It requires multiple mages to cast? "What do I need to do?" she asks Nazir as she takes their hands.

"Do nothing. Allow the spell to carry you without struggle."

Nazir begins chanting. His telepathic translation magic refuses to explain the meaning of these words, though Tanya will recognize 'Abadar' and 'Sothis' among them if she pays close attention to the sounds. As he speaks, a torrent of magic unfolds from both hands in a fast spiral that envelops the four of them, winding around all of their arms and binding them into a tight sphere that trembles with potential energy. The other two are grinning like idiots and nodding along with the chant.

Last chance if Tanya wants to back out!

The chanting would be concerning if this was Earth! It doesn't really rate for weirdness next to a catperson and a dismembered dragon.

Tanya doesn't back out.

The sphere closes, the spell dissipates, and they are whisked away in the blink of an eye. It's almost anticlimactic.

Everyone's boots land on a completely different stone floor, along with the sack and a fine layer of grit carried along for the ride. A gust of hot desert air puffs out into the temperature differential, ruffling clothes and scattering sand as it goes. They're indoors, in a room that has been built expressly for this purpose. The walls are covered in unintelligible signage, though the fact that it's a short message repeated in multiple languages and accompanied by arrows all pointing in the same direction will probably get the meaning across.

"Welcome to the Triangle Gate Bank of Sothis. This is the inbound teleport berth," Nazir says. "Follow me, I'll find you a teller… Hurayra, I need a scale."

The catperson passes Nazir a blue reptile scale, then shoulders the velvet sack and leaves through a different door.

This must be the equivalent of air traffic control. Tanya assumes Nazir radioed messaged ahead to get a berth assigned. 

(What happens if you try to teleport to an occupied location? Possibly nothing good, same as landing an airplane on an occupied runway! Transportation does not have to be inherently fail-safe; society builds safety-ensuring railings around it.)

Tanya follows Nazir. (Why are they using a scale as proof? Couldn't the dragon have an accomplice turn in one of his own scales to claim the bounty? Does the government also collect gruesome trophies - not her business.)

Nazir leads them through the back offices and the counting rooms to the front of the bank in silence. The architecture is similar to the bank they just left, albeit much larger – huge sandstone blocks sealed in place via friction and gravity, rectangular windows glazed with something translucent enough to admit sunlight, and the occasional succulent or cactus planted in an alcove. The sounds of pens scratching on parchment echo through the noisier areas.

The front office has more activity. Here there are rows of desks occupied by somber young men with precise haircuts, all of them with much darker skin and hair than Nazir and Iomedae. Their desks are lit by sourceless white pinpricks of light, sitting on the tips of feather quills and the rims of water glasses like impossible candlesticks. Some of them look up and offer some gesture of respect as the group passes, but most are absorbed by interactions with customers, who stem from a long line that snakes from an orderly queue near the front to a door that goes out to some area lit by sunlight. Nazir acknowledges them but hones in on one in particular, a man whose current customer is just getting up to leave.

Nazir's speech is still comprehensible to all listeners but the other man's is not, leading to an experience rather like overhearing someone speaking on a cell phone.

Eventually he turns to Tanya.

"Share Language will cost you twenty gold scarabs for the day. The bank will offer you a bridge loan to cover the expense – no charge if your account is funded in the next six hours, but if you decided to use a different institution the soft rate applies. I will go and settle the bounty now. Take care."

The young man behind the desk extends a hand in Tanya's direction.

All the tellers are mages? That can't be accidental. Maybe their registers or safes need magic to open. ...oh, this is the line for buying spells. There are probably other, non-mage tellers elsewhere in the building.

(This is very unlikely to be a scam to put her twenty scarabs in debt to the bank. There's no real reason for anyone to do that, and it's a very small fraction of the sum she was promised. Anyway, she's not signing anything.)

(But she probably will be shortly. Opening a bank account as a foreigner must require some documentation, even if she starts out with a large deposit and they have magic to verify her identity.)

