"Share Language. I was kind of on the fence about getting it but I don't really want to put on puppet shows all the time."

Finally!

"Will this last an hour as it did yesterday? I have many questions but none are urgent."

"Share Language is different from Tongues. It will last all day and I can cast it every day, though if we anticipate me being tight on spell slots we might want to push it late until we can skip one."

That's much better than the spell from yesterday! Which makes sense, that one was available on short notice and this one Belmarniss had to find and apparently pay for.

"All right. Do you have any urgent questions for me? I'd like to ask a lot about - this world, I'm not sure yet what all my questions will end up being beyond the first few - but if you already have plans for today, or if you need to ask me something to make up those plans, please go ahead. ...I can also spend time bothering someone else with general-knowledge questions while you're busy, if there's someone you want to recommend and are willing to pay for their time. Or do something to earn a bit of money, if there's something I can do usefully for part of the day, like - flying people or small things around quickly or lighting or heating places. Or killing 'monsters', if there happen to be some a few hours away that are bothering people, after we've done the live fire test and you think I'm briefed appropriately."

"So, I owe Instructor Johysis a favor in the form of teaching a few of her classes for her, over the next few days, but in those days I expect to also have time to answer your questions and test your powers against summonses and, sure, midsized monsters that aren't too hard to find. I... could introduce you to my mother... who would find you very interesting and be able to answer many general knowledge questions... or I could kill some time in the classes I'm supposed to teach by letting the kids ask you about how you're a real live human adventurer and it might be informative what they want to know... but there may be some things we should cover first because I don't know what your native culture is like or anything. ...if your light can last for extended periods of time without you there, then you can make decent money providing it to plant farms. They do not generally want it to be easy to find them, the usual standard for wizard students making money this way is that you cast a Light on something and one of the farm slaves runs it to someplace with plants and runs it back when it runs out."

"I can't attach my light to objects the way I've seen people here do, I can only emit light where I am. I'm willing to answer children's questions and tell them stories, but I suspect the answers would be too confusing to be useful without a general explanation of where I come from and I might not want to spread that information in an uncontrolled fashion. I don't think I'm an 'adventurer', from the sense I get of that word; I'm a soldier in an army. Are there downsides or costs to introducing me to your mother, or is that simply the fallback choice?"

"Farm light does not really work as a job if you can only emit it where you are, alas. Flight looks like a lot of fun but has limited practical spendy applications underground... You may normally be a soldier in an army but without your army you are a powerful individual wandering around contemplating monster-slayings on your own recognizance and that makes you an adventurer and you are especially an adventurer if you don't want to go around fully explaining your original context. The downsides of introducing you to Rynaeri are that this risks getting attention from her mother, or her aunt, who are less friendly, and that she might offend you and I am really quite concerned that you will wind up provoked or confused into hurting somebody you don't need to especially since I cannot in good faith reassure you that nobody around might need it and don't want it to be her, and that she's often around my little sister who is even more likely to offend you because she is an annoying preadolescent."

"I will not be offended by anything." Tanya is a rational man and being offended does not serve any purpose when you are completely outside of your society and anyone who might agree with you. "Or rather, I will not act on being offended by anything, except for probably indicating the offense in my tone or body language, and I will not let myself be provoked. I will only act if someone is attacking or credibly threatening me, and I do need to be clear on what that might look like. Even then, I can leave instead of attacking anyone if I can recognize the threat and correctly assess that I can get away safely, which might not be possible if I think I'm being attacked with unfamiliar magic and have to make a split-second decision."

"I do recognize the possibility of cultural misunderstandings and miscommunications, and don't want to offend or provoke anyone myself. I'll leave it up to you to decide, but if it's only a matter of spending a few more days to prepare so I can get the explanations from you directly then I think we should err on the side of safety." This is yet another case of Belmarniss indicating a reason for Tanya not to interact with other people, but her mother presumably wouldn't give her contrary information anyway.

"I appreciate that but I'm not one hundred percent confident on there being nothing else like, uh, getting in a stranger's face to yell at them for not speaking your language, which we have not yet discovered and clarified, available to entrap any social situation into which you are introduced, that was really alarming. And many attacks would in fact look like casting a spell and you don't have the expertise to recognize one in progress."

... in her defense Tanya was in a very alarming situation when she did that and now she is better oriented, but being justifiably rude to strangers is still very bad so she totally gets where Belmarniss is coming from.

Tanya doesn't think doing glorified pest control in her free time can be a primary defining feature the way being a soldier is. If it is such a familiar social role here, these people should be organizing a proper militia to fight the monsters! Well, it is what it is; she doesn't mind people thinking of her as Animal Control if it doesn't come with any problematic expectations. The word 'adventurer' feels like it ought to have some unfortunate associations, but she might be reading too much into the language spell, she does not understand the language spell.

"What do you suggest, then?"

"We test-run you to see if we'll survive going up, I teach some classes, if I do wind up introducing you to my mom you can sleep in my room when I'm not there because our cave is just me, her, my sister, and two halflings - you didn't react to the phrase 'farm slave' so I assume we do not need to get deep into that? - and in a week or two we see if we can get out of here and go explore Taldor a bit."

"...Can you please describe slavery as practiced locally? I don't know how far to trust the translation spell. If it is as I understand the word, then I think it is - a thing with regard to which I should exercise the virtue of not taking unproductive offense at the local culture, and not provoking you or anyone else." Look at how unoffended Tanya is, except for the entire preceding sentence. "To be clear, for any realistic answer I can imagine you giving, I don't anticipate being able to - act to improve the situation for myself or anyone else at no-one's expense, so I won't try to do anything you might be worried about." Helping slaves escape may be a noble cause but first there has to be somewhere to help them escape to, and various other conditions which would need to be fulfilled to make sure both the injustice and the economic inefficiency are actually reduced and not merely moved around.

