Belmarniss nods to authorize broken-bones nonlethal takedowns.

"Should I escalate to potentially lethal force if this fails and they fight back and do not flee?"

...handwobble. Hand-puppet-motions.

"I don't understand what you mean... I will try to flee instead of fighting if I can, but it would be easy to block the door and corridor. I could try to blow a hole to escape but with this much rock it would probably kill people in other rooms or on the street, so that counts as lethal force anyway. If they're not effective at attacking me I will hold back. I don't need to ask you about any of those, and this is all a hopefully very unlikely hypothetical. I don't know what you mean by that sign, can you explain another way?"

...okay how about this! Belmarniss casts Prestidigitation and makes ugly plasticky-looking little dolls, like somebody made shapes out of saran wrap and then put them in a toaster and they managed to hold their shape despite this treatment but are still now brittle and delicate even for saran wrap statuettes. Here is a little Tanya, you can tell because it's got orange hair! Here's a door! Here's a prop chamberpot! A halfling doll comes up to the door and knocks and says a word (Belmarniss provides the word, in an affected voice, though she is able to move the dolls without touching them). Tanya-doll shakes her head. Halfling doll leaves.

Generic drow doll appears! (She's got a different hairstyle from Belmarniss herself, so it's probably not supposed to be Belmarniss.) Generic drow doll jimmies the door open while Tanya-doll is lying down. Tanya-doll gets up from presumable sleep (the dolls don't have enough detail to distinguish open and closed eyes) and breaks the drow-doll's legs, signified by Tanya-doll waving her arms and the drow-doll collapsing: this is fine (if Tanya wants to consult the phrasebook to confirm that Belmarniss said this was fine).

Scene begins over again. Drow comes in. Drow-doll says some words. Tanya-doll squeaks in a Tanya-affected voice back. This is fine! Eventually the drow-doll leaves and closes the door behind it!

Magical constructs instead of illusions are interesting, illusions seem more flexible but maybe she's biased!

"Should I look up the words from the second scene?" Her phrasebook isn't indexed phonetically so it'd take a little while.

Headshake.

"...you're saying someone could come in and say some things, and I'd say some things back, and then they'd leave peacefully. If they want to talk to me, why would they pick the lock and not just knock? Of course I'm willing to talk to people who want to talk to me if I can understand them! I was asking my other questions because you said some people in this city can't be trusted and I - wanted to prepare for the worst case, however unlikely." Tanya does not understand the parable of the two drow intruders.

Niss sighs and sets up a new diorama. Here's a Niss-doll, she holds it up next to her face in case the resemblance is not obvious, and the Niss-doll accompanied by the Tanya-doll pays the generic drow-doll some disproportionate-for-visibility prestidigitated coins. One coin two coin three coin! Now Tanya can go behind the door! Tanya lies down, and gets up once. Tanya lies down again? Drow from the reception desk comes by to say words!

"I understand you only paid for me to stay one night! I thought we were talking what to do if someone breaks in, surely the landlady would use a key or knock. I'll leave here in ten hours even if you don't come back, is that what you wanted me to say?"

Doesn't look completely satisfactory but eventually Niss just nods.

"So. If someone knocks while I'm not sleeping, I'll open the door and if it's the short servant let them take the pisspot and if someone wants to talk to me I'll do my best with the phrasebook. If someone knocks while I'm sleeping and I don't wake up right away, either they go away or they knock louder. If someone attacks me, or if I wake up with someone unexpectedly in the room, I will fight back or run away and if I can take them down without killing them that's fine. Ten hours from now I'll leave and if you're not here by then I'll assume something is wrong and eventually try looking for you. Is that all right? If you say no I'll try asking more questions."

"All right," Belmarniss echoes.

"Then I'll see you in ten hours. ...thank you, for your help, and I hope we can work profitably together."

Nod nod.

And she's off.

Tanya locks the door behind Belmarniss, sits down, and starts thinking.

To say that Tanya is a sound sleeper is to undersell her. She is a graduate of the trenches of the Rhine, which means she can sleep through an artillery barrage a mile away. If she's not particularly tired, she can also wake up when her alarm clock goes off or someone shouts her name (if they can be heard over the shells).

