Sure, Maurabel can recite the history of the Shattered States. There was an empire, with a mage emperor, who collected a ton of elementals when they first started coming around human settlements to figure out what was up with the concept of writing. Reports differ on whether he personally invented the amulet technique or if someone else did - it's easy enough that it could have been independently invented several times, though. He and his ton of elementals united and civilized the known world by force and he reigned over the greatest empire of all time till magery became more common with the discovery of the seaweed factor. He optimistically allowed everyone access, imagining it would strengthen his empire, but when the new crop of mages was old enough to capture elementals and do magic to support local powers, he suddenly had to deal with several simultaneous rebellions. One of his elementals convinced him that he could project magical power in more places at once if he set them free to operate as his agents. He tried it, and died, and in the resulting chaos everyone with a halfway plausible vision for independence got it.

... And there weren't immediately a thousand wars as everyone with a halfway plausible vision for independence started trying to conquer each other?

(How recently was this?)

The Shattering was like twenty years back? Maurabel's theory is that everybody wanted to consolidate rather than expanding after attempting to expand ended so badly for the Emperor. That and it's hard to know if your neighbors have a seven year old who has just discovered revolutionary magic that would completely alter the course of a war, since it's a fertile enough field that that's easily the sort of thing that could happen.

Jinye's theory (which she does not say) is that the wars weren't happening to Maurabel's neighbors because Maurabel got lucky.

"I think there's going to be more wars soon," Jinye says, which is not just a self-fulfilling prophecy, "the next time a minor territorial dispute turns into an overwhelming victory for the stronger side and the winner thinks there was an Emperor before and the next one could be me."

She walks for a bit longer, and then says, "I think one of the things we need to build resources for is doing something about that."

"...doing what about it?"

"Surviving it, of course," says Jinye. "Without starving or having our workshops burned down. What else would I mean?"

"I don't know, that's why I asked. Once we have money I guess we can stockpile food."

Jinye smiles quietly and says, "Yes, that would be a good idea -"

And then she clarifies.

"I should say that I have - not - lived in a world without war for twenty years. My home was better in many ways. Worse in others."

"In - having more war recently, or is there more?"

(There is a frozen moment where Jinye Attani Cocoon is thinking:

This moment matters. If she plays it as Ajian Madurai, she might poison Maurabel towards empire-building forever; if she plays it as Jinye Attani Cocoon, she breaks character.

Is character important to maintain? If this is some kind of virtual reality she is trapped in, how precise would it need to be for them to not have the actual information about who she is? If this actually is an alternate universe, does it matter if she drops Ajian Madurai? But this is a very unnatural way of thinking about it, because she can tell what answer those are pointing towards; she could equally well phrase it as "what do I lose if this isn't an alternate universe, and what are the odds this isn't some kind of trap.")

"I spent the past six months living in a city that had been tyrannized over by a state that was shockingly good at suppressing anything that might look like a revolt and shockingly bad at considering the economic consequences of doing so. Or the consequences to popular opinion. Subjugation by a foreign power might not be terrible if they were competent, but they will probably not be competent." Anything that can happen to them can happen to you. Old rule.

"The economic consequences?"

"Any humane cost to a populace can be expressed as an economic cost to the ruler, so therefore good government from a practical sense will always include good government from a moral sense. If the government's good enough."

"...that doesn't make any sense to me. It's very economically profitable to enslave elementals."

"I admit my political experience is limited to humans," she says, "who can't be magically enslaved. But there are a dozen reasons to hire free labor instead of using slaves or forced labor; human slaves work less hard and less imaginatively, people you force into labor might be brilliantly productive in some other effort but people you hire don't have a better option, people working for themselves specifically you don't need to watch but people working for the state you do, so a state will just replace all other oppressions with letting people pay for protection from them - but there are tax rates that make people work less hard or hide more money so the state gets less money long term, or if the tax rates are too high, even short term. So both states, Good and Selfish, will end up protecting everyone from oppression and collecting taxes, and the difference between their competence at these things will be tremendously larger than the difference between whether they're being good to make money or making money to be good."

"That's... interesting if it's a regularity you've observed but I am actually very concerned with the situation of elementals, who can be magically enslaved."

"And you should be! I appreciate the reminder that I am in an alien world and laws I thought were universal now have exceptions."

"Anytime!"

They are back at campus now. Maurabel leads Jinye and Balsa into her room; it's a tight fit in there but Balsa sits on the bed and takes one of Maurabel's books off a shelf to read.

BOOKS.

Can Maurabel teach Jinye how to read in the local language? Jinye only knows how to read in the languages where she's from.

Sure, sounds fun and also relevant to the printing press project, maybe Jinye knows clever things about how many of each letter you need. Maurabel pulls down another book to use.

Corresponding to their frequency in words in the text they're printing but she doesn't know any of the letters.

(Jinye learns extremely quickly, to a really implausible degree.)

That makes this much less tedious! And yes, Maurabel had guessed that much but didn't know if there were other factors.

Not that Jinye knows, she isn't an expert in printing, she just memorized some history books that had mechanical descriptions.

Well, then, Jinye can be taught to read in short order. The book is mostly sketches Maurabel has done of things observed with various kinds of sensory magic, heavily annotated with her observations.

Cool! Any useful devices her magic replicates, such that Jinye can tell her how to SCIENCE thousands of years ahead of schedule?

Glass magic is really good for lenses - actually making them or bypassing the need, depending. Shine can do spectroscope-type things. Water can dowse.