(She is finding excuses to avoid thinking about it and she is aware of this and is going to stop right now.)

This spell is going to implant knowledge into her brain. Tanya can't really imagine what that will feel like. And it's reasonable to be terrified of magic directly influencing your mind.

The army is very good at training people to quickly and calmly following instructions and executing on previously decided plans regardless of how they feel about it in the moment. War dulls rational feelings of fear, and weeds out those who hesitate to march forward for even a moment.

Tanya accepts the offered hand with a firm clasp.

The man places his other hand into his pocket and recites something in a similar cadence to the one Nazir used earlier. Magic comes rushing out of his hand and into Tanya's, threads of invisible light soaking into her flesh and bone before disappearing deeper inside her.

Unlike some of the earlier spells that Tanya has seen or interacted with, she can feel this one advancing as it goes. There are tendrils of foreign knowledge intruding into her mind, trying to provide her with information of unknown providence. If she chooses to STRUGGLE AGAINST IT WITH ALL HER MIGHT, she may be able to resist it! If she does nothing, she is going to learn a new language in the next six seconds.

Tanya STRUGGLES WITH ALL HER MIGHT against her natural inclination to resist the spell and yank her hand back and shoot the teller.

Spontaneously learning a new language is a far more disorienting experience than teleportation! Unlike the universal translation effect, this is someone's particular vocabulary rather than the full lexicon, and not all of Tanya's native concepts have an injective correspondence. She must make the conscious decision to speak in Osiriani, if she wishes to be understood at all, but her grasp of Osiriani is strong – she may get the impression that her source for the language was highly literate. It's a little dizzying.

Nazir may be leaving, but Iomedae has a more intimate impression of how Osirians feel about unaccompanied young women. She will remain standing behind Tanya and continue to glare daggers at the teller, in case it's unclear to him whether he has discretion in this matter.

The teller is a professional! He will not break with protocol just because a sixth circle cleric of Abadar and his adventuring partner have intimated that this was not optional! He will, however, incorporate that into his decision-making process.

"You are interested in opening an account?" he asks, in the exact dialect that Tanya now speaks. "We will need some information from you first…"

As a preliminary matter, the bank wants to know Tanya's full name, age, occupation, nationality, home address, whether she is the head of her household, her degree of proficiency with magic, and what she plans to use her bank account for.

It's very reasonable not to let (apparent) children open bank accounts without a lot of due diligence and paperwork! Tanya is glad it's possible at all! Obviously she's legally emancipated, as of the moment she became an officer, but they're not going to recognize her uniform or military ID. Which also means she needs to make the uniform proud and try to let it carry its weight for a bit.

Name: Tanya von Degurechaff. (Not translated to indicate nobility; she has other things on her mind.)

Age: ... ... fourteen.

Nationality: Germanian. (Tone: if they haven't heard of it, that rather speaks of them, doesn't it?)

Occupation: Lt. Col. aerial mage of the Germanian Imperial Army.

Home address: ... this postal code will get mail to her, once they get it into the Germanian system.

Head of her household: yes.

Degree of proficiency with magic: A-class.

She plans to ise her bank account to, uh, keep mpney in and occasionally withdraw it, and has not made any further plans yet but may make them later. If she doesn't need it for anything else in the next few weeks, she will presumably invest it.

Fourteen-year-old girls are not ordinarily at liberty to open their own—

The glare intensifies.

— with such stellar character references, he is disinclined to doubt her assertion of emancipation.

"I do not think we can send mail to this address," he says, sounding apologetic. "I don't recall Germania from any of our postal destination lists… if you are a mage, we may be able to reach an alternative arrangement. Your classification is unfamiliar to me – what is the most powerful magical feat you are capable of? What is the least powerful magical feat you have not yet been able to accomplish?"

"I expect to rent local accomodations and I can update you when I do." Tanya doesn't want them actually teleporting a letter into the Germanian post (at least not without consulting her first!) "But I don't know how long it will take me to pick a more permanent local address. I can buy a postal office box, if that's a service the local post offers."