"The reason you want to be very, very legibly an adventurer is because drow as a group enslave any non-drow they get their hands on, and you want to make it clear that this would get nowhere with you, without having to actually kill anybody to prove it. In practice this is mostly orcs, the big blue or green folks, because they're strong and have darkvision like we do, and halflings, because they don't eat much but can do just as well as a medium-sized person at a lot of tasks. You don't have to like it or pretend to like it, I don't like it myself, but if you go around stealing random people's slaves you're going to have an immediate problem with feeding them and a bunch of less obvious follow-on problems such as our entire economy and the way we avoid going extinct due to disliking babies relying on slavery. My understanding is that halflings and orcs are both also popular slave species upstairs though not as universally so, so even if I somehow convinced my mom to give me one or both of her halflings and we got them safely up there this would not obviously improve their prospects, and not only because they're monolingual."

"I am glad to hear you also understand slavery and racism are wrong. And yes, that is the kind of problem I anticipated when I said I don't expect to be able to unilaterally help anyone. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. And I don't know enough about the world yet to participate even in existing efforts at systemic solutions." It sounds like this city isn't even particularly unusual. "And that helps explains why you suggested I should go to the surface, earlier. Why do you want to go there? Are the surface-dwellers less xenophobic?"

"I haven't met a lot of 'em but I don't think so, I think they will all hate me on sight because I am a member of a chaotic evil subspecies that keeps stealing their shit, which is why I'd be reluctant to attempt the trip without an accompanying human."

"...I would be happy to vouch for you being perfectly pleasant and law-abiding ever since I met you," although the short-term impression of a complete outsider may not be worth much, "but I am still not clear on why you want to go somewhere such testimony would be needed?" Being hated on sight sounds very unpleasant and unproductive.

"Well, I hear that in addition to a sky fireball and also slavery they have cool things up there, ranging from more food variety and cooler libraries to noticeable concentrations of Good people and nobody bothering me to get married. I might not like it and if I don't like it I can come back down."

Tanya can sympathize with that! In her first life she also experienced notable social pressure to get married, and she thinks women had it worse than men. Luckily her parents eventually came to understand that, given who she was as a person, a marriage would not have served to improve either her life or that of her wife and children... It's been a long time since she was reminded of that; her men didn't usually spend their time worrying about being pressured to marry if they survive the war.

If her would-be guide is a young woman trying to get out of the small city she was born in, that is very understandable but Tanya has to set some expectations. "We don't know what we'll encounter on our way or how long it will take us to get to the surface, and what we'll do once there. So I might not be able to escort you back down if you later decide you want to go back. And - I hope you can find happiness in a library, but I can't commit to being your guard or token human representative forever, if there's no other reason for us to stay together. So I think you'll need a better long-term plan. It might be that you cannot make one until we reach the surface and learn more, but I wanted to make sure that is a problem you're taking seriously."

"Yes, I'm aware of all that. We could also just die. Totally a plausible result here. But I was close enough to deciding to go adventuring on the surface without a human that this seems like a good choice of timing. - do people on your planet get stronger from fighting stuff? Because that's how it works here, and I'm about at the limit of what I can achieve magically without fighting some stuff, but the trip up will, if survivable, render me better equipped for the trip down in more ways than one."

"...people get much better at fighting with practice, as they do at most things, including the use of magic. Many things are best learned under fire and training methods often try to simulate aspects of real combat. I once set up training under live artillery fire, with a very small but real chance of a trainee being harmed, and this achieved excellent results" if not the results she wanted. "...and nobody was maimed or killed. But I'm not sure what you're imagining when you ask if that might be different on different planets; if anything, it might be different between races."

"No, it works the same way for humans on this planet. I mean that I can hang a certain number of spells of a certain limited range of circles, as a wizard, and as a sorcerer I can cast a certain number of spells off a certain personal list, also of a limited range of circles, and that capacity will not expand if I sit around and study and practice. ...maybe the live fire artillery thing would work, I'm not sure, I did get some growth off mostly-safe dueling practice as a kid. Other kinds of casters are also like this and it's harder to track for people who are just running around with swords but they also seem to improve in ways that are linked to danger and stakes and not just practice."

"I don't understand what 'circles' and 'hanging' refer to, unless they're mistranslated somehow." Obviously you need to learn a given spell, and to practice and get good with it, and to have a casting implement that actually supports that spell, but then you can just... go ahead and cast it?

"Spells have shapes. Spells with no punctures are zeroth-circle, one puncture first-circle, etcetera, they go up to nine. Wizards prepare spells - you saw me do this once I had Share Language down in my book - and those spells, once prepared, wait on a scaffold for - actually you might just want to sit in on an introductory wizardry class since I'm going to be teaching some anyway."

"That's not how my magic works at all. I had to learn each spell, and practice to get good with it, but then I can cast any of them as long as I have enough mana. And they require a lot of calculations, but they're not things that can have - punctures? Does your magical mathematics describe shapes? I guess I don't know that that's not isomorphic to how we do it... The introductory class sounds like a good idea." A young woman who is a teacher's assistant and an enterprising mage and wants to leave home so she can see better libraries is such a good person to have around, and also to have in society more generally. 

"I don't think Instructor Johysis'll mind if you sit in as long as I'm prioritizing the kids. Where do you get mana from?"