What she can't do is wake up because someone quietly sneaks into the room. That's what guards are for! Tanya isn't trained in spying or infiltration missions and has never in her life slept in an unsafe location without a guard rota posted!

The door opens inwards so the obvious way to rig an alarm won't work, and there's no furniture to block it... No, she's missing the obvious solution: take down the hammock, use it as a bedroll, and sleep against the door so it can't be opened without shoving her.

It will still be possible for someone, having quietly unlocked the door, to kill her before she can spin up her orb. She doesn't weigh enough to slow down the door being shoved open. (She tries and fails to make an effective wedge with the tools she has on hand. Kicks herself for not asking Belmarniss for one before she left.) This is the best she can do, so she stops thinking about it for now.

Next order of business: sleeping. 

Tanya is only half-through her day cycle, but (being a good soldier) she can sleep for seven or eight hours. And it would make sense to do so towards the end of her ten hours, so she's at her most rested when Belmarniss comes back to pick her up. That's what any would-be assassin would expect.

So she's going to sleep now - with her back against the door and her gun in her hands - wake up in five to six hours (hopefully), and then use the remaining time to fret think. She won't be as rested, but she's gone on much less sleep for much longer and isn't really worried about her performance tomorrow.

(How is Tanya going to wake on time, you ask? Her computation orb is clockwork but it doesn't do anything when she's sleeping. She was on a routine patrol and is definitely not carrying a watch with an alarm function.

But Tanya has a pretty enormous little secret: a second orb, the super-secret Type-95. Designed by Dr Schugel of questionable sanity, inspired by Being X of unquestioned madness, the world's only quad-core orb, an engineering tour-the-force that no mage can safely use without exploding. Crammed full of overpowered versions of all the spells an aerial mage could ever want.

Even all the questionably-useful spells known to Elenium Labs only take up so much room; the fourth core has copies of the most useful ones, so you can cast them in parallel. But Dr Schugel refused to dream small.

That is why core 4 also functions as a mundane clock when the orb is not in use. It is truly a marvel of Germanian engineering.)

The halflings do not come to collect the chamber pot while she's asleep. Nobody bothers her at all, in fact.

Then Tanya has three and a half hours to herself. She would like to take notes but should probably conserve her paper, so - thinking it is.

Unfortunately, thinking for a long while fails to come up with novel insights. She still knows essentially nothing about this world. What the local technology and magic can do, how the local societies and polities and rules work, what people here have and what they want, how to decide who to trust. She has essentially no idea what  she can or should aim for, and this whole trip to the surface is premised on the idea that she should wait until they're there before learning that. If translation magic on the journey going to be one-way only Tanya can't exactly question Belmarniss on the way.

She trusts Belmarniss because  - she's the first person she met, which is silly; and she's the only person so far who both could and would talk to her, but she hasn't tried that many people; and when she decided to allow her associate cast an unknown spell that paid off (in a way Tanya could not have predicted). The problem is that trusting Belmarniss means trusting her advice not to trust other people. So Tanya doesn't really know what options she's discarding by leaving the city, how dangerous the route is or how difficult it might be to come back.

She doesn't entirely understand why Belmarniss trusts her, if this society defaults to mistrusting strangers. There's no reason for Tanya to attack Belmarniss and she will need her help to communicate on the surface, but that's not the same as trusting your life to a stranger who might decide to save herself instead of helping you in a fight. She needs to ask Belmarniss why she wants to go to the surface and what she plans to do there and how long she plans to stay. Was she about to go anyway (alone?), was meeting Tanya a happy accident for her and is that why she was eager to suggest that Tanya should go 'upstairs'? Could she not find anyone to go with her before now, and if so why? She implied she doesn't want to join a raiding party - no, she didn't say that explicitly, that's just Tanya's interpretation (obviously nobody sane wants to be a raider if they have a choice!)

Eventually Tanya sits back down against the door and lets her mind wander, but she doesn't fall asleep again.

Knock knock.

She opens the door carefully. Opens it fully, once she sees it's Belmarniss and doesn't detect any magic which might be indicating a local illusion by someone pretending to be her.

"Hello."

"Good morning. The night was uneventful. I assume translation is still one-way for now? I'll follow you; please tell me where we're going if it's in the phrasebook." There's 'food' and, well, if she says 'fight' Tanya will assume it's target practice time.

"Food," Belmarniss indeed says.