"Okay. Why are you emigrating?"

"My world is full of monsters called mals which really want to eat mages. Especially teenagers, who are high on mana production but not as self-defense-capable as adults. Bar says they can't come through here, though, and apparently everyone in Har is a mage and they don't get eaten by mals about it. Prior to my arrival here, I had less than a fifty percent chance of surviving to adulthood, and I'm one of the luckier ones."

"Ugh. Okay. So, first things first, I am not going back to Har for a while, so if you want to stay with me we'll be in Milliways for a while. Milliways security covers this area but not other areas, and I have wards but I can't make new ones for you. Secondly, what marketable skills do you have?"

This is a very familiar question! "Thank you for your explanation. As for my skills, I would guess that the most relevant of them are these: I speak and am literate in English, French, Old and Middle Aramaic, and several dialects of Arabic, and I can translate spells and nonmagical poetry and prose between any of them. I'm skilled in janitorial and maintenance work. I can launder and mend clothes. I know some basic blacksmithing and carpentry and chemistry and first aid. I can carry furniture and arrange it to your liking in your room here as well as making other modifications if necessary, and I'm good at notetaking."

"...Okay. Within Milliways there's translation magic, and the languages spoken in the Hari Empire are Hari, Ilan, Devin, North Essi, South Essi, Ereli, Thwilit, uh... Lexori, Garahi... anyway I just learned about English yesterday and have never heard of Mandarin, Aramaic or Arabic... can we get a copy of Hari is the Language of the Empire that actually sounds like Hari, or something? Anyway, I would fucking love for someone else to launder my clothes, and blacksmithing and carpentry are always in demand in Har, and, uh, what kinds of things do you do maintenance on?"

"I'm a fast language learner, I expect I can pick up Hari, if not here than in Har." He lists types of plumbing, ducts, floors and walls and ceilings, and some other things.

"Okay, we do have plumbing in Har and I don't know enough to tell whether it's much like your kind. We can probably make this work. How old are you?"

He's a sophomore, er, sixteen years old.

"I might not be going home soon enough to worry about that. Humans are adults at seventeen, so. Anyway, I left my copies of all the laws and stuff in my bedroom, Bar?"

Bar can present copies of the imperial, state, and city laws again.

"I am capable of understanding and intend to comply with these laws if invited to move to Anavel Sani. In the case where you wish to return before I am of age, I would accept command magic as necessary to assure you that my actions will not reflect poorly on you."

"That would matter more if I had a command mage I could get to easily, and if I weren't going to stay in Milliways for long enough for that not to matter. Anyway, while we're here, do you want to work for me?"

"Yes, definitely. What would you like me to start with?"

"Well, I currently am not responsible for any building maintenance so far as I know but I might have laundry eventually and I don't think there's a convenient setup for that here, and I might want to know about your world's technology if you're from Earth - I can get books but I don't necessarily know what to get books about and I could use... suggestions, extra common sense... and if there are going to be a lot of worlds with English in them maybe if we can get the translation effect to work conveniently for it I'll trade you English for Ilan. In exchange for the extra common sense and laundry and so on, I will put a room for you on my tab for as long as the time warping in here doesn't leave me paying for the room for ten years while I only run into you for ten hours, or anything."

If time warping does that he can do janitorial work for his room, the issue is food. He can provide common sense and tech advice and laundry. His father referenced the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines when helping him pack for school and it's a good place to start probably. The industrial revolution on his world started with textiles, that might be a good place for her to start, and… he pauses mid-speech and realizes something. Bar is selling him things at Earth prices, not Scholomance prices, the scissors and tape measures were trivially cheap. And he doesn't need them right now, he'll return them. And Saira doesn't have a computer, but she's clearly interested in Earth tech. He writes on the back of one of Bar's napkins, and…

Bar doesn't like arbitrage apparently, but he can afford to buy an old laptop and a generator producing the appropriate output type that Hari magic could plausibly automate the inputs of from Bar and some precision tools at what are much better prices than Bar would give Saira and present them to her as … a favor. Not arbitrage. He tries to hold the thought in his head very, very firmly as he hands over more of his gems.

"Saira, I have a … gift to you. To express my appreciation for this job." He hands over a bulky, hinged boxy device with a portion that looks like Griffie's tablet and a portion full of buttons with symbols on them, that Saira is mostly able to parse as sounds and numbers (though "quertyuiop" doesn't sound like a word), some cords connected to a box with weird stuff at the ends, and a boxy with an iridescent black panel and a large crank and somewhere a cord could maybe connect.

She can buy him food or just pay him and he can buy food.

"What... is this thing?"

"This is a computer. It can connect to a network in Bar, who has access to … pretty much anything anyone ever published for free, which is a lot, and you can store information on it, and it's also useful for writing, and it seems relevant to the task of making more computers It's like an older and less powerful version of Griffie's tablet? …I didn't actually recognize the logo but their tablet looks a lot like a modern iPad, and this is an older device which does a lot of the same sorts of stuff an iPad does. Though you can't operate it by poking the screen, you need to use this bit instead. Here, you can turn it on by pressing this button and I think I can get you set up, I've touched a computer before even if it didn't make sense to learn much about them."

"And this is a generator, for producing the right kind of electricity for the computer. It's hand-crank or solar-based but I figure you could get a force mage to crank it later and Bar has electrical outlets for now."

"Thank you. Bar, charge me for his next meal, as a gift."

And with that, unless Saira has other ideas, he can get started on investigating language-learning options, set up Saira's computer for her, and as a common-sense source note that she likely wants to skip the fuel-burning phase of industrialization and just go straight to using ideal heat engines or something, explain the problems with antibiotics and that she might be better served by getting information mages can use to target pathogens directly…

Yep, every power plant design that's just some way to generate heat can be replaced with an enchanted rock. Yep, antibiotics sound like worse death magic.

"What've you got for aging?"

Anti-aging magic is imperfect and difficult and he's having a lot of trouble generating mana in Bar so it's not the most productive path anyway. He can help her go through her book supply. There are mundane means of preventing and responding to cardiovascular problems and osteoporosis and cancer and … actually Saira might be really good at cancer? Maybe? She could just turn some replication-related genes off possibly specifically in tumors? Cataract surgery is a thing, arthritis treatments exist, there are some genes that she should fix in people if they don't want dementia.

Oh hey. She did not already know all the dementia-associated genes in humans.

"Okay, I'm assigning you to figure out if any arthritis treatments from Earth are better than what you can have a structure mage do."

Saira's new minion can do a literature review and produce a report!

And while he's working on that she can read more of her giant to-read pile and exist with her sign up and occasionally take breaks to stretch.

Someone with genes coding for one set of exotic hair pigments would like to instead have genes coding for a different set of exotic hair pigments and can get Saira reference material on this. (Unfortunately for Saira the pigment synthesis isn't something it'd be easy for her to patch into other customers, it's pretty alien biology even if she can work with the genes.)

Griffie picks up seeds from Bar and has a detailed list of changes ey wants Saira to make, but seems pretty hyperfocused and doesn't hang around long. Ey says "pleasure doing business with you" as ey parts, though ey doesn't actually seem to have any real feelings about the transaction.

A human man from upstairs says that Saira looks attractive while stretching and asks whether she'd like to join him in his room. He makes a comment that Milliways struggles to translate, plausibly regarding unbuttoning his genetic code and/or pants. Ibrahim, whose job responsibilities include common sense assistance, winces and whispers that she probably doesn't want to do sex work here, it might make her seem less respectable to other medical customers and she can afford to abstain.