Jinye in Cosel
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"If every [untranslatable] of land produces twice as many crops each year, everyone is twice as rich in crops. If it takes one tenth as much time to travel, everyone is ten times as rich in travel time. If I can make books a hundred times as fast..."

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"Hm, I guess that's - sort of like what's already happening, with magic being common."

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"Exactly! It sounds like magic is great for making there be more stuff available for everyone. I definitely approve, and wish there was magic back where I'm from. But there isn't, so I'm stuck not knowing basic things until I can learn them all."

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"Well, the book machine sounds great. It's smaller than the mill? I could keep it under my bed or something?"

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"It actually wants its own room," Jinye admits. "It's going to be - bigger than you are? Not a lot bigger but bigger?"

... Jinye pauses. "I suppose I could start by trying to sell better plows?"

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"Better how?"

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Jinye thinks they don't have the moldboard plough yet! "With cheap metal, I can build quite strong plows that will turn the soil while they cut them, exposing new soil to the surface and cutting deeper furrows, but that are still very light and easy for a horse or ox to pull." She pauses. "Also, if your plows don't have wheels yet, wheels make them much better. And I can design a harness for horses to better distribute the weight of whatever they're pulling so their collars don't choke them."

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"We do have wheels. I don't know about the plows, though, I've never personally lived on a farm."

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"So you might already have the technology." All right. "Do you have room for the bookmaker?"

Jinye pauses. "... If not, you can ask me about almost any problem and I might know of some sort of solution, even if I can't make it with what I have on me."

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"I could put the bookmaker out in the woods somewhere? My room's pretty small."

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"Just as long as you don't expect it to get rained on," says Jinye.

Seed capital. She needs seed capital. All of this is to get her seed capital...

Then, the Revolution. (Or military coup. One of the above.)

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"I'd give it a roof. Anyway, I can feed you for a short while since I don't see any of this getting you dinner today."

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"It will not. Thank you." Jinye pauses. "I can lend you my knife as collateral?" It's what another culture would call a Swiss army knife; it has a blade and tiny scissors and tweezers and many other useful implements. It's a slightly odd Swiss army knife because you can actually hold a reasonably stable knife-grip, if you have hands Jinye's shape, and use it to stab someone with, but this fact is not obvious on first inspection.

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"I have a - oh, huh, that's really neat -" She inspects the tiny scissors. "Okay, cool, sure. Do you want dinner like now or should I go check out some elementals to get started on building a shed for the bookmaker?"

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"At some point I still need someone to tell me how elementals work, since we don't have them where we're from? And -" she glances up at the sun "- I assume artificial light is hard to get? We may want to work while there's light."

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"Well, it's not hard to get if I bring the right elementals, but I admit I didn't expect to need any of the shiny ones for making a shed. We can talk about elementals while we're building, I suppose."

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"Excellent! Thank you!" 

So the bookmaker is made of metal and wood and you can use lead or metal for the keys, and once we start printing it will need ink - oil-based inks are better than water-based inks - and paper, obviously...

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Maurabel takes notes on this! They have not invented oil based ink!

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... Jinye is aware that oil-based ink is generally agreed to be superior but she has no idea how to make it herself, she isn't an inkmaker and has never read a good explanation of how to make it. Hopefully it isn't that complicated, but this is one area where she doesn't know, she ahs to guess.

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Assuming they have a ton of money later they can experiment with it!

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With luck!

(Jinye is really looking forwards to having a ton of money.)

So, what are elementals like?

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"They're basically just folks except it happens to be very easy to magically enslave them and they don't have childhoods so they act kind of odd before they've met humans," says Maurabel levelly. "That and the magic - mages have three or more elements, elementals have one or two but lots more of those." She heads for the elemental barracks.

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... Jinye stops dead. (Inside her head, she's calculating very fast. Odds that Maurabel would have said that if she approved of it, odds that she is really bad at keeping her mouth shut... hmm. Something of a risk... odds that she has a new ally she can actually work with, very good...)

"Wait, what?" She lets a tiny bit of her emotion leak into her voice, then strangles it and catches up to Maurabel. "I would have thought," she says, now very calmly, "that there would be some explanation of why people are enslaving elementals other than 'it is very easy'. A moral justification of some sort, say."

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"It's - also very useful?" shrugs Maurabel. "People say other stuff but I think it being useful and easy is all most people require."

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"Well," says Jinye, "then it sounds like there's one more thing I need to fix, while I'm here."

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