrooms.

Indeed, om nom mushrooms. And then presumably Tanya will go to hammock for the non-night.

Over the next while, Belmarniss teaches classes, answers Tanya's questions about magic and geography and giant spiders and stuff as best she can, and shops for their excursion. Rynaeri does eventually manage to bump into Tanya but is not particularly inquisitive past the pleasantries and marveling at the color of Tanya's hair and agreeing that it seems like the sort of thing Niss would do to go on a little adventure with a human. Belmarniss's sister makes herself more thoroughly scarce and Tanya manages not to meet her at all.

And then it's time to go!

Goodbye, weird xenophobic underground mushroom city. What does their route look like? Has Belmarniss managed to learn any more details?

Not much! She is planning to ask the farmers they will pass on their way out if they know anything about where raiders claim to be heading but expects to spend some time in blind alleys.

Tanya can create a three-dimensional illusion of the paths they've tried and update it as they go. When it grows too large (or the scale too small) she has to start on a new map sector and eventually she'll run out of storage room for these, but it's better than nothing. Or they can just memorize things, and she does have the remaining pages of her notebook, but neither is great for complex three-dimensional structures.

That's really useful, it's hard to map caves on flat paper well even with all the social technology drow have for doing this.

Belmarniss locates her sister to hug her goodbye, and Rynaeri, and gives each of the halflings a strawberry as a farewell present, and then they start hiking. Or, well, Belmarniss does.

A whole strawberry for each slave Tanya is sufficiently practiced at hiding her opinions about the slaves by now that if other people don't want make an issue of it they can at least pretend she's not expressing them.

Tanya can also fly Belmarniss in her sling if she gets tired or the route is sufficiently vertical, or if there's a segment with very broken ground where flying would just save a lot of time.

Belmarniss can do a lot of walking in cavey terrain but there do eventually come stretches where that comes in handy; the farmers often do not choose to improve the routes between themselves and their neighbors much.

(That is why some roads should be improved at public expense. Maybe then there would be more trade and less raiding, and the route would be easier to police.)

Well, if she expresses this opinion out loud she'll get a great laugh!

"...Does Noctimar not want to trade, because it's too xenophobic? Not even for wood and plants and other things you lack? The lack of a road also means people like you can't leave easily, or come back. A road can have a border post for customs and immigration and be easy to defend on either side, even if the raiders dig additional tunnels elsewhere."

"There's a little trade with the other underground folks. It's all individual people taking risks to see if they make them rich, there's nobody who could realistically go 'okay everyone is paying for this because I said so', that's a little too much stealing for even a very serious warlord to manage. Nobody outside my family cares if I leave or come back let alone how hard it is."

"Most trade requires taking investment risks, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. If you need more than one individual to pull it off, then everyone joining or paying in takes some of the risk and shares some of the payoff. You don't need to force them to join, they stand to profit as much as you do. ...do you not have the concepts of - joint ventures, investments, shares?"