It is pitch black.

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Let there be light!!!

Which is to say: Tanya is busy dodging in unpredictable directions at three gees and she does not immediately stop doing it just because she suddenly cannot see any threat. This promptly makes her collide with something, which her shield can absorb but leaves her dizzy for a moment. And the light's intensity is more suited to the daytime sky than a dark enclosed space, and it takes her another half-second to turn it way down. Her reflexes are still stuck on 'middle of a dogfight', which means she's on a hair's trigger to shoot something as soon as she finds something vaguely enemy-like to shoot. Not her men, but all their mana signatures are gone? - no, something must be wrong with her detector but that means she has to rely on visual cues to shoot things -

What can she see?

She is in a cave about twenty feet across in most dimensions but blobby enough that it would be challenging to find the specific places at which it's that distance if you got out a tape measure to prove it. There is some kind of creepy cave animal on the ceiling!

How did she end up in a cave??? At least that explains why she can't sense any magic, rock and earth will block detection beyond ten meters or so, but still. What?

Can she hear anything? ...is there even an exit from this cave? (She is flying and does not really care which way is down as long as she can get out of here.)

If she listens carefully she can hear dripping water, the creepy cave animal softly adjusting position like it's thinking about jumping on her, and maybe faint echoes of other things farther off. There are actually two directions she could take out of this cave. Five if she can shrink.

Tanya is admittedly pretty Small but she definitely cannot shrink.

She considers calling out but - this whole thing was enemy action? Or... it happened during enemy action, or something? She doesn't understand what's going on, at all. But she needs the light, which will already draw attention to her anyway if the cave is otherwise pitch dark -

...she'll explore for ten minutes first. (Ten minutes of flight can cover a lot of ground but she'll be moving too slowly and cautiously to really take advantage of that.) She can use her orb's recording to reconstruct her path later - in theory, she's really not trained in this, the closest equivalent is buildings but she'd be much better at remembering the rooms of a building - anyway. There's nothing to be gained from waiting here. And she does not want to think about what just happened until she knows more, because -

...she's scared. This hasn't happened to her in a long time - fights are dangerous, of course, but they feel different. She can deal with it, of course, she just isn't inclined to stop and try to think her way out of the situation.

What lies down this randomly chosen path? She can fly soundlessly and tune down the light but can't turn it off entirely.

(She makes distance from the animal and otherwise ignores it. Animals are not on the top of her mind right now.)

The randomly chosen path contains:

- a variety of sparse but weird cave animals, including a giant millipede, some kind of ooze that is only an "animal" based on how it moves away from the light, and some bats who presumably exit to the surface when they want to do that out of that shaft there that she cannot fit through
- various cave mineral formations
- some bones that might have been a human's maybe
- and...

- this purple humanoid!

Insects can get that large? not important right now! Tanya has no special affinity for knowledge about animals and is going to ignore them.

The bones are a great sign for there being an exit she can use although caves can famously be very hard to get into.

- oh, there's someone here! No magic (so not immediately dangerous). No light source of their own, but not obviously trying to stay hidden either... Something's weird about their skin color and the shape of their head but Tanya's light source and vision really aren't calibrated for these conditions, she's throwing crazy shadows everywhere as she flies. They could be an enemy agent, and they can see her or at least her light but - not immediately doing anything about it that Tanya can see or hear? Better to approach them than to flee. (This flashes through her mind almost nonverbally in a few seconds.)

"Hello?"

The person says something! And makes a gesture! Neither is recognizable as anything Tanya knows linguistically.

Tanya doesn't recognize the language but that was a flare of magic! Which she also doesn't recognize!! It - doesn't seem to be coming from an orb? And had no obvious effect?? 

...even low-rank mages are rare. This is definitely not a coincidence. She doesn't know what happened, how she got here or why, and the other woman might be an enemy agent. She could be transmitting their conversation over radio, leading more soldiers to Tanya. Except - why give herself away? What did the magic do? 

Tanya is in uniform, armed, and visibly using magic. She can flee and hope the caves have another exit. She can't attack without confirming that this is an enemy, but she could interrogate a civilian... if they had a shared language. Whatever the woman just said wasn't in Ildoan or (probably) Dacian, but Ildoa is full of people from Magna Rumeli. Tanya doesn't know Elinika and the Balkans have languages even weirder than that. Well, 'hello' is pretty international; it's Tanya's own fault for not addressing her more clearly.

She doesn't point her gun at the woman, but only because she doesn't need it to kill an (unshielded) combatant and not threatening her might preserve option value.

"Do you speak Ildoan?" she tries in that language. If that doesn't work, she has - Germanian, Francois, English, some Russy... Lebadonian? Very rudimentary Ispagnan?

Purple person points at her mouth and shakes her head, but then points at her ear - it's pointy - and nods.

It is weirdly pointy focus. "You understand a little but don't speak it? Which one -" she'll go over the languages again, more slowly this time.

"Understand understand understand," she repeats. "Don't speak. Comprehend Languages," she adds, slowly and clearly as though this might be recognizable when nothing else she isn't directly parroting is. (No magic flare this time.)

She understands Germanian? Or - she might have chosen it because Tanya is Germanian and she doesn't actually want to talk? Tanya still has no idea what language those last few words are in, but at least the woman clearly isn't mute.

Tanya doesn't want to introduce herself by name, because her name is known in certain quarters and this person might not be an enemy yet, but she doesn't have an alibi picked out, it's never come up before. "Please call me - Maria," a name which exists in every European language. "I'm an officer of the Germanian army," which anyone can tell by looking at her. "Can you show me the way out of these caves?" Asking where she is might work even across languages, admitting she doesn't know where she is is the dangerous part.

"Belmarniss," puts in the purple woman when it's names time. And - slow headshake, at the question.

"Can't, or won't? Or - did you not understand me? Outside. Exit. Leave. Go away."

"Understand," repeats Belmarniss. "Can't."

"...because you're not allowed to? Who do you work for?" She could be simply lying to stall, but it amounts to the same thing. "Government, army - corporation -"

"...allowed. Can't."

"Why?" - this is leading nowhere. 

Tanya is, in fact, allowed to compel her to help, assuming she's an Ildoan civilian, but if she refuses to help then Tanya is - well, she's theoretically allowed to arrest her, which would be worse than useless right now!

"Who else is in this cave? Which way is the exit?" She has a compass and maybe the woman does do, if she spends time in caves. "Can you - draw me directions, I have paper -" she'll get a pencil and paper out of her backpack. By feel, so she can keep her eyes on 'Belmarniss'. What language could that be a name in? Is the woman really understanding everything she says, people can usually speak at least a little in a language they understand that well!

"Uh..." Handwobble.

Handwobble is not a no, what can she do given paper and pencil?

Here's a small notebook with a thin hard cover so you can write in it in flight. There are a few pages full of cramped handwriting that Tanya will stop Belmarniss from trying to read. Here's the next blank page.

Belmarniss in fact glances at the handwriting but doesn't make herself hard to divert.

She has a convention for drawing cave systems on two-dimensional paper! Hopefully it comes across tolerably well when she labels elevations in a neat stack with one symbol per in the upper left hand corner and then marks caves with them and gives caves that are above other caves matching symbols to indicate where they connect or don't as the case may be. In any case she will do a simplified map of the area, with a big star as a You Are Here - she points at it and gestures around the cave they're in - and the city in its seven-marked-altitudes glory over there, and you see how all of this is a cave system and none of it is a ladder up to the place with weather and stuff? Yes? "Noctimar," she explains.

And then on the next page she will draw something that looks much saner! A surface map! Less detailed and not just because the format requires less finagling to be remotely usable. And she'll name stuff on it, and she'll point straight up at the ceiling. "Taldor."

That's an enormously complicated cave system! No wonder she couldn't just give instructions. Or show her out, it probably takes hours on foot. Is this person a professional speleologist? She definitely doesn't look equipped for it but maybe she has a base camp nearby? (But why was she in the dark? And her clothes look weird - not important.)

...Tanya dutifully tries to follow the map and she thinks she understands it. At least, well enough to understand that she doesn't understand how the cave map connects to 'Taldor'. She can't recognize the surface map but maybe it's very local or something, there's no scale, and anyway the important thing is that it's on the surface. 

"Thank you, that looks very useful. Where is the exit from the caves to... Taldor?"

Handwobble handwobble dotted line coming off from these city outskirts thisaway?

She can't not know where the exit is. No matter how much you love caves, this is still the most important thing to know about them!

"I don't understand why you won't - can't - draw the exit. ...I can pay you a few lire to guide me out?" She's lucky she has any on her; currency isn't exactly standard equipment and her actual equipment isn't hers to trade away. 

"Can't," repeats Belmarniss.

Ugh.

"Is there anyone else in these caves?" People wouldn't go down here without backup, right?

Nod, but like, a kind of hesitant nod.

"You're not sure?" Tanya guesses. "Because the caves are so big, and there might be other people here, but you came alone?"

Headshake headshake.

Thaaat... probably means 'no' as in 'yes, I'm not sure'? 

Tanya can try to follow the map and come back if she fails to find anything. But if the map is at all accurate, this cave system is very intimidating and even if Tanya could find her way back here some hours later, there's no guarantee she could find Belmarniss. And she still has no idea how she got here, whether she needs to fear enemy action or what form it might take, whether Belmarniss is an enemy agent or an honestly confused civilian... 

If she finds a sufficiently large empty space she could start collapsing the ceiling until she reaches the surface - definitely not a good idea, building demolitions are not the same as cavern collapses tens or hundreds of meters underground. A move of desperation, to be considered in case she runs out of water and has no better options. ...but it won't come to that, because she can follow Belmarniss who presumably has supplies even if she doesn't intend to leave the caves any time soon. And it will give her time to think.

"What was the magic you used earlier?" She's not sure what else to ask but they both know the other is a mage, so - it might shed some light. 

"Comprehend Languages."

...it makes sense she can't explain it if she barely knows Germanian, and Tanya really can't think what spell with no obvious external effects you'd cast upon seeing a stranger.

What magic would a (probably) low-grade speleologist even need in a non-orb implement? Light is the most obvious, air and water filtration, communications, ideally something to help climbing (but Tanya hasn't heard of anything like that on the civilian market)... Some of those would be ongoing spells, comms don't really work underground (better to string a telegraph cable), and none of them make sense as a reaction to seeing her. It could be a very short-range signal but anyone close by can probably see or hear them anyway.

This whole situation is incredibly suspicious but Tanya can't see any better way forward, so.

"I don't know how much you can understand me and I don't really understand you. I intend to follow you, hopefully to your camp and then outside. Alright?" Not that Belmarniss can stop Tanya from following her, but if she wants to obstruct her she could just stay here for a day.

Handwobble. ".......all right."

And she'll turn and lead Tanya through the caves.

Progress of a sort? It's at least better than staying in one place. Tanya follows, alert for signs of anyone else being around. 

It feels weird for Tanya to be lighting their way when she's in the rear. Belmarniss must be conserving her batteries, or her mana if she has a mage light. She definitely seems to know her way around.

Belmarniss does, after a bit of walking, cast a spell! "Root."

That's a different spell from before! Tanya is watching closely this time and she can't make much sense of it. It... does something with the ground Belmarniss is walking on? Maybe she's doing some kind of surveying or analysis of the rock formations? That sounds like a reasonable industrial spell that probably exists, but doing it all alone in a cave must be a rich eccentric person's hobby. And she's not even stopping to look at the ground as she does it, she's just talking and gesticulating to herself? Well, anyone who spends their time alone deep underground is likely to be some kind of weirdo.

