An economist appears in a puff of (imaginary) smoke!

The economist looks around in circles! She seems very very surprised to Sarun! She appears to be staring at empty air as if she expected to see something other than empty air there!

She says something in a language he doesn't understand!

(It is "hi!")

She says something else, much longer!

(It is "excuse me, do you know what's going on, because I don't.")

Sarun says something to her back in a language SHE doesn't understand!

(It is "who are you and where did you come from?")

She tries a lot more languages!

(It's about what she said in the first one.)

"- Aland!" calls Sarun.

A servant rushes over from just inside the house. "My lord?"

"Get one of the elementals, the youngest one you can collect on short notice."

"My lord," repeats the servant, and away he goes.

(Maybe they're looking for a linguist? But the odds that any linguist will speak English on a low-tech planet like this are... not actually terrible but they could be worse.)

The economist points at herself. "Silda."

(She is breaking character over being TRANSPORTED TO ANOTHER PLANET, because Lila Banerjee would probably be panicking and Silda does not think this is an effective strategy.)

"Silda," repeats Sarun. He points at himself. "Sarun. Appointee Sarun."

"Appointee Sarun," she says, nodding, pointing at him. "Representative Silda," she says, pointing at herself. 

"Representative," he sounds out.

Aland comes back with a woman who has wings made out of wood. "She says she's 'Representative Silda'," Sarun tells this woman. "Is that enough to go on?"

"I don't recognize the word," says wood-wing-woman.

She shrugs in sympathy; her job title is not that easy to pronounce, and then - 

THERE IS A WOMAN WITH WINGS MADE OUT OF WOOD!!!

The economist DOES NOT RECOGNIZE THIS! It is NOT FAMILIAR TO HER!

"...Wood elemental," Sarun says, pointing at the wood elemental.

"Wood elemental," she repeats.

... She pauses. She points at herself. "Human." Then at Sarun. "Human." Then at the wood elemental. "Human?"

"No, wood elemental," says Sarun.

"Human," she says, pointing at herself. "Human," she says, pointing at Sarun. "Wood elemental," she says, pointing at the wood elemental.

... She's going to leave experimenting with 'robot' or 'person' until later, thanks.

"Yes - I don't think we need it after all," Sarun tells Aland. Aland takes the wood elemental away. Her stride timing matches his exactly.

Well, that's either really impressive or really creepy.

Words time? Wordswordswords?

Wordswordswords! Sarun invites her into the house after he's exhausted the vocabulary possibilities of the outdoors.

Great! She will happily accept! Are there important inside-house customs she needs to follow?

He seems to find her default behavior unobjectionable. Here is a chair. Here is a glass of water. The glass is actually quite prettily designed - the whole house, actually, is a strange mixture of barebones adequacy (rough-spun linen and wool clothes, less than innovative leather slippers for shoes), surprisingly high quality objects (seamless solid wood furniture, glass dinnerware, metal farming implements of precise manufacture), and literal magic objects, such as a little twist of metal he taps to light up the room.

This is REALLY REALLY COOL. She is in the PAST in an ALTERNATE UNIVERSE with MAGIC and she doesn't need to murder ANY of her schoolmates! If she doesn't wake up this will be the best thing ever!

Can he explain how the glass happened? And the metal? And those amazing lights?

"A mage made the glass, and a different mage made the metal lamp," Sarun says, pointing helpfully.

"Mage? What is a mage?"

"A mage is a human with elements. An elemental is not a human and has one element, or two. A mage is a human and has three or four or more."

"Elements? What are those?"

"Shine," he points at the metal, "glass," the glass, "wood, like the wood elemental, adamant," he indicates both the metal and a coin in his pocket, "water," inside the glass, "fire," in the kitchen, "earth," he gestures vaguely outside, "ice, lightning, shadow -" the dark places under the furniture, "stone," the hearth, "air," he blows a puff of it.

She is in a world with MAGIC! This is the BEST!