"My exact magical abilities and accomplishments are classified. Is everyone in Osirion required to report their exact abilities?" What a colossal intrusion of privacy if so, and more importantly, what a terrible set of perverse incentives! "Class A indicates I am capable of casting multiple complex spells simultaneously, and is the basic requirement to qualify for aerial combat. If it helps, the proximate reason I am opening this account is that I happened to kill a dragon this morning and there was a bounty on his head. ...in self defense."

"This is true and accurate," Iomedae confirms of the last sentence. "Hej Nazir will arrange for the payout into this account."

It is immediately obvious once she starts talking that both Iomedae and Nazir have strong accents. Tanya's internal grasp of the language classifies them both as hailing from far distant corners of the country, or more likely a different country altogether.

What the fuck it would be unreasonable to demand verification when Nazir is presumably already explaining this to his boss as they speak.

"You are not legally required to report your exact abilities to the government," he says slowly. "As your bank, we require this information to… better suit your needs. Your strength as a mage is predictive of your income, future growth, career path, professional activities, and need for specialized banking services." He would press the question again, but casting multiple complex spells simultaneously calls for Quickened spells, already near the high end of the absolute risk assessment for new clients. He adds 'fifth circle or higher' to the box on the form.

"The rest of this, if you please," he says, and passes Tanya another sheaf of paperwork. It's covered in literal hieroglyphs, a mixture of alphabetic symbols and logograms functionally reminiscent of kanji and kana, but it's perfectly readable. It wants her to indicate how to spell her name (there is no obvious way do this in Osirian hieroglyphs), to acquiesce to a set of legal stipulations for dispute resolution (noteworthy excerpts: Tanya will agree to submit to truth magic provided by the bank during arbitration, unless she wants to pay for someone else to do it; Tanya will not be able to transfer funds to any country at war with Osirion, unless she waives several different consumer protection rights; the bank reserves the power to check Tanya for hostile enchantments under certain circumstances which are only vaguely enumerated), and to confirm in writing that she will not share access to her bank account with anyone who is not a part of her household.

Tanya knows, intellectually, that this is a routine process and the bank has a clear business interest in this information, especially for a customer with no prior history. She's just out of the habit of dealing with civilian business bureaucracy. She shouldn't have pushed back so strongly, the poor clerk is only following a flowchart and she was probably a bit rude.

Spelling her name in a non-phonetic system is a Choice, and not one to be made lightly; it will affect how everyone perceives her in the future. "Since I don't actually know this language yet, is it alright for me to spell my name phonetically, or will it become a legal name that I have to use outside this institution and is hard to change?"

Is this for arbitration between her and the bank, or arbitration services the bank may provide between her and future third parties? Is she giving up any legal rights she would otherwise have (e.g. to file suit in ordinary court) by agreeing to this arbitration instead? Is Osirion presently at war with any countries?

A purely phonetic spelling is highly recommended. In fact, Tanya should not attempt a transcreation of her own name without guidance from a native speaker or ten, to avoid accidentally choosing a spelling with unfortunate implications. She is unlikely to run into problems changing this later, unless she experiments with enough different spellings that confusion becomes inevitable.

The bank's forced arbitration clause for retail accounts requires that anyone disputing charges or transactions from the schedule indicated on the contract seek resolution via an arbitrator. This is partially for reasons that Tanya is already familiar with and partially because some arbitrators specialize in niche subfields of dispute resolution, such as cases where a transaction is alleged to have been authorized by someone magically disguised as the account holder. If Tanya is instead accusing the bank of criminal conduct, that goes through the justice system. They do also provide neutral arbitration services between their clients and third parties, but this is a completely different department and they can tailor the arrangement as desired.

Osirion is not presently at war with any countries! If this changes it will become public knowledge within hours at most, and at no point will any of the bank's clients be allowed to unintentionally complete such a transfer.