She does that same spell every few minutes as they go, particularly in places where the ground is uneven or steep.

Tanya isn't interested in her surveying and hopes she's not going to spend the rest of the day at it. She's not slowing down and even the biggest cave system can only be so big, so hopefully they'll end up somewhere more useful-to-Tanya soon? It doesn't cost her anything to fly along except that actually time is precious and she has to report back as quickly as she can!

Belmarniss is moving reasonably quickly, though, Tanya doesn't need to help her climb cliffs or anything like that. These caves are unexpectedly easy to traverse on foot, or at least Belmarniss has found a route through them that has that quality.

Yup.

This cave has some people in it! Two who are dressed about like Belmarniss, with pointy ears and purple skin and pale hair, and a couple who are waist-high but not proportioned like children at all. Belmarniss says something - to the purple people; she's not addressing the little ones.

....this is very weird. Three people with obvious family resemblance and two - dwarfs? It's not really her business but it's quite confusing. 

Also, why did Belmarnis make a "so-so" hand gesture when Tanya asked if there was anyone else in the caves and then lead her straight to them? Tanya is mentally downgrading the degree to which they had understood each other.

"Belmarniss, does anyone here know any of my languages better?" She can greet them in each of them again.

Headshake. Rapid conversation in her own language with the purple people and then she's trying to lead Tanya through the cave and onward.

Tanya wants to stay at least long enough to try to communicate with these people who might actually understand her! 

(And they also appear to have turned off their lights as Tanya and Belmarniss were approaching? What is it with these people?)

The purple people in the cave had mostly stopped paying attention to her in response to something Belmarniss said and one of them looks annoyed that Tanya's trying to get her attention. There is more conversation among the purple people and some of it involves gesturing at Tanya.

She's going to have to insist on getting their attention, even if this involves speaking rather loudly and in their faces. Do they visibly understand anything she's saying?

When she gets right up close to a purple person the purple person pulls a knife and shouts at her! Belmarniss shouts too!

Her barrier is categorically adequate against any amount of force a man can exert but that doesn't mean she wants to antagonize them, she just wants their attention! She backs off and insistently goes through all the languages she speaks.

...and she'll get out the money she has on hand. It's - thirteen Ildonian lire in coins and thirty Germanian marks in bills, apparently, which is not that bad for something she happens to have on her approximately by happenstance. Money in hand is a universal language, right?

(The one-lira coins are 5 grams of silver each, alloyed with a bit of copper. The marks are harder currency, but also harder to exchange locally. Ten lira is more than most people's daily wage, so the total sum ought to be fine recompense for diverting someone for a few hours to lead her out of here if they were at all inclined to help her.)

Rapid annoyed talking in their language. At one point Belmarniss rolls her eyes and casts a spell - "Light -" on a pebble one of them tosses her. They squint at the coins.

Belmarniss's light is a nice white light that makes it clear that the full size people are all in fact purple. (The tiny ones are human colors.)

That's not how inference works! If the people look purple that means your light isn't white. (It might be obvious if Tanya used an optical spell to make a mirror and look at her own face in the light, but she has no reason to do that.)

Making a permanent magical light attached to a pebble is what the fuck? Belmarniss isn't casting the light after the first few seconds, it's just sitting there? Definitely magical, not a lantern or a chemical reaction - it's omnidirectional and entirely even, and the pebble is still visible through it and it's not white-hot - and Tanya could have sworn it's a random pebble the other person just picked up off the ground! How does that work?! Tanya obviously doesn't know all the industrial and civilian spells there are and it's a rapidly evolving field but anchoring a spell, a detectable mana source, to an object separate from yourself has obvious military applications (as decoys, to start with) and she hasn't heard of anything like that??? Now she wants to get a proper translator for Belmarniss and shake her down for her secrets get an explanation of what's going on, even if getting out and back to her unit is objectively still her highest priority.

She will watch the ?spell? on the pebble very carefully and make sure her orb records every detail for later analysis. While being hyperaware of any other use of magic or visible weapons around her, of course. (Knives don't count as weapons.)

If she'll back the fuck off the knife will go in the person's lap but not actually away in its sheath. People examine coins and converse about them and about Tanya some more.

...does the language remind her of anything she's heard before, now that she's heard more of it than the two words "Comprehend Languages"? Does it sound even vaguely Italic, southern-Germanian, Nordic or Slavic? (Tanya doesn't have a great ear for languages but she has a vague idea of what she thinks these language groups all sound like.)

It's hard to tell words apart from their neighbors in a completely unfamiliar language spoken quickly by natives, but she can catch strings like "mekta" and "noth" and "aulin" and "sheb".

That sounds - maybe very vaguely Slavic, by process of exclusion? Definitely not Russy, though.

...she'll wait for them to reach some kind of conclusion on whether they want to even talk to her. Apparently? Certainly as long as Belmarniss isn't leaving.

No one "wants to talk to her" if by "wants to talk to her" she means "suddenly evinces the ability to speak anything she can understand".

Eventually, if she can read body language, the consensus is that she should go with Belmarniss the way they were originally going.

Sigh. What a bizarre, non-actionable situation to get stuck in! At least with all these people here, she's more confident she can find someone if she has to leave Belmarniss later or if Belmarniss doesn't lead her anywhere useful.

She'll follow her. At least she seems to be purposefully leading her somewhere? Or at least going somewhere herself, rather than just exploring the cave system.

They go through a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, Belmarniss stops and turns to look very seriously at Tanya. She points into the cave beyond, from which some light activity is audible. "Understand," she says slowly and clearly, pointing at herself and her ear. "Not understand," she says, pointing into the cave beyond. "Not." Point at Tanya. "Understand?" (These are all conjugated the same way whether they should be or not.)

"...there are people there who won't understand me?" Tanya guesses. "Or - I won't understand something there that you will and I should watch you for cues?" That's probably too complex for Belmarniss's limited Germanian, how can she say it more simply - "something in there that you understand, I will not understand, I should do like you do?"

Exasperated facepalm. Handwobble, nod, nod.

Can she tell which parts the nods are for and which are the handwobble. Tanya apparently didn't parse the earlier handwobble about there being other people correctly. If she repeats each part separately can she get a yes/no from Belmarniss about it?

Nod for "there are people there who won't understand me", emphatic nod at "watch for cues". Handwobble at "do like you do".

"...fine. If you're sure none of them will understand me, I will follow you and won't try to talk to them." For all Tanya knows Belmarniss told the previous group of weird speleologists to pretend not to understand her, but if she had the local authority to do that (modulo an internal argument) then Tanya won't try to deliberately go against it. (Yet.)

In that case they're going to go through a pig farm, worked by some big blue-skinned people with tusks. The pigs are in pits instead of in pens, but they're clearly audible. There aren't guardrails, though there's plenty of room between them; Niss walks carefully anyway between the open pig pits, which the blue people are pouring mushrooms into and shoveling muck out of. One of the blue people has a tusky blue baby slung on her back and a smaller purple baby tied to her chest.

?????????

Tanya is... going to keep flying behind Belmarniss, apparently, while recording everything she can? (There are no lights here either! This is really not the biggest problem here, and yet!)

Dwarfs definitely exist and it makes some sense that they'd specialize in caves that only very small people can get into. Weirdly pointed ears aren't fundamentally weirder then other facial features. Skin tones are a trick of the light.

Humans do not have tusks. No, not even if they work with pigs all day!!! And these men are as tall as the Legadonian Guard Regiment! What the fuck are they doing raising pigs in a cave with some kind of tooth deformation linked to gigantism?!

The minute they are alone again Tanya demands answers from Belmarniss, with her question being "what was that?!"

Belmarniss blinks at her, and... answers, but, she does it in her own language, so she might be saying "pig farm" or something else.

This is probably not on the shortest path to Tanya getting the fuck out of here but once she is out she would really like some answers, if only for her own peace of mind! What is this, the Brothers Grimm's version of Alice in Wonderland?!

She gestures for Belmarniss to keep going with a frustrated sigh.

...sure, Belmarniss can continue to talk about the pig farm for a bit, can they keep walking? Next up is a mushroom farm; this one has mostly tiny workers but there's one blue guy.

There is no way that any one place would have that many people with dwarfism or gigantism unless they were very rich and collecting them for a traveling circus (i.e. the Legadonians). ...if it's a circus, they could be painting their skin weird colors? 

What kind of circus lives in a huge network of caves and raises pigs in the dark?

If Belmarniss's provided monologue contains answers to these questions it's not understandable to Tanya.

There are more mushroom farms, or more caves' worth of the same mushroom farm.

...

A secret experiment in self-sufficient underground farming? That can't work, right, the fungus needs plant matter that would have to be brought in in very large amounts if you want to get pigs out at the other end...

Eventually they get out of the farm belt, down a long, narrow switchback staircase. Belmarniss calls down the staircase before they start but no one answers and she considers that good enough to go ahead.

Once they emerge from the stairs, they're in a city, a tall stairs-and-ladders-dominated hive of people, little ones and purple ones and tusky ones, running around on various errands, hawking goods out of stalls and climbing up and down and arguing and making out and slapping their children and eating at restaurants and getting measured for clothes and disappearing into side tunnels and reading books. Some of the little ones are carrying lights - magic ones like the pebble Belmarniss cast on earlier, not candles. Purple and tusky people do not seem to be in the habit including if they are reading books and appear to have been doing that since before Tanya's light swept over them.

...

Tanya's suspension of disbelief can stretch pretty far, but she cannot bring herself to believe in an underground city populated by uniformly deformed people who read books in the dark. And who have so many mages - she can sense occasional spells throughout the cavern, none of which her orb recognizes. (They're definitely discrete spells which take the same amount of time to cast every time, including at least one that isn't identical to the spell that produces light.) She can see a few non-magical light sources, flickering like fires, but the small uniform light-spells predominate. The people don't speak any of the major local languages despite there being hundreds of them here at least, and many more by implication. (She's tempted to fly up and illuminate the whole place properly, but - some of them might object?)

This is a scene from some fairy tale. It doesn't fit into the reality Tanya knows. And she has no idea how she could have gotten here, there was powerful magic she didn't recognize and then an abrupt transition, both as she remembers it and in the orb's records. She wasn't even stunned unconscious, the orb would have powered down and recorded that. 

Is it Being X messing with her again? She can't think of any other possibilities but that one is - pretty horrible, actually! Tanya would rather keep risking her life in the war!

...she needs to get out of this cave and into the sky so she can see for herself. Belmarniss agreed there is... something flat (?) above them, right, she doesn't think this cave is her world, and so Tanya's course is unchanged.

Belmarniss watches her take in the city for a moment, and then, when Tanya doesn't do anything that requires immediate attention, beckons her further in.

Tanya is visibly shocked, and on edge, and for a few seconds she moves quickly and jerkily as she speeds up her reactions while she takes it all in (that spell isn't safe to sustain for too long or she'd use it most of the time). But after that she'll follow Belmarniss.

Great. They can go through the chaotic city - a purple preteen attempts to pickpocket Tanya -

Tanya isn't going to be surprised by someone sneaking up on her! (For humanly possible levels of sneaking up, not Golarion-bullshit levels.) She constantly scans her surroundings and uses optical warping to maintain little rear- and side-view mirrors floating next to her head. If a random kid could touch one of her men unawares she'd tell them they deserved to lose their wallet for the abysmal failure of situation awareness. (Also, the hand wouldn't make it through her barrier.)

She's on edge but she doesn't point her rifle at the kid, only flies higher up and fixes him with an unimpressed stare.