(Now, now, don't get ahead of yourself, Silda, the likely explanation is not that you are in a world with magic it is that you are in a world with SCIENCE that people don't understand. Actually it is that you are in a VR experience one of your rivals set up to extract information to you / distract you, which, uh, if so, kind of sucks? But it's nicer than murdering her, so, thanks.)

She is VERY ENTHUSED about this. What does he do? Is he a mage?

He's not a mage but his kids are! They come home for dinner around this time and he has them show off bits of magic for her - they can't do that much yet since the oldest one is seven but one shows off how he can squash a pebble in his hands, and one girl demonstrates freezing the water in Silda's glass. "Ice," Sarun says helpfully when she does that.

COOOOOOOL. Silda is very impressed with magic. Can anyone learn magic, or is it something only some people can do?

Sarun's wife comes in. He gets her a piece of seaweed from a bowl of it stashed in the kitchen. "Not magic," he says, pointing at her slightly swollen middle, and then he gives her the seaweed and she rolls her eyes and eat it, "magic!", again at the bellybutton zone.

This continues to be AMAZINGLY FASCINATING. So no magic for her.

What's the food like?

The food is bread and lemony lentils and yogurt.

She will praise it and not tell them that she can make even tastier food, because, let us be frank, she can't. A civilization in which she was born can.

Silda thinks that learning as much of the language as she can is very, very important! So she's going to work on that.

Sarun and his family are happy to keep trying to teach her the language, both directly and by talking to each other in the background.

Great!

She's still not going to pick up enough to say anything very complicated until the next day, though.

That's okay, they can get across that she's welcome to sleep in their guest room.

Once they can ask her where she's from they do want to know that though.

She's from Sanand, it's a small city a long way away. She was in the - facilitating-international-trade department of the government? She has absolutely no idea how she got here.

Maybe someone - shadow-kidnapped her?? Except she didn't appear in a very dark location.

Shadow-kidnapping? She's never heard of shadow-kidnapping before!

Well, you know how Shadow elementals can teleport? They can take passengers!

... So, uh, where she's from, they don't have Shadow elementals.

Or any elementals.

Or any magic.

They're really good at building stuff without magic though?

...why don't they have any elementals or magic?

... Honestly she's not really sure. It's a very big universe? Maybe they just don't have seaweed, or... wherever elementals come from?

Elementals just start existing suddenly for no apparent reason as fully grown adults.

This sounds odd to Silda? Do they know how to talk, and facts about the world, and things?

They do know how to talk, they all start knowing all the languages in the world, but not very many facts.

Silda thinks this is kind of bizarre.

... Do they know what concepts mean? If they have the concept "calculus -" wait no that didn't translate. If the have the concept "writing", does that mean they're automatically literate? If they have the concept "leatherworking" can they recognize - leatherworking tools?

(Does "writing" translate?)

Yeah, new elementals started being able to read and write about forty years ago when writing was invented! They're not sure about the other details.

!!!!!

... Writing. Invented. Forty years ago.

She's just going to...

... So, uh.

... Does this apply to - hand-skills, or just mental skills? Like leatherworking... and writing...

!!!!!!

Elementals only know languages - written and spoken both, turns out, but it's possible in another forty years a new way to do language will be invented and then new elementals will know that too.

... Silda speaks six, and many dialects.

She guesses that many of these languages have ideas that, um, did not exist until she came here.

He, uh... depending on just what different kinds of elementals can do, and how smart they are, and much comes with the language, this might be no problem at all or might destroy all life. She doesn't want him to panic - please don't actually panic - but, uh, she might need to know a lot more so she can fix things?

- well, she doesn't need to panic, elementals don't appear that frequently, and wild ones usually just act like wild animals till they've been civilized a little by their masters so they aren't like to do anything that complicated just because of knowing some words. Words definitely don't translate to a lot of knowledge - like, they act like wild animals in spite of not acting like the word 'polite' or 'privacy' or 'clothes' are totally meaningless sets of noises when they hear someone say them.

