"Either! I thought you read the book! Kobolds aren't very good eating, we're meatier."

Sigh. "The book noted some non-people 'monsters' which are likely to approach sound, including burrowers like bulettes and purple worms, and also a kind of people called, uh... Destrachan? However, I think differentiating between intelligent adversaries and beasts is important. People would be able to understand the words and decide whether to follow us or the kobolds and not just approach any sound blindly. And the fight itself wasn't very quiet," what with the screaming kobolds on fire. "I suppose if this area is sufficiently frequented by kobolds that any local predator is already able to find them, they might investigate any novel prey."

Belmarniss has a valid point, really, Tanya just isn't used to mage fights being at all stealthy unless great care is taken and she was not told in advance. What if she decided to fire an explosive shot? The vibrations would probably travel much farther underground than her voice can.

"...why do you think everybody who might be able to hear you randomly yelling can understand specifically Drow through six bounces of echo just because they're bright enough that they can have picked up some language at all? We're lucky the kobolds didn't speak exclusively Draconic and you could follow what was going on in real time instead of me having to translate."

"Because someone understanding us is potentially worse for us, and we should prepare for the worst case." Are they ready to move yet?

"...if you don't want to be understood it makes even less sense that you yelled." Yes, Belmarniss is ready to move now.

"I wanted the kobolds to understand me!" Tanya also wants Belmarniss to understand her but it seems she's somehow failing at that?

"They use Draconic amongst themselves. Though it's pretty different from academic Draconic."

"At least one of them spoke Drow and it was reasonable to assume more would, he could have had someone to learn from or practice with. ...the important part is whether making noise was a serious error, not whether they were likely to understand me and so make it worth the cost. You may be right that it was in error and if so I wish you had mentioned it earlier, for example when we were discussing possibly using explosive shots to collapse tunnels which would be much much louder."

"I think voices attract a different and worse subset of possible creatures than explosions."

See, now that's actionable! "What kinds of attention, and why?"

"Again, I think the kobolds would've kept it down if there were local hazards attentive to yelling. But in general you're looking at - any monster that prefers to eat people, there are some of those, and any monster that's around as a deliberate hazard for would-be thieves like undead or something, any intelligent creature that knows that if it talks it might have loot."

...if Belmarniss agrees that the kobolds would have been quiet if noise was a problem, why is she complaining so much about Tanya not being quiet? 

"I understand that it's best not to raise our voices going forward." This isn't productive. "Let's discuss the fight itself. We would have benefited from being able to blind them while seeing ourselves. I can't make half-transparent mirrors or illusions. How good is your penumbra spell?"

"It's fine for light and is rated for at least full sun, won't protect me if things heat up."

"How many times can you use it and could you apply it to me? If you can, I want to test if it would prevent us from being blinded by an illusion light source as bright as the sun, like the one I used earlier."

"I can only have one up at a time but I can use a Darkness for myself, if we're far enough apart and I'm not too close to the enemy."

Darkness is the single-purpose illusion that blacks out everything around the caster, right? "Then it's worth testing. I'll increase the illusion brightness gradually, tell me if I should stop. I won't create heat; bright sunlight can feel hot in itself but that part's not dangerous."

Tanya will start with something appropriate to lighting a cave and definitely isn't blinding and ramp it up to sun-brightness over a minute, to let her own eyes adjust. It's pointed at Belmarniss and away from herself so she can maintain situational awareness, but she still has to squint by the end.

Niss in her penumbra does eventually squint but doesn't report being blinded.

(Tanya reruns the test with the penumbra on herself to be sure.) 

"Good, that expands our non-lethal options. Our lethal ones too, since I can blind the enemy while shooting them if you're in Darkness or can stay out of the fight." Tanya wonders if the newly deployed C-rank infrantry mages have already discovered this tactic. Wishes she could write it up for HQ. 

Sigh. "I wish there was a credible way to demonstrate we can kill someone without actually killing them." That's not a problem that comes up much in the army, because in the army you usually do want to kill them if you can. Whereas this was just senseless slaughter that didn't benefit Tanya or anyone else.

"Even the ones who are people are sometimes just stupid."

It is the responsibility of government to ensure stupid citizens don't become criminals. (Also to reduce the number of such via public education.) Tanya doesn't know why a state hasn't formed here, or moved in from the outside and taken over. Are Taldor and the other neighboring polities uninterested in ruling this land or busy with other wars? Are they deliberately destabilizing it to keep their borders secure? Are the local equilibria different because of magic and technology (or the lack of them) which Tanya doesn't properly appreciate yet? Do the locals just lack the relevant cultural traditions? Are they in a century-long interregnum between periods of better government? She doesn't know nearly enough to even guess.

"This problem is solved in other places by states, with public schools and good labor laws and police and - many other things - I don't know nearly enough about local cultures and shouldn't comment on whether or how it could be done here. Maybe Taldor is better run, in which case I'd ask why Taldor doesn't expand downwards or export its culture or something."

"Taldor used to be a big empire and it declined but I'm not super clear on exactly why it declined, that's one of the things where every writer has their own theory and there's probably a lot of censorship affecting which ones get printed."

"An empire can be less efficient and prosperous than the same territory broken up into multiple states. Empires risk being run by their less competent members, extracting value from some regions to the benefit of others, or having the richer parts prop up the poorer ones. And they tend to try to conquer more of their neighbors, because their national identity isn't tied to a well-defined area or group of people. Of course, I don't know if or how any of this applies here; on Earth the biggest empires of my age were the result of people with advanced technology conquering those without and then deliberately keeping those regions poor, but that's hardly a universal..." Why modern technology, once invented, failed to spread quickly worldwide is the biggest question of economic history, insofar as history deals with what-if questions.

"I suppose the important question is how the the countries formerly part of Taldor's empire compare to Taldor as it is today. Is Taldor, no longer an empire, richer or more advanced or better run than other countries?"

"Not that I know of. For awhile one of its breakaways, Cheliax, was a big empire, but when I was a baby a ton of shit went down all around the same time and one of the things that happened was that Hell conquered it and the news is since then it's been losing bits."

That's a weird name for the translation spell to give something. "I don't recall seeing Hell in the atlas."

"Atlas only covers this plane, I used to have what purported to be an atlas of the Abyss but I sold it and I've never had a Hell one."