He abandons the attempt and disappears into the crowd. Belmarniss stops to watch if Tanya's going to do anything else about this, and then when she doesn't sighs in relief and continues.

Tanya grew up in an orphanage; she understands this kind of thing happens in developing societies that aren't rich and civilized enough yet, similar to street begging. Normally a pickpocket would have the sense not to go after an aerial mage in uniform, but normally the mage is able to arrest them. Anyway, she has much bigger worries on her mind right now.

They have a longish walk through the city. No one else tries to start anything, though a couple times Belmarniss has to engage in brief chat with random purple people (the tiny and tusky people never attempt to address her).

Tanya can come up with many theories for what's going on. Multiple races (*) with different cultures or languages or typical occupations or even social castes? An aerial mage (of a species not attested locally) not eliciting stares or requiring explanation beyond a few sentences? Belmarniss (alone in a small city?) knowing Germanian, but only a little? An underground settlement that doesn't know (or forbids) contact with the surface even though they must trade with it for food? 

But she restrains herself from guessing. Besides not having any hard facts, this is all fruit of the poisonous tree: if Being X sent her here then everything she sees might have been selected for her to elicit a harmful initial reaction. She will wait to see what Belmarniss is leading her to, because it might be that she's leading her to someone who actually knows Germanian, and then Tanya will be able to reason rationally from facts instead of guessing. 

(*) In the Earth sense, obviously.

Belmarniss takes her into what might, in cave people terms, be a sort of suburb. Tunnels and ladders and hallways and stairs and more castings of that one spell she likes for rough terrain, lower traffic, more curtained-off or even door-having apertures blocking casual entry as they pass through.

Finally they are in a relatively large space with little alcovey areas around the edges. Belmarniss talks to some people - purple teenagers younger than herself, looks like - and gets directions that send her to a specific alcovey area. The purple teenagers gawk at Tanya but do not attempt to pick her pocket.

Tanya still has no idea what the earth-probing (?) spell does! Presumably Belmarniss already knows everything she wants to about materials right here in the city? ...and in the caves too, if she lives here then she presumably wasn't exploring before but changed purposes on meeting Tanya (for which she is grateful, if everyone else can't or won't talk to her).

Gawking is fine. (She wonders if they're mages and can see her spells like she assumes Belmarniss can.)

She's nervous about being in an even semi-enclosed space; this isn't a cave but there are many more people around here. She's been on high alert since they entered the city; now she will keep an eye on the sky open side of the alcove.

The alcove is furnished like an office, if you ignore that the desk and the chair are made of bones. (The bookshelf, at least, is carved right into the wall.) It's got a closed stone trapdoor in the floor that isn't particularly trying to be hidden but is locked. There's a purple woman there who greets Belmarniss in a friendly sort of way; they have a talk.

The furniture is made of bones? That is sure an aesthetic choice that Tanya might react negatively to if she hadn't just decided not to react to things until she can properly talk to people!!!

(Some units have skull insignia. Some churches have ossuaries that people can visit. Tanya is going to ignore this very strongly, because it does not matter.)

The conversation concludes with the woman whose office they appear to be visiting pulling a book out of her desk and paging through it. Belmarniss leans on the wall with a patient-waiting attitude.

Tanya is willing to wait a little. (She really hopes Belmarniss isn't going about her own business while letting Tanya tag along and wasting her time.)

They'll be waiting about fifteen minutes.

This had better be worth it. But what else is she going to do, accost random people asking if they can understand her? 

(Maybe she's looking up something that would help, like the telephone or address of someone who speaks Germanian.)

...she consults the map Belmarniss drew for her earlier, trying to trace the path they took to get here and to match the city's schematic with what she's seen of it. (She hasn't seen much, because she didn't want to light it all up.)

The map is not very detailed but it does not contradict anything she saw outright if she makes some reasonable assumptions about the map's liberties with scale and granularity. That would put them about... thereish? She could wave the map at Belmarniss in case that gets her to point at things.

Tanya can't think of anything she particularly needs pointed out, and can't communicate well anyway. 

She can do 'hurry up and wait'; she hasn't decided how long she should be willing to wait for, but she'll wait for fifteen minutes.

Eventually the woman finishes with her book, puts it back in her desk, gets up, and holds out her hand to Tanya. "Tongues?" she says.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand." But she'll shake the offered hand.

The woman holds firmly onto the offered hand for three and a half seconds while she casts: "Tongues."

"Did that take okay?" Belmarniss asks. "What're your most urgent confusions?"

Tanya can, of course, sense the woman casting. Her instincts are screaming at her not to let a stranger cast a completely unknown spell at point blank range, even if she has no visible weapon and the amount of mana she's using isn't enough to penetrate Tanya's shield and barrier. Magical technology is evolving quickly and the mana-to-heat conversion efficiency of current orbs is definitely not any kind of limitation of physics.

She could be about to kill Tanya on the spot! Never mind that she has no shields or other active spells to protect herself or Belmarniss from the backblast of the explosion. Never mind that Tanya is yet to see anyone here achieve a magical effect stronger than a weak light. What if her spell has an effect Tanya's shield isn't meant to protect from that knocks Tanya out? What if Belmarniss led her here so they could steal her orb? Why take a risk, any risk?

Tanya has been thinking, since she saw the city. Suppose she has been sent a completely different world, where she knows nothing and no-one. All her hard-won skills and knowledge, her preconceptions and reactions, could be wrong here; in fact this world might have been adversarially chosen to produce that effect. She doesn't even have the luxury of growing up as a baby and slowly learning about the world. What is the rational thing to do, if she isn't sure of the outcome of any possible action? How can she tell what serves herself and not being X in a situation he might have set up?

When you meet complete strangers, game theory says that you should try to cooperate at least once. If Tanya has to choose between the failure modes of "Tanya attacks complete strangers, turns new world against herself" and "Tanya foolishly trusts complete strangers, letting them attack her" then she'd rather be the second kind of person. There's more to her than the professional soldier on a hair-trigger reflex. 

Tanya doesn't know anything about Belmarniss and her intentions. If Belmarniss isn't rational, or if the local culture endorses robbing strangers, she might attack Tanya. But in those cases Tanya would lose anyway; she can't stand alone against all of local society. (Except in the sense that she could probably kill all of them, but what would be the point?) And if the local equilibria don't favor cooperation, then maybe Tanya doesn't want to live here. Maybe she'd rather die and tell Being X to his face that she is tired of his bullshit than live in a world where she has to assume the worst of people to survive. 

She speeds up her reactions and powers her shield as much as she can. Takes her service pistol in her free hand. And lets the woman holding her hand complete her spell.

...so Belmarniss was only pretending not to speak Germanian before? She doesn't even have an accent now! "What did you just do and why wouldn't you talk to me before?"

Tanya hopes there's a good explanation for all this! On the upside, that spell wasn't an attack after all.

"...I just asked Instructor Johysis to cast Tongues on you, because I do not speak your language, never have, and am unlikely to ever learn it. You will notice if you pay close attention that I am not speaking it now. Before, I was using the spell Comprehend Languages and repeating a few words you had already said to me. Because I do not speak and have never spoken your language. Tongues will last maybe an hour and I do not have infinite favors to trade for more castings, so please try to be a bit quicker on the uptake."

That makes no sense and Tanya is about to tell her so when her brain catches up with her ears because that was not Germanian or any other language that she knows, except that apparently she does know it? What the fuck, brain?

"...I suspect I still don't understand. I - already thought I probably came here from a different world. Our magic doesn't do... translation?"

That's not even right! Magic could in theory do translation, because translation is at least possible as an, an algorithm - Tanya's first world had very crude computer translation (but only between two languages the algorithm knows, obviously you can't translate a completely alien language from scratch)... But whatever this is, it doesn't feel like translation? It feels like just knowing how to speak in a language? The word for 'word' sounds like this and Tanya can tell this without even speaking out loud but she never learned this fact???

In some sense this isn't more surprising than going from a world without magic to one where some people have an extra mental lever that does stuff outside their bodies. Scientists can detect and measure magic (although only by relying on other mages operating the detectors) so it's no more mysterious than magnetism (i.e. very mysterious but undeniably real)... Tanya can't quite put her finger on why she feels this 'Tongues' spell cuts against her world's paradigm. Maybe a magic researcher from back home would look at it in glee. Maybe this vague feeling of dread that she has absolutely no idea what is and isn't possible anymore is because she's used to weighing everything as a potential threat and she should remind herself to think more of the benefits of technological development.

"I don't know what you can do," she concludes somewhat hesitantly. "Earlier I asked you about the surface because where I'm from people don't live in caves. ...Assuming this is an underground cave."

"Humans don't live in caves; we do. The reason I can't take you to the surface is because there's a bunch of monsters around and I don't know the way. But I do speak the language most popular upstairs and then a few more besides and you don't, so I'm not sure how much it'd help you to brainstorm ways you could get up. - let's get out of Instructor Johysis's office, shall we."

Humans don't...? Monsters? The translation isn't perfect.

(Tanya does not seriously reconsider that a bunch of non-humans might live in a cave with secret advanced magic on her planet.)

"...I will follow you."

Niss finds a different alcove that is mostly bookshelves and has a couple hammock-esque chairs hanging from the ceiling and nobody else in it right now, a couple doors down from the office alcove. "Here's fine. How did you wind up here? Teleport accident?"

"It was some kind of enemy action. So probably not accidental on their end, but I have no way to tell what they could control about the outcome. I'd never heard before about a spell that would send someone to a different world - or just make someone disappear, from our perspective - and I would have heard about it" if military intelligence thought she might encounter it "so it must have been a very new, secret development." Or it was a one-off intervention by a lazy wannabe god, but saying this will only make Belmarniss think she's a lunatic.

"I don't really know where 'here' is and I'm not sure where to start asking. ...have people ever appeared here unexpectedly from other worlds?"

"It's not, like, normal, for that to happen, but we know other planets exist and have people on them. You are in the drow country of Noctimar."

They have an interplanetary civilization? And live in caves??? 

'Drow' doesn't translate; it's a modifier of 'country', so probably something like 'republic' which can gain a meaning entirely divorced from its literal sense.

"Is there - a procedure, for people coming in from other planets? Or countries, but of course you won't have diplomatic relations with Germania so I'm not sure what the process would be checking... oh, and - I'm sorry for intruding on your day like this and I appreciate your help." Tanya does her best to smile, but the rest of her body language is tense and hasn't caught up yet with 'calm smiling diplomacy'.

"No, drow are not big on procedures, and, again, it is not normal for this to happen. You are - mostly because you keep flying around - parsing as a powerful adventurer, which means people will leave you alone unless they're really cocky or you piss them off a lot, so that's, uh, useful, and why you didn't get immediately knifed for getting in a random person's face, don't do that."

'Adventurer' translates as something closer to adventurist: a person who engages in hazardous and selfish military/political/commercial schemes. Tanya doesn't want to be perceived like that!

"I can stop flying if that creates a negative impression," she says and does. (But keeps her flight spell active.) "And I'm sorry for bothering those people earlier. I had no good explanation for what was going on, and I thought there was time urgency because I had been attacked and ought to return to my unit as quickly as I could, if I wasn't in another world. I'm not in any danger from non-magical knife attacks, regardless. "

"I assumed I should go to the surface but now I'm not sure what that would gain me. ...is there any way to get back to my world? You say this isn't normal but it's at all known of..."