(Civilized. By their masters. Don't panic, Silda, it's probably not what it sounds like, not if they do just act like wild animals.)

That sounds like good news.

(Please don't let 'create antimatter' be an elemental power.)

Sarun's estate doesn't have a ton around - he only employs one mage personally and that mage is only responsible for four elementals, and they're often hired out - but she's welcome to ask them about any details that seem important.

She's very grateful for all he's doing for her! She'll want to talk to the elementals when she has a chance.

... Writing was invented forty years ago? She thinks that's really amazing. She hopes the inventor of writing (!!!) is still around. Where she's from they invented it... six tens of tens of tens of years ago? Something like that.

(Does he have the word for thousand for her?)

The inventors of writing (it was a several person team) are mostly still alive, but they live far away. He... does not have a word for thousand.

Well, they can make one out of 'ten hundreds', or they can borrow her word 'thousand', or the word in one of the other languages she knows, like 'sen' or 'qian'?

Either way, yes. Her people know a lot, since they've written down most of the good ideas in the last six thousand years.

"Sen" is pretty pronounceable. It sounds like it would be very interesting to meet more of her people!

Probably! She has a very good memory, though, so she might be able to answer any questions he has about how to do things. 

Well, if her world doesn't have magic she probably doesn't have a solution to Sarun's biggest problem, which is how to manage the fact that mages are more common every year and anyone with Adamant can make their own indistinguishable coins - some places are moving to currency standards based on salt or seashells but these would really disadvantage Rixo, since it's not on the shore and can't independently source those things, so he's trying to do some protectionism of metal coinage around here and regulate Adamant use, but it doesn't seem like that'll work forever.

... Hmm. What precisely is his problem? Was he artificially maintaining the value of the coins above the value of the metals and now anyone with the metals can make the coin, or is the problem is just that the value of the coins is dropping because the metal is becoming less expensive, which is symmetrical to a rise in price, or are they counterfeiting using thin layers of valuable-metals on top of cheap-metal coins... she was actually trained as a person-who-makes-countries-rich, this sort of problem was covered.

The coins are worth the value of the metal, which is dropping outside of Rixo; some of the independently minted ones have cheap centers of whatever else, some don't. Rixo has mines and doesn't have coast, and the coastal areas are already benefiting enormously from everyone wanting seaweed to have magic babies and then on top of that they're "mining" all the currency.

Yeah, that's just 'your comparative advantage against other countries has suddenly become less valuable'. Hopefully everybody-becoming-richer because of cheap metals is helping, but even if it isn't helping enough he has a new comparative advantage: Her. And all the useful things-she-knows.

It sounds like she is a useful person to know! He would really like his country to be rich and apparently that's her deal!

Yes! Yes it is her deal! She was doing that for her country before and now she would love to do it for his country!

You can distinguish real-metal coins from fake-metal coins by weighing them on a scale, which she expects he knows, and of course if the fake-metal floats you can use water as a test. She non-confidently expects that real-metal coins will end rising in value from their present point long-term as the economy gets revolutionized because long-term other sectors will grow faster than mining-plus-metalworking if Adamant mages already have very-cheap-metalworking, but she could be wrong. In his position she might buy up metal on the expectation that the price will shortly rise, but it depends on what other uses he has for his funds because she has SO MANY MORE IDEAS for things he can do to fix EVERY PART of his economy and those are going to take money, though he can freely broadcast or auction off the ideas once they're proved good depending on his ability and desire to capture-resources-for-his-government as opposed to his ability and desire to capture-resources-for-his-country as opposed to his baseline desire to increase-total-resources-available-to-everyone.

First, though, she should learn everything magic can do so that she doesn't end up duplicating anything.

Well, you can get de novo metal off of an Adamant elemental and then transmute it into other kinds of metals with magic, so mining (for metal, at least) is rapidly becoming a less important sector. Same goes for rocks, since there are Stone elementals. What would be really convenient would be finding a salt mine.

He can call in a mage who is able to list the elements and what they do (the obvious, plus their less obvious healing and sensory applications).

You can WHAT WOW.

... Silda suddenly needs to know so much more about what magic can do!!!

Wait first emergency can you control minds with magic. Or read them. Those are both kind of important.

No? Minds aren't an element.

She is going to spend the next while asking for lots of cool things you can do. So you can turn things-in-a-category (and she's still not sure just what the natural categories are, what's included in 'adamant' or 'shine', say) into other things in the category, or make them out of nowhere (!!!), or teleport (!!!!!)...

The elementals don't just conjure them up, mind, there are just some elementals with "material halos" that you can pick bits off of. Or you can take off a bit of the wing, whichever. And yeah, Shadows can shadow-walk, none of the others can do that.

Huh. But the halos regrow instantly?

(And the elementals don't... object, if you cut off their wings?)

Halos regrow instantly, and the wings come back eventually.

Thank you, but I don't think that was an answer to her question about the wings?

Sarun confesses he's never asked one, but since they do grow back it can't be that bad, like haircuts.

... Valid, Silda supposes. She should probably ask one at some point.

They're at her disposal as long as she's working on making Rixo rich!

That is exactly what she plans on doing. She just needs to find out which of her ingenious ideas still work in a world of elementals, and which don't work otherwise.

Right now she's wondering if she can set up a fiat currency. Probably not? How much do people trust the government to keep its word when it can profit by breaking it, and how stable is government policy? - Actually, how does the government work?

Rixo is a republic! People can vote on who should handle departments like tax collection and law enforcement and famine preparation and then all those people elected to those positions elect an Appointee, usually one of them. Sarun is the Appointee and also the head of the treasury.

Ah, that makes sense, perfectly reasonable. Her city was a republic, too, but a different kind of republic; every district elected its own representative and then the representatives all got together to decide how to handle things like tax collection and law enforcement and famine preparation, with them choosing specialists instead of the people choosing the specialists immediately. (Though she'd been elected to a different job, where she was in charge of representing Sanand in a larger entity that was trying to get standardized trade rules and low tariffs and handle things that affected lots and lots of different cities, like the alien invasion. But that's kind of a side note.)

So, if she's correct... if someone else gets elected next time (which hopefully won't happen!) and wants to handle the treasury a different way, he can change all his predecessor's rules? Are there any things-the-government-isn't-allowed-to-do?

Yeah, the head of the treasury can do whatever the head of the treasury is allowed to do...? How would a government not be allowed to do things. There are things that are more likely to cause rebellions?

... So, a lot of countries in her part of the world have rules they make in advance defining what their governments are and aren't allowed to do, and they write those down and the people need to support it overwhelmingly to change it, and since the government and the army and the people all respect these rules, if the government broke the rules, the people and the army would replace them with a different government.

Silda just wanted to check if you had rules like that. That's all.

It seems like it might not be very safe to have an army that didn't do what the government said.

The idea that those places follow is that the government does what the people want and the people choose the government, and also make up the army, and the people and the army don't really have different interests, except that the army has a little more training.

Huh. Well, Rixo isn't set up like that.

Right, no, understood. It just makes it harder for the government to give its word and keep it, is all. And the best way to have a currency depends on the government - or some other entity, but it's better if it's the government - being able to give its word and keep it.

Sarun does not quite see how that is supposed to work.

... Right, this is kind of complicated and there's lots of preliminary topics.

So, consider the case of borrowing money. Maybe the government is fighting a war and wants to hire mercenaries, but doesn't have enough money for it? Or there's a famine and they want to buy food so the people don't starve? Then the government might try to get a loan, from their own people or from other countries. And if you're considering lending money to a government like that, Silda thinks that your main question is going to be, will the government you're lending money to pay the money back. If, after the war or the famine is over, they say "well, it's our money now" and refuse to repay it, everyone who lent them money is going to be very unhappy. So the people considering lending them money will, themselves, care a lot about whether the government is going to repay them. If they think that there's equal odds it will repay them and that it won't repay them, they'll want to be repaid at least twice as much as they lent, because otherwise they expect lending the money will be a bad idea. Does this make sense so far?