"- no, it is absolutely in your best interests to fly around constantly if that's cheap for you to do, because some people might choose to attack you with non-knives on less provocation and it would be ideal if you simply didn't look like a soft target in the first place. Uh, if you go to the surface there's probably people you could buy two Plane Shifts or something off of, if you can make enough money, I don't know exactly how your magical loadout remunerates because it's clearly nonstandard if you didn't recognize Comp Lang. - there exist people down here who have this power but not trustworthy ones and those are among the people who might choose to risk tangling with you even if you're flying constantly, I think your odds are better upstairs for both racism and general background level of peaceful trade reasons."

So people here do routinely attack outsiders, and she just chanced to meet one who doesn't? Or - the first person she met, who is also the only one she can talk to, is telling her that most everyone else here is untrustworthy. Because she wants something from her, or because she wants her to go away? It's at least true that Belmarniss hasn't attacked Tanya, even when Tanya gave her teacher a chance to cast a spell at her, but that might be mere prudence on her part. And she wants her to keep looking powerful and dangerous, which also means looking unapproachable, although a random teenager tried to pickpocket her so Tanya rather doubts flying makes her look all that dangerous. (Casual flying absolutely does mark her as dangerous, but these people presumably don't know that!)

Racism is a sadly plausible explanation but she fundamentally only has Belmarniss's word for any of it. She needs a way to communicate with other people which can't be stopped (and possibly eavesdropped on or interfered with) at Belmarniss's pleasure. She doesn't have a strong reason to talk to people in this city and not people on the surface, if that's easily achievable, except that she already met Belmarniss.

"I don't know what my earning power might be. I have - magic with military applications; I can't predict what civilian uses it might be put to without knowing what you lack. I could light up the city, but only while I'm here... And the flying, but I can't carry much and it's not useful underground. My general education might contain something useful to local science and engineering, but I have no way of predicting what." If they have a way to contact other planets and to return Tanya home, then they might be able to open interplanetary relations with Germania, which is... too big and fraught of a subject to raise right away before Tanya can think it through.

"Are there other people here whom you trust who could help me get, uh, upstairs, in ways you can't or don't want to spend your time on?" If Belmarniss is part of a local group, it will hopefully matter less if Tanya doesn't talk to anyone outside of it. "What are the obstacles on the way and is there something I could do for you or others here in return for whatever help I need? I assume someone knows the way and can give me instructions, but if I can I would of course prefer to hire a guide who also speaks the relevant languages. And has the spell that would let me speak them, or introduce me to someone who does. ...how deep below the surface are we?" Tanya can try making a new shaft if there's somewhere to put all the rubble.

"I'm not sure exactly how far down we are at any given spot, in part because there's mountains involved on top. We can see in the dark, we only need light for distances and colors. There are adventurers around who I would not at all say I that I trust, including some who regularly go up to the surface to steal shit and bring it back, and if you think you might get along tolerably well with a bunch of people who go up to the surface to steal shit I can ask papersellers and fancy food stalls and such who supplies 'em. Raiders like that probably have at least one person who speaks Taldane, that's the human language popular up in the country we're under. They might but do not necessarily have a caster who can do Comprehend Languages; Tongues is higher circle, and in particular clerics get it later, so it's less likely that any given raider group will have it available. Share Language is in between and arguably better for your use case - lasts longer - but neither I nor Instructor Johysis had it. Your choice how picky to be about their communication capabilities versus getting the first group out of here. Or you could just go in the approximate right direction and bear upwards and that will probably work eventually and the reason I would not normally choose to do this is that monsters might kill me."

Tanya is not a military engineer and should not try to tunnel through mountains if she might collapse them on top of an underground settlement. It's odd and moderately suspicious that Belmarniss wouldn't know, or avoids saying, even approximately how deep they are right here in this big cavern but maybe it's legitimately difficult to measure for some reason?

"I don't intend to steal anything and would much rather not enable raiders by clearing their way up. Can you say more about these 'monsters'? And - are you saying you would like to go up if it were safe?"

"Monsters is a catchall category for any critter that may attack you and might really inconvenience a person in so doing, so not, like, a normal-sized bat or a fish or a normal sized centipede, but yes an ooze or a rust monster or a giant centipede. I'm not aware of anything really heavy-duty like a dragon in the paths between here and the nearest traversible aperture - I'm not an expert since I've never been but it would be pretty hard for the paper raiders if they had to get past a dragon or even, like, a neighboring civilization of duergar, so it's probably close to clear most of the way, but it'll have some beasties especially if you don't know their usual routes. And -" Shrug. "I'm doing okay and I hear sunshine is just the worst, but it'd be neat to explore, if it were just a matter of going up a staircase or something."

Note to self: dangerous wildlife comes in a range of 'giant centipede' (probably venomous and so dangerous to campers) to 'dragon' (big predator, if it ambushes you and you don't shoot it in time you're in serious trouble). ...except no, the mysterious language-knowledge spell doesn't give her definitions of words but she gets a vague sense that a 'dragon' is indeed a huge scary carnivorous lizard but also somehow bigger and scarier than that? Maybe it has some - ritual or cultural significance attached to it? Or maybe this world has dinosaurs, why not. And also 'rust monsters', which don't map to any animal Tanya can think of but are apparently huge lobsters (?) that corrode metal (???)

"I'm afraid I can't promise to make you a staircase, at least not without surveying and a team of engineers. If a path already exists perhaps it could be rendered safe by blocking off all side passages? Why hasn't it been cleared already - and if raiders regularly use it, why hasn't it been collapsed closed by the people of Taldor? Collapsing caves is much easier than digging them out. Unless the whole mountain above us is riddled with interlinking passages, I suppose..." Hmm.

"...the raiders are after paper and... fancy foods?" That makes sense if they can't grow wood or spices underground, although Tanya is still confused how they can grow anything underground. "And can't trade for them? ...I'm sorry, that's not immediately important, I'm just trying to orient myself. Is there anything I can do for you or someone else that would be worth your guiding me to the surface? I would normally not worry about any animal life, but normally I can fly and shoot it from above if I need to kill it for some reason, if I'm navigating narrow tunnels and a 'monster' ambushes someone I'm trying to protect that could be a problem."

"Well, the people of Taldor do not usually care to interact with monsters either, but maybe they come and try to do that sometimes and somebody kills them, or they succeed and somebody digs out or has to clear a new route. Paper, fancy foods, finished books, whatever else is hard to come by down here that people want. The two obstacles to me guiding you to the surface are, one, I have not in fact personally been there and do not know the way any better than you do apart from general familiarity with caves and the planet Golarion; two, I do not actually know if you are a sufficient fighting force for the grade of monster I anticipate to supplement my own combat ability adequately. I can imagine resolving these problems, they just exist."

Oh, good, a problem Tanya is equipped to solve. "Can you describe the fighting force that you think is necessary? If you want to have a shared measure of explosion power or light and heat output intensity I can probably figure it out if you show me some measure, but it doesn't matter unless we're expecting an attack by shielded mages. If we're just shooting beasts I can definitely kill anything I can see. I'm more concerned about defense; I can protect myself against any physical assault and I can make my shield impermeable if there are dangerous gases but I can't do anything for you. Except try to carry you away from danger, but I can't fight effectively while carrying you." A fully powered shield can stop a t-rex bite, right? "There are some more situational tools I could employ but I don't know what might be needed. I'm used to rapid aerial maneuvering and fighting in a cave is the opposite of that."

"...is there someone else who you'd trust to accompany us, who has been to the surface and would want to go there again?"

".......the fact that you believe that shielded mages are an importantly different category of thing to shoot from beasts is concerning as regards your ability to handle yourself in fights on this planet. Monsters have extremely varied offensive and defensive capabilities and I would be willing to bet that even now that I've said that your imagination is not stretching to all the ones I've heard of, let alone ones I haven't. It might do for the trip to the surface, which will take days, a week or two tops, in relatively trafficked caves, it will not do if you take up adventuring on the surface. There are monsters that mimic or cast spells, for one thing, and you clearly do not know about all the kinds of spells there are here. I do not personally know anyone who has been to the surface and don't trust most people in general, only for specific narrow purposes."

There are 'monsters', aka 'beasts', that cast spells? Well, it was always rather mysterious that only humans had mana on Earth. If many (all?) animals have mana here, that probably explains why they're considered so dangerous! "Yes, if 'monsters' can use magic that changes things drastically and I should approach this very conservatively." Normally this would mean shooting animals with great prejudice from extreme range, but.

(Also: a week or two for traversing caves? Even at a walking pace that would let them cover hundreds of kilometers! ...all right, most people aren't soldiers and can't walk (or fly) all day, but still!)

"Do you have a - proposal for checking what I can do, and teaching me appropriate tactics, that would make you feel safe about venturing to the surface?" If this doesn't work out Tanya will presumably have to talk to other people until she finds someone else willing to cast a translation spell, which sounds unpromising, so she's going to exhaust all avenues of working together with Belmarniss.

"Tomorrow I can try preparing summon spells and seeing how quickly you can kill various things. If you can do a couple different kinds really fast I will probably be game to try it. I would want some time to gear up - buying Share Language would eat into gear funds, so if we can work out a good Comprehend Languages based protocol, that might be better. You'd have to make wider-ranging guesses in smaller increments, if you spit out a paragraph with twelve wrong assumptions in it and all I can do is try to time when I nod it's easy to lose a lot of information."

"I will do my best to learn to communicate effectively. We can also work out a list of code-words or hand-signs for times when the translation isn't operating. ...And I can make visual illusions" (she demonstrates) "but that's not obviously helpful if you'll understand me but not vice versa. If you, uh, summon monsters I can kill them." If she can kill them at all then Tanya doesn't see why it would take her more than a second or two, but if brute force won't work then maybe it's an exercise to see how quickly she can figure out how to kill them, which is indeed a good test. Or maybe they'll have absurdly powerful magical shields and the amount of time it'll take her to hammer through them will actually matter. 

"There is actually a drow sign language but I'm not sure why that would work any better than just teaching you some spoken Drow, or even Taldane, frankly - you can say words when I've got Comp Lang up and I can tell you how I'd say them."

"...I'm sorry, I was still thinking in terms of communicating at a distance. Or - if we needed not to be overheard or understood, I suppose? But you're right, words should be enough. What is our next step, then?" If they need to wait until tomorrow and maybe even later, Tanya will need to know where to sleep, and who to trust or take directions from in Belmarniss' absence, and some water and ideally something to eat. She is going to be helpless while she sleeps and she really hates this but she doesn't see a way around it.

"It might make sense to use the rest of the Tongues duration on some of that vocab, actually, in particular I want to be able to tell you 'try again' if you do the twelve wrong assumptions thing. Like, we can fill out the phrasebook after but I want to establish that that should be in there."

Then Tanya can write down words and approximate pronunciations in her little notebook until they run out of time! She'll prioritize taking notes now and sorting them later, though with the local paper shortage she'll run out of notebook space soon at this rate. (It's a thin notebook; every gram matters when you're flying.) ...her orb can record her repeating the Taldane sound and the Germanian word on her orb and then she can replay it and write it down when they're not in an hurry, but some of these words she might need right away.

Great.

Tongues does eventually wear off. Belmarniss casts a Comp Lang and waits expectantly.

"You said earlier we'll need to wait at least until tomorrow for combat test and other preparations. I'll need water and food, I have rations for a few days but definitely not for two weeks. And somewhere safe to sleep, and someone to tell me when to sleep so we're synced and wake up around the same time. Unless it's so unsafe that we should sleep in shifts, we'll presumably do that on our way anyway. ...we didn't go over time units but I can show you the duration of mine," with an illusion, "and if you have an accurate clock we can multiply out from there so you can tell me how long your days are if that's important."

"If we want to make use of spare time without translation, there are some things we could do. Translation would make them more efficient but practicing working together without translation is also valuable. - I can shoot dummy targets if it'll help you calibrate the test tomorrow. Maybe practice collapsing or unblocking passages if you think that's relevant. And have some passages you don't mind blocked. You could show me any weapons or tools or spells you intend to use if I'm likely to understand by seeing them and asking a few questions that can be answered simply. We could practice working around each other's magic, for example if you're not confident in recognizing my illusions and decoys or if you have your own equivalents."

"Of course if you have your own things to be doing in preparation for the journey that would be completely understandable."

Belmarniss seems to consider this a suitable prompt to get up and head back into the city!

Then Tanya will fly after her!

Does anything else stand out about this city, given that she forgot to ask Belmarniss how much it would be acceptable to light it up and so is being conservative about not drawing attention or offending people?

If she looks she can see evidence of the sign language - those kids whose corresponding grownups are having a loud conversation are signing at each other, and those people who are leaning out of their windows on either side of this street-tunnel-cave-thing are, and those people who have a bunch of tiny people in their shop working on sewing stuff are doing it. Nobody using light appears to be exhibiting particular caution about where it may fall. They have leather, and they have silk, and there is a very little fur around, and there's not much sign of cotton or linen or wool. The smoke from the cooking fires at the restaurants is not obviously accumulating, nor can it be easily smelled from a few paces away. (The food can be smelled.)

Magic ventilation? Magic cooking fires? Who knows, but it's heartening that all the little things she notices are features of perfectly ordinary civilian life and not, say, fights breaking out or legions drilling or people fleeing a T-rex.

(Tanya does Not Understand the underground ecology and will not attempt to decipher it without a proper explanation.)

Eventually Belmarniss picks a food place! She does some talking to the proprietor and gets two bowls of mushrooms in a goulash-esque mixed-texture preparation. Offers one to Tanya.

Tanya will attempt to eat it! Hopefully whatever this is is good for Tanya, because she is evidently not getting out of eating local food. If there are going to be any issues it's better to identify them now.

It's mushrooms! Whether she likes it will depend a whole heck of a lot on whether she likes mushrooms.

Tanya has nothing against mushrooms! Maybe she'd change her mind if she had to eat them every day, but even if it were particularly unpleasant for some reason she's a soldier and she is capable of eating that which must be eaten.

They're pretty filling for mushrooms. There's maybe a little lard in there to round it out.

After they have eaten and turned over their bowls they can proceed thisaway!

Tanya will dutifully follow.

She has a lot to think about but her thoughts are running in circles. She's trusting Belmarniss, she has no information except through her and she has no obvious avenue to get such information. It's very suspicious that the first person she landed on in a random cave wanted to leave this cave and needed something Tanya might be able to provide, and had a language spell ready (and their teacher had another), and didn't take any time to think it over or talk to anyone before agreeing to this plan, and trusted Tanya for her part in it. After telling her other people in this city cannot be trusted and some of them are paper-thieves.

...alright, but what else is she going to do, talk to random people? Hope someone else has translation magic and wants to talk to her and tells her a contradictory story and she decides to trust them and not Belmarniss? Find many such people to see which opinion is more common? Go off on her own to try to reach the surface, which she only knows about from Belmarniss, and where she won't be able to communicate either, on what is supposed to be a week-long trip with two days' rations?

Tanya has a sinking feeling that she's not doing the right thing and "cooperate the first time" is not a sufficient reason to go ahead, and she cannot figure out what to do instead.

Well, is she going to interrupt Belmarniss booking her a room in a Cave Hotel?

Of course not! She doesn't even know that's what Belmarniss is doing! 

She might be able to guess from the hotelness of the cave! And the part where Belmarniss leads her to a room with a door that locks and gives her a key and the room inside has a hammock and a chamber pot and a little bench-seat-thing carved into the wall.

The hotelness was not very obvious before being shown the room!

"In how many hours do you plan to come back?" She can show her the clock-illusion again, counting off seconds and minutes which can be multiplied out to hours.

"Ten."

"Is anyone else supposed to come in besides you or should I refuse to open the door?"

They covered: "Yes-or-no question."

They also covered first-or-second! ...no, she's right, the answer to each part could be yes or not separately, even if that's unlikely.

"Sorry. Is anyone else supposed to ask to come in?"

Belmarniss hovers her hand at waist height and then points at the chamber pot.

"One of those short people will come to replace the chamber pot. Will they have their own key?"

Headshake. She puppet-ifies her hovered low hand and has it chirp a Drow word, then mimes knocking.

Tanya writes down the word. "If I do not answer will they go away?"

Nod.

"Alright. I'm not sure to what extent we are trusting the hotel for security. If I'm woken by someone opening the door or being in the room, should I treat that as potential attack? If yes, I will ask followup yes-or-no questions about appropriate responses." This feels like a bizarre question to be asking about a hotel, but Belmarniss said the city wasn't perfectly law-abiding and it's much better to ask than to risk misunderstandings later.

Belmarniss nods!

"In such a case, should I preemptively try to nonlethally disable whoever is there without waiting for them to explain themselves? They may incur some broken bones. ...competent people might be able to enter without waking me and if they do they can kill me before I can act if that is what they want, so we are talking about either incompetents or people who are not prepared to use lethal force. If given the chance, should I preemptively try to at least disable them? If yes, my next questions will be about lethal force."

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.

Tanya nods, and follows her.

It's mushrooms again!

The local staple. Tanya dutifully eats her mushrooms.

And then Belmarniss thinks for a bit, and... Tanya's coming along on a shopping trip.

Tanya doesn't know yet that's what it is but she will come along! 

Belmarniss is talking to several people in a cluster of shops that sell rolled up paper and fancy ink. At one point she casts a spell and squints at a partially exposed bit of writing on a rolled up paper.

Paper is rare and expensive here, which makes it a luxury good and explains the fancy ink. You can make parchment from the pigs, which puts an effective ceiling on the price of paper...

Tanya has no idea what the spell does. (This is an inherently scary thought.) Belmarniss keeps it active after casting it but there's no obvious effect.

Eventually Belmarniss pays in gold for the scroll she squinted at.

It's weird how different worlds settled on valuing the same metal. Then again, it's weird how two different worlds settled on both having humans.

Then they're heading out to the suburban area where they met Johysis! And sitting in its library nook again! There are some drow children, about the size of twelve year olds, in the big open area all examining a diagram drawn on the floor in illusion colors of some kind while their teacher lectures and points at bits of the drawing with a long stick made of several bones fitted together.

Teaching is the bedrock of society and the fuel of the engine of progress! It's not a school class but it's a lot better than nothing.

Can Tanya figure out what it's a diagram of?

She can get an obscured view of it from a bad angle which probably suffices to tell her that it's a lumpy thing she doesn't recognize.

Oh well.

The illusion spell is also interesting! She can tell that it's an illusion but she doesn't understand how the spell works at all. At least she can record its shape and designation in her orb, as she does for every novel spell she encounters. (The orb isn't great at recognizing the local style of spell, but so far Tanya has encountered few enough of them that no two could be confused.)

It is also lumpy!

Belmarniss appears to be copying her new purchase into a big book.

...if paper is so expensive, it seems odd to copy things? A big book is undoubtedly more convenient than a collection of rolled-up scrolls, but you'd think someone would invent the binder.

Well, it's gonna Take Her A While. She does occasionally pause and look up in case Tanya's state has changed.

How long can it take to copy a single scroll? It's not a very long scroll. She must be doing something other than simply copying it, but Tanya will have to wait for an explanation, if it's even something to do with her or their business together.

Tanya can wait a While without fidgeting!

If she looks at the scroll it is in fact covered in really fine drawings and complicated legends and arrows and symbols, and it's not being copied verbatim (it has to go across more than one page of the book, for one thing, not a continuous stretch).

When the process is finished the scroll goes suddenly blank, the writing receding into nothing from a point in the lower middle.

Is that perhaps information on their route? It's a very dense notation, whatever it is, and it makes sense if Belmarniss wants to simplify or annotate her own copy.

Cleaning the precious paper for re-use is very sensible except - how did she do that? Tanya did not sense any magic! Did the other woman's presumed-illusion spell also do this somehow? Was it a trick some kind of vanishing ink? The receding effect did not look like a natural progression of the ink vanishing, it looked like computer graphics an illusion. If local illusion spells can produce illusions at least some parts of which don't seem magical to Tanya then she's going to be in danger - no, that makes no sense, why would she do that. 

Nobody in the room looks surprised (except for Tanya). She will ask Belmarniss about this later.

The scroll gets rolled back up and bagged. The book is then... studied carefully even though she literally just wrote it down?

Maybe she's committing it to memory because the book is heavy and precious and shouldn't be taken with them?

Once she has been at this step for fifteen minutes she casts something and the book vanishes in a somewhat showy sparkle of lines and sigils that promptly vanish with it!

Um.

Is it another illusion? There's no lasting magic and also why would she illusion the book gone. Surely she did not destroy it, even if there was a... book-destroying spell that looked like that. This is... presumably related to the weird-looking ink-destroying (???) effect from earlier, except that wasn't even magical!

Whatever the spell did, why did it produce those sigils? ...she's being stupid, they're obviously meant to tell locals what the spell is doing. Very sensible when one is not in the military.

Tanya now has More Questions.

Hand?

What - oh, it's probably the language spell from yesterday or something similar. Sensible to keep it until Belmarniss was done with her business, since it doesn't last very long. She thinks Belmarniss can't cast that spell, so probably it's another spell with a similar framework?

...it's a very civilized and admirable convention, whether it's magical in nature or merely social, that to cast a spell that affects another person you must shake hands with them. Tanya approves. She will take Belmarniss's hand.

"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?"

"It replenishes over time, up to a personal limit which varies a lot between people but usually stops growing by age ten or so. Once someone has a reasonable capacity, skill in using it becomes much more important. ...if you meant 'where does it come from' on a deeper level than that, in terms of physics, I don't think the answer is known but I'm not an expert. As far as is known, animals and natural processes don't produce mana and I've never heard a good explanation for that beyond saying that mana is a property of souls. ...and I should have mentioned, not everyone is a mage; maybe one in four or five hundred is, one in several thousand once you filter for an actually useful amount of mana and degree of skill."

"Huh. I think something like a quarter of people are smart enough to be wizards, if they try, maybe more if we were better at teaching it or something, it's just kind of expensive to get started so mostly only the very bright invest in it. Anyway, I work in the way I described, so even if I turn out to be far more allergic to the sky fireball than expected and the first village we come to starts throwing rocks at me without waiting for me to make sudden movements, I will probably be able to go back down without you, due to having seen and cleared the route and also fought anything that got in the way."

Tanya is unsure how much she should take that literally and how much is the bravado and/or naivete of a young woman wanting to escape her hometown! Maybe she should angle for an introduction to Belmarniss's mother, in order to ask her discreetly, except she can't trust her because she is presumably the person who wants Belmarniss to stay here and get married...

"Your whole population has mage potential but only the top quarter studies it? That makes sense; if we had so many mages and also didn't have a war going on most people would probably choose other professions, and there would definitely be a shortage of casting implements and qualified teachers, at least for a long while." They don't seem to be very technologically advanced or to have a particularly high quality of life, but you need a much bigger population than one small city to produce the caliber of researcher who'll invent spells of real economic significance, not to mention a lot of R&D funding. 

"So - the bottom line is that you need to do work to prepare each instance of a spell ahead of time, which means you need to choose what to prepare for, and also you can only have so many prepared at once? How many is that?"