He hadn't thought of borrowing money from his own people - conventionally if you need money from your own people you just tax them - but he does follow, if you loosely think of a government as a person who is your neighbor and asking to borrow something.

So, setting optimal tax policy is actually a really difficult and complicated question, because the more you tax people, the more they try to hide the money they're making so they're hard to tax, or the more they avoid doing whatever you're taxing and do substitutes instead, or just the less they work? And precise level aside it's important that taxes be consistent over time, because people will often say, "well, we have a clever idea for something a little risky to do that would make us better off, but if the harvest is bad or there's a war or the government raises taxes we might starve, so we won't -" and the more crises you can mean they don't need to consider, the more likely they are to do good-but-risky things, and the more people do good-but-risky things, the richer the people are and the better the state is. So there's also a reason to have a stable tax rate that usually gets you more than you spend but occasionally you need to borrow more briefly and then pay it back, even in normal times.

(Silda is not even going to mention anything more complicated about slight government debts being good at the moment. If she does these people will borrow ALL THE MONEY and go into hyperinflation and then their economy will collapse and they will be a very valuable object lesson for future generations.)

And also government sometimes borrow from people from other countries that aren't their own... sorry this was a digression she thinks trying to manage a state's finances is really interesting and important.

Well, for the harvest-is-bad problem they have famine preparation storage but they fill that up with... taxes. He's intrigued to learn more, but clearly she's building on ideas that he's just never heard of before.

Yeah, she's going to need to go back to really basic levels for this. She definitely thinks famine relief is important and good, and of course states should collect taxes, they need to in order to do good things.

... Uh... wait one moment. What are they taxing and how?

Usually they take grain from farms - or something else if they farm something else - and money from townsfolk, although he's pretty sure the tax collectors are all in the habit of allowing people to pay in the other option if that seems to make sense at the time.

... Right, this seems reasonable but she's going to want to get into the weeds of exact methods later.

So. Currency.

So Sarun knows how the reason people take payment in salt or gold or seashells isn't just that it's valuable, it's that it's the thing everyone else acknowledges as currency? They'll store lots more salt or gold or seashells than they need right now, because they know they can trade it for whatever they like later? Seashells are pretty, but what makes them good as currency is that other people will accept them as currency?

Right. Though salt is also separately important for eating. And it seems like it's important that it's pretty hard to make something that isn't salt seem like salt or something that isn't a shell seem like a shell.

Yes! That salt is useful and important is good, because it means that even if everyone suddenly stops using it as currency tomorrow, it will still keep being worth having. And being difficult to counterfeit is also important! If people can make fakes than they do that and the value goes down to the cost of making fakes, which is usually very low.

The problem with salt is that carrying around little bags of salt everywhere is annoying, and salt melts in the rain, and it isn't convenient to trade with at all. So, let's imagine that you adopt salt as your currency, but you also set up a "bank", an organization which issues little bronze coins. If you give them a [unit] of salt, they'll give you a little coin saying they owe you a [unit] of salt, and they can give you back the coin any time and you'll give them the salt.

If we can somehow make these coins too expensive to counterfeit to be worth making fakes of, and if people trust that the bank will still be around and keeping deals, this seems much more practical than everyone carrying around salt everywhere. But those two conditions are important, and if you can't do that, this currency doesn't work. Does this make sense?

It makes sense, although it seems like it might be very tempting for people to rob the salt bank.

Yes, that happens. You hear about bank robberies sometimes, though they're mostly built like fortresses to be very hard to rob.

Anyway, the other really weird thing is... You know the salt-backed currency? 