"...you've misunderstood something. Far fewer than a quarter of drow study to be wizards. A quarter is my guess at how many would succeed at hanging first-circle spells if they put in the work but most people are farmers and some people fail at becoming wizards for reasons other than not having enough raw intelligence. You also need to be able to get enough sleep reliably, you can't have shaky hands or a stutter, you have to tolerate a lot of math, and if you drop out to do laundry as soon as you've got your first cantrip that might be a smart thing to do but it's not going to make you a first-circle wizard.

"My wizard spells need preparation ahead of time, yes. My sorcerer spells don't - that's why I can be so profligate with the Comprehend Languages, there's only so much opportunity cost there. ...I can just give you numbers but I'm not sure they'll do you much good since you don't know very many spells that exist."

...yes, that's an obvious mistake in retrospect, a quarter of society spending months or years training to be mages is far more than could be supported when most people are farmers. (Even in Germania, a solid one-third of the population works in farming or farming-adjacent jobs.) 

"I see. And your 'sorcerer' spells are still limited to being cast only so often. Is that not because of running out of mana or some equivalent? Do the more complex spells take more, or is that a separate issue of skill or some other factor? I would appreciate some numbers, I'm not even sure what order of magnitude we're talking about here. ...I can also wait for the class if you'd rather, but it might need to start with a basic overview for me to understand it."

"I could imagine someone modeling sorcery as running on some unifying substance but I don't think it's a good model because spells are discrete and you can't use up lower circle slots to constitute a higher circle one unless you're already really close to having the higher circle one in its own right. You could think of it like having a certain number of arrows of different types that I can shoot, if you could transmute arrows into equivalent quality arrows but not into better arrows on the spot. And if there were also unlimited zeroth-circle arrows, because you can catch a cantrip and re-cast it, which is why I never run out of the one I use to avoid tripping that you've seen me do a bunch."

Oh, is that what she was doing. (A bookish young woman who is prone to tripping is a bit of a stereotype but probably not an inaccurate one?)

Tanya takes a moment to puzzle out the arrow-metaphor. "So you can cast a fixed number of 'sorcerer' spells of each group, the spells being grouped by some mathematical property. One group contains the spells that can be cast any number of times" - presumably up to some mana limit, but a very weak spell like the local lights really can be cast all day long by even a weak mage. "And the same for 'wizard' spells, except you need to prepare specific ones ahead of time. How many times can you cast limited-use spells, then? And how useful are the unlimited spells, for protecting yourself or fighting? ...which reminds me, you said the journey might last two weeks and would certainly last days, we can carry enough food but do we expect to find water en route?"

"We'll want a bag of holding for the trip for that reason. Though a couple weeks is a high-end estimate. I know a lot of cantrips, there's one I don't have but know exists that I'll want to get ahold of before we go which'll keep the sky fireball off my case. Most cantrips are not very combat-oriented but I have Ray of Frost, which I can do as a sorcerer -" She zaps a bit of the floor with it. "I also have a technically-not-a-spell bit of sorcery, a little stronger but not much and not cold-themed, which is limited per-day..."

Belmarniss of course knows all the spells she knows and how many of them she can do in a day and does not mind telling Tanya most of this information.

Tanya has no idea how much actual damage these spells can do when they're being used for real. Presumably a lot more than that, you wouldn't want to freeze half the room as a demonstration! 

"To be clear, I can carry around forty to fifty kilograms while flying, which is more than enough for our water budget. Up to a hundred kilograms for a couple of hours, if I really push myself. But it would need to be in a rigid container, or at least a stack of several containers. My flight spell is optimized for moving the caster and I can only do crude pushes on other objects; if I need to, for example, fly you up a cliff it would be easier to lift a small platform you're standing on." Mages can evacuate other mages under fire with a fireman's carry but they can't do anything else useful at the same time, it's almost as tiring as the real thing, and it tends to leave the person being carried with extra bruises. "And if I'm carrying something like that, I'd be much slower to react to a sudden attack, especially if it needs to be set down carefully. There's also a risk the container would be punctured in fighting, so if you have another solution it's definitely worth pursuing."

"Bags of holding are bags that have more room inside than outside, they're very popular. They're heavier than they'd be if they were just normal empty bags, but they don't get heavier when you put stuff in them. It's also possible there'll be water en route and Detect Poison's a cantrip so we'll be able to tell if it's safe to drink but it's advisable to bring some."

"That sounds incredibly useful! We don't know how to do anything like that. How well does it scale?" Tanya has a brief vision of carrying an artillery division in her bag as she flies.

"You can't nest them, and the ones that hold more also weigh more, and of course they require wizards trained in crafting wondrous items and a fair whack of spellsilver to make, which is why I'm going to need to go to my grandma for money. But they're pretty cool. Also in extremis Ray of Frost does condense moisture out of the air usably."

"That makes sense. I can also condense water but only if it's fairly humid, I wouldn't want to rely on it."

"It's not usually super dry down here but yeah, it would definitely be annoying. If we had a cleric along, they can create water as a zeroth-circle spell, but arcane casters can't and I don't really want to try to get a cleric."

That is a very understandable sentiment!

(Do the local clerics have a spell to make water come out of the stone? It sounds very useful for an underground city with no rainfall. What a pity useful spells are hoarded by the church. Tanya doesn't even want to know what kind of god they worship.)

 "It seems we can ensure our water supply without that, yes. ...I think I'm back to general questions about the world, which are not urgent. I expect you also have some questions for me?"

"Yeah, I don't have a good sense of your usage limits except that if it all runs on the same thing presumably it all trades off against all of it?"

"That is correct. There is a unit measure of mana but I'm not sure how to translate it, it is annoyingly not tied to the other fundamental physical units... Mana is a limit on casting many powerful spells very quickly but over longer periods of time the more usual constraint is tiredness and loss of focus. If you have to cast all day that's very many opportunities to get something wrong, and losing control even once can be catastrophic, either in itself or because it gives an enemy an opening or just because you fly into something. So combat mages have to be very careful and know their limits well. ...it helps a lot that we operate in groups and not as solo 'adventurers', we rely on each other and switch out as necessary. I of course can fight by myself, but I lose a lot of effectiveness this way. More because of being in a cave."

"I very much hope tiredness won't come up as a constraint, I should either eliminate the target or retreat long before then, but if we're pinned down for a long period of time and I keep using magic but can't break out for some reason, that would do it. As for mana, I can't use all I have on a single spell or two anyway, because the individual spells are also constrained by my orb. If I simply kept firing as powerful a spell as the orb allows as quickly as I could then I would run out of mana before I grew tired, after - two to four minutes, depending. But those spells would bring the roof down on our heads long before that, so it shouldn't come up in practice."

"Oh, adventurers are not usually solo, groups of like fourish people is normal. What does the orb do?"

"It's an example of a category called casting implements. They form the mana into specific spells that are built into them. Freeform casting is possible but, in practice, it's very difficult and approximately no freeform spells have been invented on our world that are both useful and reliable. Computation orbs in particular are necessary for spells with variable effects and many parameters; they compute the exact way the spell should be cast in each particular moment, for spells whose equations humans can't solve at anywhere near realtime. I thought your work up-front when 'preparing' spells might be similar, but since you can also cast some spells at will I'm not sure about that anymore."

"For example, applying force to an object is relatively easy, and some industrial applications that need the same amount of force applied at the same location every time can employ a not very skilled mage and use a simple and cheap casting implement. But flight requires applying different forces to different parts of the body, which change position relative to each other and are sized differently in different people anyway, and then also accounting for wind and altitude. And flying in combat requires very rapid and precise changes in orientation and separately the thrust vector, while moving at least the arms in order to shoot at targets; it would not be possible without modern computation orbs."

"Huh. Our spells are mathematically complicated objects that have to go through a preparatory process between the format in which they're written and the one in which they're hung and then change again when they're cast, but they're mathematically complicated objects that treat a lot of things as fundamental, like 'a person'. Fly is a third circle spell but I don't have it. - we should check if you can apply your flying force thing to a Floating Disk, because I do have that. They're not usually good to ride because they really want to follow you but if you cast one in an enclosed space you can sit on one."

"I can apply force to anything physical. It's ordinary force, the same as if you pushed it. Can your floating disk that you can sit on be pushed or lifted normally? I can make a magical shield that won't let physical objects through, if you push on it it absorbs the energy but if you apply enough force it breaks. A lot more force than pushing on it, of course. Maybe your disc is more like that."

"And I don't understand how it's possible to treat 'a person' as fundamental; the spell interacts with their body, it's not as if I'm somehow targeting the soul or their own magic or something... Maybe there's a complicated spell sub-unit that, uh, defines 'a person' and then various spells reuse it? But I'm not a magic researcher and I can't claim to understand how the spells I use actually work, I only know how to operate them."

"Not very normally, which is why it'd bear testing. It is a force effect, though, so maybe this won't work at all. Clearly your spells and ours are different in a lot of ways and the fact that ours can treat 'a person' as a natural thing is one of them, might be working on souls or not, I'd need to look into edge cases to form a confident guess about that."

If it operates on souls can it be used to determine how complex an animal needs to be before it has a soul? ...Tanya does not say, because she does not particularly want to get deep into discussions of souls, even though she's the only person on her planet remotely qualified to participate in one.

"It's worth testing. What other interactions might be useful? I can do various optical effects including lenses for zooming in on remote objects or for focusing optical spells, and mirrors. Visual illusions, which are broadly the same class of thing. Magical decoys, which imperfectly mimic my own mana signature - or someone else's, if I practice - and can be moved around me, this can help mislead enemies who target sources of magic like aerial mages do when they can't see."

"I can, in fact, obscure vision by creating a very small explosion with a lot of smoke. ...this uses up ammunition of which I have a limited amount, so I should be very conservative with it until I can confirm whether it's possible to manufacture more, presumably somewhere on the surface. It's the same ammunition I'd use for either penetrating thick metal armor, which I hope monsters don't wear, or for creating very powerful explosions which would almost certainly collapse a tunnel or something. So for offense I'll try to stick to light and heat, which don't require ammunition."

"Other utility spells... magnetic compass, precise rangefinder, using the illusions to try to hide myself - I can do that for you too, but I'm much more used to illusioning a patch of empty sky and I'll need to practice in this environment." Radio. Barriers and shields, which she can't apply to Belmarniss. A few other odds and ends.

"My spells usually have a range limit that has nothing to do with how well I can see, though some of them like the ray of frost do require aim and I guess optical tricks could help with that... Prestidigitation will turn things colors, and make little fragile things like the puppet show stuff, but there isn't a good visual illusion cantrip, they're all higher circle than that. I don't know if there's any critters that target by anything like a magical signature, I'd expect the ones that can't see in the dark to instead echolocate or sense vibrations or something. Most monsters do not wear manufactured armor but they can have scales that are about as good. I don't know what a magnetic compass is?"

"It points due north. Magnetic north, which isn't quite the same as geographical north, and I just realized I don't know where the north magnetic pole is on this planet, but it at least points in a consistent direction, which can help with not getting lost. ...no, wait, if there are magnetic ores or metals nearby it could get confused. Never mind, it's probably best not to rely on it underground."

"How can creatures that can't see in the dark live in the dark at all, do they all have ways of producing light? Or do you mean they're just blind? Flying obviously reduces noise and vibrations but I'll need light so I can see potential ambushers - I can illusion more light sources so they won't know which one I am but they'll definitely know someone's there."

"What determines the effective range of your spells? If the spell throws liquid acid it makes sense that it can't fly very far, but I'm not sure what the ray of frost is doing."

"Some things are blind and rely on other senses, a lot of fish are like that. ...when you say you can illusion light sources does this mean the plant farm plan could work after all, I don't immediately have reason to think that wouldn't work. Admittedly the ones they use normally are evocations, so it might matter to a plant. My ray will go about -" She points in a direction that doesn't have anybody in it. "Ray of Frost - thirty-five feet ish. It just fizzles out past that."

"The illusions don't work like objects that reflect ambient light, they capture all incoming light, that's why you can't see through them. And they emit light to be able to be seen. A perfectly black object and an object that emits light are the two simplest illusions. I can't leave one in a farm, the same way I can't leave any of my spell effects very far from me. My magic is fundamentally short range (*). Everything that goes farther than that is a physical effect created by the magic, such as light." 

"I don't know how your spell works but I can see that it remains magical for the entire duration, it's not creating a physical effect that disappears after thirty five feet. Which makes sense, but it's more useful to use magic to propel a bullet or produce a ray of intense light or heat, since those have much greater effective ranges. ...admittedly I don't have a spell that cools things."

(*) Tanya's concept of 'short range' is appropriate for aerial dogfights, not for melee combat.

"There's fire combat spells, I'm not sure about light ones - or, like, there's certainly spells intended to blind people, perhaps with light, but I don't think it'd do any damage? Even the gentle kind of damage that doesn't usually kill anyone."

"I'm not sure what you mean? Either the spells produce ordinary light, which can blind and in sufficient intensity can permanently impair vision. Or burn or kill someone, if there's enough of it. Or else the magic directly affects the target at short range, in which case I don't know what your spells are doing and they could be blinding people some other way entirely. By fire spells do you mean ones that produce heat, or that catalyze fire as in the chemical reaction, or something else?"

"Maybe a light blast spell of some kind would do that to a normal person but people with a few circles are tougher, and equivalently experienced weapons-y people moreso. By fire spells I mean things like Fireball which is a ball of fire and bad to be in because of how it is fire."

What is even 'fire'. Tanya's magical (?!) understanding of this language is unhelpfully insisting that fire is fire, other things can also be fire but fire itself is just that.

"I suspect a translation difficulty. Light and heat are the same kind of thing, we can see light of certain - 'frequencies', like the colors you get if you split white light with a prism?" No, Belmarniss has never seen sunlight, she thinks the sun is a 'fireball in the sky' - the girl really deserves a proper library - "I'm not sure if you've ever seen that?" Tanya can demonstrate a rainbow-prism with an illusion! "Heat is off to the red side of that. We can't see it, although some animals can see a little farther than humans in one or both directions. Anyway, that's heat radiation, what you can feel at a distance. Fire itself is a chemical reaction, things burning to smoke and ash, which produces heat. The two tend to go together but the reason I care about the distinction, here, is that I can reflect light and heat with a mirror but I can't shield against magic that directly induces a fire reaction. If I can see the magic I'll know which one it is."

"As for a 'light blast', one of the properties of light - and heat - is that there's no physical limit to how much of it can be in one place at once, unlike matter. I can put a lot of energy into a single spell. I can -" what's an analogy that would be obvious to a cave-dweller - water and steel both have very high heat capacities but does Belmarniss know that? "...if I refer to the amount of energy to heat a 'liter' - uh." What the hell, magic language knowledge? "Would it help to talk in terms of the amount of energy needed to heat some unit volume of water from freezing to boiling, or to take it from boiling to complete evaporation, or to melt a given weight of steel? ...Steel heat capacity varies, so that would be only approximate. In any case, I can - if I'm not worrying about the resulting steam explosion or collapsing a tunnel - boil all the water in a human body in well under a second. It's not the kind of thing being tough and experienced lets you survive, if you can't dodge it and don't have a magical shield or a very thick physical one. Does that work as a frame of reference?"

"I think my conclusion from listening to all that is that when I summon something for you to squash as a test exercise it should be a fire elemental. To be clear what you say is very interesting and it may have some applications for some situations, perhaps including many or most monsters that have water in their bodies at all and would be better exploded, but I think you'll make a really interesting facial expression about a fire elemental."

"What is a fire elemental? - If you want the surprise to be part of the test that makes sense."

"Elementals are creatures from an elemental plane - Air, Water, Fire, Earth - which are composed of that element."

...

Golarion has humans and also Aristotle? (*)

Her sense of the language seems to say that... air, water, fire and earth are exactly that, or maybe the Platonic ineffable concepts of that or something... and a 'plane' is a place you need magic to get to. And some creatures from the plane-of-elemental-fire got over here and Belmarniss can 'summon' (lure?) them to be killed. Presumably they're not dangerous or they wouldn't be so easy to find and Belmarniss wouldn't be so blase about it before seeing Tanya kill one?

Anyway. Belmarniss seems to think that an 'elemental' is largely or wholly composed of that element. That might make sense for the other three, even though Tanya doesn't see how a living body can avoid having all three of solid, liquid and gas, but it makes no sense for fire? "If it's made out of fire, what is it burning?"

Putting out a fire really isn't within Tanya's capabilities. She has no direct way to cool something down or to block the flow of oxygen, unless it's a very small fire that fits inside the farthest reach of her shield. She can blow apart the thing that's burning, and try to move it somewhere where it won't do more damage and will burn out, but she's really the opposite of a firefighter.

(*) Tanya has not had a classical education.

"That question does not, in this case, have or require a well-defined answer."

"Then the only thing I can conclude from that is that we do not mean the same thing when we say 'fire' and the translation spell is wrong. ...do you want to tell me more about the 'fire elementals' or do you want it to be a surprise test?" A blind test would be entirely legitimate but mostly as a way for Belmarniss to learn about Tanya, not for Tanya herself.

"I haven't extensively studied fire elementals! I'm a transmuter more than a conjurer. I can answer basic questions about them but I can only answer... correct... basic questions about them, not questions that are like 'so is this fire north-facing or south-facing, which is of course a property all fires have one of'."

"Fire - as I understand the word - is a process, not a thing. It has the properties of burning various materials, turning them into for example char or ash and smoke, while giving off some light and a lot of heat and spreading to other flammable objects nearby. It can be extinguished either by cooling it enough, for example by dumping water on it, or by smothering it, that is, preventing fresh air from reaching it. It needs air to go on burning. Without doing one of these two, or removing the substance that's burning, it's almost impossible to stop a fire. Does that at all describes this 'fire elemental'? If not, could you describe it from scratch?" Tanya can provide convenient illusions as she speaks, to avoid any misunderstandings.

"The thing you describe sounds like most normal fire of the sort we cook with," says Belmarniss agreeably. "It bears some... thematic resemblance to fire elementals, which can't go underwater and which catch flammable things that touch them on fire. But you can keep a fire elemental in a sealed box - they don't, in fact, need to breathe - and you do not have to give them any fuel - they also don't need to eat. They are vulnerable to cold damage - that is to say, a fire elemental that would stand up to the same number of arrows as me would tolerate fewer Rays of Frost than I would - and they're immune to fire damage. Anyway, the one I summon will not be really physically present, it'll be a construct body the spell maintains for a few rounds and then it'll go home, which is also what will happen if you kill it before the spell runs out, but in most other respects it will be just like it was really here."

Oh, it's a magical construct. (That Belmarniss thinks is animated by a spirit of the 'real' Platonic essence of fire elementals from the plane of fire elementals? Or something?) Magical constructs can simulate some very complex things; Tanya's orb can't make any of them besides her decoys but she's heard of some impressive experimental research.

"If it's vulnerable to arrows, that means it has a physical body that can be affected by pushing on it and puncturing it and tearing it apart and so on, right? And in addition to that it sets nearby things on fire - because it heats them or some other way? And it's not vulnerable to being heated up further itself, as far as you know. And not fed by it, an ordinary fire heated up would spread. Is that correct?"

"It has a physical body which can be damaged by physical means; fire and air elementals are very light but they still have substance and you can shoot them. I believe fire elementals touching things and setting them on fire this way works the same as touching the things with a torch would, with the caveat that anything that has magic involved can - bend its efficacy and probability around the power of whoever's doing it. I think if you heat up a fire elemental this does not power it up in any way although it wouldn't astonish me to hear about a weird elemental that was like that."

"I can shoot physical projectiles. I would probably need to calibrate over several shots to adjust for a very lightweight body so I'm doing damage where I mean to and not just leaving a small hole. As I mentioned, I have a limited quantity of bullets and want to conserve them, but of course it's important to prepare if this is a kind of danger we might face on our way and not just the one maximally inconvenient to me. ...for completeness' sake I should mention that I can make the bullet explode at a given point and not only on contact, if an explosion just outside the target is better than one inside it for some reason." She also has her mage blades as a holdout weapon and should test them but only if she can do so without undue risk, or ideally any risk at all.

"I can't immediately think of a situation where you want to explode outside rather than inside a single target if you can do either."

"For example, to affect several targets, or to push some large object."

"Yes, if you have several targets then you want to catch lots of them in a blast."

"When did you plan to run the test?"

"Probably after I teach the kiddos their Message lesson, I can send them to scatter around the edges of the school to practice it and then the big space will be free and you can paste a fire elemental."

She wants to do it here? In that case Tanya will inspect the space more attentively. At least one wall of it will be providing her backstop! "Drilling somewhere you'd rather I not accidentally damage the walls will make using explosives difficult," she remarks. Of course one should be able to operate in such conditions or any conditions as required; reality isn't conveniently arranged for your purposes. At least this place doesn't have polished marble or wall paint.

"There... aren't really good places to damage walls? Because we're underground. Even if I took you to a mineshaft where they're damaging walls on purpose that doesn't make it a particularly safe thing to do. You don't have to show off any specific technique, I just want you to see the elemental and check if your damage output is in some form like what you've described against Golarion-style opponents."

"That makes sense! But if I test an explosive bullet against a fire elemental and its own body doesn't entirely contain the explosion then it will affect the surroundings, at least cosmetically. And I think it's not really possible to perfectly guarantee that a cave or building won't collapse because of an explosion in just the wrong place, if the building isn't explicitly designed for that or the cave has never been stress-tested that way. If we need to do it, I'll start small and scale up slowly to mitigate the risk, but the downside is that this will use up many bullets and possibly also many fire elementals."

"I would much rather avoid explosions underground, but if you think we might encounter fire elementals or other creatures apparently invulnerable to light and heat then I think we ought to test it. In real combat I'll use light or heat on any target vulnerable to those, and I'll check if the fire elemental is vulnerable to light before I explode it. I can also just shoot many non-explosive bullets but I'd be using up my supply very quickly and I don't want to do that for a test."

"Does your method of putting bullets in things not also work on, like, rocks? Putting a rock through an elemental will also hurt it."

"I shoot bullets from my rifle. The bullets have a small amount of explosives that when ignited propels them through the barrel." She demonstrates with an exploded diagram illusion. "And I can add spells to the bullet on top of that. I... suppose I could push rocks with my flight spell," like a primitive caveman desperate soldier out of ammunition? This would be a useless tactic for aerial mages who can fall back on optical spells anyway, but at close quarters... hmm. Tanya does some quick calculations. "My spell is optimized for applying force to relatively large objects relatively slowly, and is very bad at propelling even small rocks when you need to apply the force very quickly. It probably wouldn't be competitive with a crossbow, let alone with real bullets. Larger rocks might work better; they won't penetrate but they could bruise or even crush someone if this works out. This might be a good idea in some scenarios and is definitely worth testing."