If everyone expects a currency to be used by everyone, it does not, technically, need the backing. It just needs the belief. People will want it because they know other people will want it in the future; 'that you can buy stuff with this' is sufficient reason. This is not a state she thinks that Rixo is in right now, to be clear, where she could have a non-backed, a 'fiat', currency. But it is how most states where she's from work, and they all work very very hard to make sure that everyone believes they will keep their word and never default or do anything to make the currency worth too much less, so that people will keep using it.

...huh. But what's the advantage of doing that besides being able to keep all the salt you had in the bank at that one time?

The main advantage is that countries don't want to have to spend lots of resources collecting salt. It's cheaper for them to just issue easy-to-make coins than to collect huge quantities of salt and guard it behind fortress walls.

They've also noticed, in all their history-learning, that it's mostly good for a country if the amount of money it has is growing at a steady rate, very slightly faster than the rate at which production of goods is growing? And that's easy to control with a fiat currency? But explaining why would be kind of complicated.

Huh. The amount of seashells is probably growing, they most likely don't break as quickly as new ones can be collected. Salt he's not sure. Metal is growing, though the speed is capped by if nothing else the limited number of elementals and mages who happen to have Adamant as one of their elements.

Yeah, she's not sure they have the tools to measure the amount of money in circulation precisely enough for her to try to manage that? It's very tricky to track it precisely, and it's... really not good... when there's a breakdown enough that you can see very high prices in the market, though everyone having a lot more stuff because of all the mages will make the bad effects much less bad, because it is good when everyone has a lot more stuff.

Is it? Some people think it's harder to govern the rich.

... So, that's somewhat complicated, but rich people have more to lose if things go very badly? If people are starving they rebel very easily; if people are happy they consider what they'd lose before rebelling. And since they had enough to eat growing up they're often smarter and have better self-control? And you can tax them more, because they have more stuff, and this added wealth makes you much better at fighting off enemies? But it's also true that they are usually much better at finding ways to oppose governments they dislike. Personally, Silda mostly tries to solve this by being good at running governments so people don't dislike her, but other people have tried other solutions.

Is it that important how much you eat when you're growing up provided you don't, like, starve?

Oh yes! People need lots of food and lots of different kinds of food. Your body is building itself bigger with the food it eats, and it needs specific things in order to build itself as well as it wants to, and if it doesn't have those you'll be less strong and smart and healthy and tall.

(Silda is very obviously extremely healthy, and is, indeed, much taller than the average woman.)

Nutrition is a whole complicated field, but it's generally a good idea to eat a lot of different things, including meat and grains and vegetables. Some people don't eat meat (Silda usually doesn't) (purely to stay in character of course), but in that case you want to eat lots of eggs and beans and other [untranslatable]-containing food.

Why do some people not eat meat?

Religious reasons, sometimes? Or they don't think it's kind to the animals to kill them for meat. Silda mostly did it because it was the sort of thing you did if you wanted to be elected.

...elected by people of those religious persuasions?

Yes, or who care about animal suffering.

Huh. Around here it would be really weird to turn down meat you came by.

Then in that case she will not worry about it, here!

Oh good, they're having mutton tonight.

(Not worrying about it, as she said.)

So, back on topic: What's his tax policy look like?

He will explain it to her! It's... kind of a mess but he's earnest about it.

... Right. Well, that's fixable, that's fixable, that's... actually a famously hard problem... but sort of fixable...

Any other crises he wants a random person from the future very far away to help with?

He's happy to keep her busy all day. It turns out during the course of this that he does not read very well.

Huh, any particular reason why not?

Well, he only started trying to learn a few years ago. He's used to mental arithmetic and there's not much that isn't numerical to read. Sometimes writing things down mixes him up more than not doing that. So he doesn't practice much.

Oh, that makes sense. Silda learned to read when she was a child, so she's gotten lots of practice.

... Wait, there isn't much written? Do they... not have printing yet?

That is not a word in his language so he cannot tell her?

Oh, it's a tool for making lots of copies of books very quickly. Her people have lots of tools, and at some point she should get a room full of smiths and metal-mages and explain how to make all sorts of advanced tools. She's not sure how to best trade off between government-resource-generation as opposed to world-resource-generation; how does Rixo organize its crafts?