"I'll need rocks of various sizes, from a pebble up to say fist-sized, ideally hard ones which won't themselves fall apart when force is applied to them so I can reuse them and experiment for a while. Something like river-rounded stones would be good, although aerodynamics probably doesn't matter much at this scale. And a cave where I can magically throw them at the wall, since I assume you have no cheap disposable targets made from wood or similar. This isn't a standard use of the spell so I want some time to practice before proceeding to live targets."

"Yeah no absolutely nothing made of wood is cheap or disposable. We can go down to the river and get some rocks."

"Oh, you do have a river, I'd been wondering about your water and sanitation situation. ...I mentioned that I can boil large quantities of water quickly and cheaply, if that's helpful for anything." Presumably they don't want their river boiled but maybe they want a big hot swimming pool or something. The river itself could be used as a backstop that won't get scratched although she won't be able to reuse her ammunition; it might still work out if the riverbank is full of suitable rocks.

"The river is relevant to the water situation because it's cheaper than going to the temple but it is not really relevant to sanitation. Do you want me to Prestidigitate you clean?"

It makes sense for the temple to charge for entry to its public baths, or drinking and cooking water if it has any piped in or filtered. Pity how it's the temple that's doing it and not free private enterprise. "I meant for disposing of sewerage but - I suppose belowground you'd use it all for manure? And for baths, yes. What is Prestidigitate?

"Yeah, nightsoil all gets sold to farms. Prestidigitation is the most versatile cantrip, it can clean things including people and their clothes, if desired while you're still wearing them though that's not how a high throughput business will do it."

How would you clean clothes while worn? A spell could direct water and then air easily enough, but that sounds uncomfortable for the person wearing the clothes and liable to leave you either moist or too warm, and some detergents might not be great for your skin. Maybe the spell is extremely precise and flexible to allow it, but why would someone bother developing such a spell when cleaning clothes not being worn is so much easier? Anyway, that's not important right now. Tanya does not particularly need her clothes cleaned if she doesn't have an opportunity to get herself cleaned, which she would appreciate but is also not a terribly high priority. She might ask for a bath at some point, but these people probably don't have private baths and a public one would draw attention to her orb and weapons because she has to keep them close at hand. In the worst case, she can take a dip in the river.

...she gives herself a mental shake. "Thank you, but that's not necessary right now." Does Belmarniss have time to answer other questions or does she need to teach her class soon?

The girls are starting to trickle in and pay for their lesson! Niss explains Tanya to the kids as a human adventurer she's been toting around who may listen in on the lesson because her magic is from far away and works differently, and then they are talking about the cantrip Message.

Tanya listens attentively. It's important to learn how local magic works, even if she's not going to learn how to cast it. And Message has obvious tactical applications.

It sure does! This particular classful has all gotten it scribed into their books in a previous session but they're still new to it and need more familiarity with how it handles so that they don't drop it when they cast it and that's what Belmarniss is doing, answering questions about why it squidges this way and which parts you need to be most careful with and whether you should fling it like this or like that.

Tanya can see the magic they're handling and she can maybe if she squints convince herself that she sees a correspondence between the magic and the shapes they're describing and have drawn in their books, but she has no idea how to even approach manipulating magic like this. Really, it's quite regrettable that this amazing opportunity for cross-fertilization between two completely independent magical technologies has been wasted on a soldier like her.

One of the kids has fallen into a two-handed casting habit and Belmarniss puts her to drilling subcomponents of the gesture! One kid keeps dropping her copper wire when she gestures and needs to drill that! One has it pretty much down and is poking the other students with Touch of Fatigue and Belmarniss Mage Hands the disruptive kid's hood down over her face before she can grab the next one and assigns her to go over there and receive longer-distance Messages. As more and more of the girls get the cantrip down they wind up scattered about, practicing.

These other simple spells also make sense, both as things that are simple to do with magic and as useful applications of it, and the use of 'foci' (casting implements) is also familiar. The gestures aren't and she really doesn't see why you can't just skip them? You need to shape the magic right  but you do that with your mind, what do your hands have to do with it?

Prepared spells are also new. She doesn't detect any magic while the spell is being 'prepared' or while it's apparently hanging around ready for use, so what is actually being done? If it was just mental preparation or calculations, they wouldn't need to redo it every time... She'll ask Belmarniss later, although she might not know either. Still, while interesting it's not obviously decision-relevant.

Class lasts almost two hours and then the girls mostly disperse.

(Is the class gender-segregated?)

Tanya is ready for whatever is next. If she has to figure out a way to hurl rocks to bludgeon animals, that is objectively very silly but a soldier does not pass up any opportunity for an advantage.

"You want the fire elemental here or by the river so you can try the rock thing?"

"I want some time to practice with rocks first. But the river might be better anyway if people won't care if I scratch the cavern walls, and if I angle my shots down the water itself can provide a backstop."

"Scratching them is fine, yeah."

"Unless the river is very shallow, I expect I can practice with rocks in a way that flings them into the water without any collateral damage. I don't know what explosions underground will do and will be as cautious as I can, and I don't know if the cavern the river is in is any more fragile than this place. Generally speaking, explosions have more force the smaller the space is and narrow tunnels would be at most risk of collapse. If I'm shooting explosives at a target on the ground then the ground under and around it is at risk of breaking, even in an open space." That's just how explosives are!

"If the goal is for you to see my light-based attacks, against a target vulnerable to those, we can do it most anywhere because I can ramp them up gradually and rock can generally absorb a lot of heat, but water can absorb even more so the river would work for that too. If the goal is to test explosives, specifically, then there's some risk involved. If it's to test blunt projectile damage, I don't want to spend more than a couple of bullets just to demonstrate but I can practice with the rocks first and see if that amounts to anything. How many times can you summon targets? And how far away is the river?"

"I don't think we need to test explosives specifically; at no point in the trip upstairs are we going to be assured of a battleground that isn't a small to medium sized cave. The riverfront area I have in mind is about a half hour walk, and I've got two summonses today and room for a couple more little ones if we want them."

"Then if you have the time, I could practice with rocks and then test them on a fire elemental, and separately test optics on a different kind of target. Or I suppose you could leave me at the river for a few hours and come back."

"There might be people fishing there, I'd sooner stick around."

"That makes sense. Shall we head there? ...My practice would probably scare away any fish; maybe we could move up or downriver." 

"I do not feel particularly beholden to the quality of their catch and there are only so many places where there's river access."

That's not very prosocial of her!

...anyway, they can have the rest of this conversation while they walk to the river.

Or fly, as the case may be.

Yes, yes, she's very jealous. They cut through some suburbs and go down some stairs and there's a nice big river, and some fishermen.

If she can get a sufficiently flat and rigid platform, Tanya can fly her alongside! This is faster than walking and therefore efficient. (It's not actually efficient in terms of mana usage, but as long as Tanya doesn't have to do anything else at the same time and they're not actually going fast it's fine.) It might also look impressive, although Tanya is no judge of local customs.

Tanya tries picking up a rock and shoving it with the flight spell. It tumbles as it flies and lands... not really where she wanted it to.

The flight spell can't adjust to the rock's irregular shape, let alone its internal variations of density. If Tanya could determine its exact center of mass, and ideally if it was also shaped in a way that wouldn't make it tumble and deviate as it flies, then she could aim it. The computation orb can't do its namesake job here, because its flight spell really wasn't built to target random rocks. The latter part doesn't matter for a sufficiently massive rock, but carrying massive rocks around is impractical.

Tanya can find a few especially well-shaped rocks and figure out an approximate solution for launching each one by trial and error. This is the antithesis of standardized ammunition and she does not want to rely on it.

She tries giving a stone flat sides with a cutting laser. This takes annoyingly long because the stones fracture from the heat if she tries to go any faster but the result is more predictable in flight. If she wants to approximate round stone balls she'd probably have to work for an hour on each. And then she'd have to carry them around and recover them from enemy bodies and clean them for reuse. Even muskets weren't this annoying to use!

How hard can she fling a kilogram projectile, though? The flight spell only works up to a meter and a bit away from her body. Heavier projectiles take longer to accelerate and so gain more momentum, but if they're too heavy they won't go far enough. Tanya tries to figure out what mass is needed for an effective range of fifty meters... and quickly runs into another limitation: the flight spell refuses to apply more than 10g of acceleration to any object, regardless of its mass. (This is a safety feature!)

With an effectively constant acceleration (up to a projectile mass of a hundred kilograms), she can't make a railgun: light bullets won't go any farther than heavy ones. She can, however, make a 100kg bombard at a forty-five degree angle with a radius of twenty-three meters, if only she had a hundred-kilogram rock on hand.

All in all, it doesn't seem terribly useful unless they need to siege a miniature castle. She reports this to Belmarniss.

"We could get you sling bullets, would those be better?"

"No, because they won't fly any faster than heavy rocks, which means they'll still have a range of twenty meters. And that's in a ballistic arc; a flat trajectory wouldn't make it past ten meters. You'd be better off using an actual sling."

"Gotcha. Okay. Fire elemental now?"

"Alright. Your spell has a limited duration, right? Can you tell if the construct is damaged or how much or do we only learn something worked if it 'dies'?"

"If it gets injured it'll be visible, but I don't get direct feedback on it. It'll only last about thirty seconds."

"Then I'll be fast. I can replay the record from my orb later if you miss something."

"Sounds good. I'll put it over there?" Point.

Tanya positions herself so her shots will go through the indicated location and into the river at a shallow angle. "Go ahead." And she speeds up her thinking and reactions; she can tolerate a threefold speedup for thirty seconds.

"Summon Monster."

Here is a snek made of fire. Hiss.

Heat: no apparent effect. Visible light: no effect, up to levels where ambient reflections would start being a problem for Belmarniss. (The snake isn't very reflective, so those are quite high levels.) So far as advertised.

What does an ordinary submachine gun bullet to the head do?

That kills the snek. It vanishes.

"Nice."

"One standard shot, not explosive or anything. If it was like a regular snake and I destroyed the head then that makes sense, but snakes aren't generally known for being armored. Other creatures might require an armor-penetrating or explosive spell on the bullet, but this wasn't harder than killing an ordinary snake. Except for how light didn't work on it and it could presumably burn me if it got near, ordinary snakes would be stopped by my barrier."

After all the buildup this was rather a disappointment. Not that Tanya is disappointed that her enemies local wildlife is easy to kill, of course, but this doesn't feel like it demonstrated much to Belmarniss -

...Tanya suddenly realizes she is being deeply silly. Belmarniss is a civilian! She happens to be a mage and to know some spells that can be used to kill people, but that doesn't give her the mindset of a soldier. She's a young girl who wants to leave home and traverse unexplored wilderness to reach the mythic land of sunshine and libraries, and she's afraid of fire snakes (and possibly regular ones) on the way. That is an extremely legitimate and understandable fear! Snakes really are dangerous to people! Even to mages, if they can't fly or shield themselves or if they happen to be asleep! Of course Belmarniss wants reassurance that the literally alien foreigner escort is competent!

Now she's feeling embarrassed. What was she thinking of, showing off to a civilian? 

"...did you want to summon another, different target?"

"Sure, do you want another kind of elemental so you can see how your light thing stacks up against stuff that's not immune?"

"All right. Do you think an air elemental might be immune because of being transparent? Is it even visible?"

"They're visible. Not as obvious as a fire one but you can see 'em. I don't expect them to be immune."

"Understood. Please go ahead."

She summons another monster! This one looks like a four foot tall tornado with the suggestion of eyes, though the eyes sometimes whirl around with the rest of it and blur until they settle again on looking at its summoner.