What does she mean by that?

... So, if everyone grows twice as much food, there's twice as much food, and the world is twice as well off in food. But if the government keeps taxes at exactly the same level, the government isn't better off. On the other hand, if the government comes up with a brilliant way to make one tax collector do the work of ten, the government can afford to hire only one-tenth as many tax collectors, which saves it nine-tenths of what it was spending on tax collectors' salaries. So that would help the government's resources without making people better off, except indirectly as having the government have lots of money makes the citizenry better off.

Fascinating! That makes sense! What does she mean about organizing crafts though?

So, some places have rules that say that you need to pass a test to be allowed to be, say, a smith, because smiths who aren't licensed might end up burning down their smithies. Or say that all the smiths are supposed to organize themselves into a specific organization that should make sure no incompetent people become smiths. A lot of these rules tend to be worse than doing nothing unless you're really, really good at it, because most good-sounding ideas turn out not to work out. Silda thought you might have laws like that?

There are rules like that for the priesthood but that's priesthood-internal.

That makes sense.

He hasn't said much about the priesthood. What should she know about it?

So there's various gods, and people who are specialized in carrying out the procedures that induce them to do various things. You go to them if you want an augury done or if you want to make a particular bid for godly intervention on something. Sarun puts in an appearance now and then, donates a goat or some money or whatever aimed at good harvests and peace and all that nice stuff.

(There are no gods where Silda is from, unless the AI who lives in her head and helps her with math counts.)

Huh. What forms does godly intervention normally take?

Rain, good luck, skill in war, success in love, depends on the god.

(So, all wholly plausible coincidences.)

Makes sense. Silda isn't sure if her home has gods? People over there disagreed about whether or not they did, and if so, what they were like. Probably she should learn more about the gods here so she can know how to avoid offending them.

That's best practice, yes. Apart from things like addressing them disrespectfully or fucking with the priests and/or temples the biggies are that you aren't supposed to do incest or cannibalism or worship a human as a god.

Silda has no intention of doing any of these things! Do the priests and/or temples do other than try to get the gods to intervene?

Priests will get on your case if they think you're doing those things; godly wrath isn't something you can court by yourself lest it take the form of a huge disaster or something.

Of course, perfectly reasonable of them. Silda doesn't want huge disasters any more than anyone else does, it's just that there's some places where she's from where priests run a lot more than that, and she wanted to know if this was one of them.

Nope, priests do not run most things. That would be kind of weird.

It is very weird.

Sarun would like to introduce his charming foreign guest to some of his friends, is that okay with her?

Why, of course it is!

(ahahahahahaha Silda is going to run things)

Then at dinner he will have some people over and they will all want to know where she came from and what it's like there!

She came from Sanand, which is a very long way away, via unknown magic! And it is tremendously rich, with all arts and skills developed to a very high level!

So it's experiencing a Golden Age at this time?

It does not think of itself that way. Sanand just thinks of being that rich as the natural state of affairs.

Lots of places think that during their golden ages.

... To clarify, it has been that rich for the past few hundred years, and before that it was richer. It got conquered by an empire that collects very high taxes and so is poorer and unhappy about that. But it's still partly self-governing.

...gosh. What empire is this? They didn't know of another empire besides the one that Shattered.

The Attani Empire! It is very powerful and developed even compared to Sanand, but she has no idea if it has even heard of this planet. She just disappeared and then appeared here and has no idea why.

Wow, from another PLANET? Amazing. She should explain to a mage with a Glass elemental sometime and see if they can see it. Or a Shadow, if it's too far for Glass.

She doesn't know that she's from another planet, but it seems likely!

... Glass and Shadow elementals can see the surface of other planets?

Glass ones can see the moon as though it were up close, at least. Shadows can see anywhere dark enough.

... Wow.

(They don't have mages or elementals in Sanand.)

And yet they've accomplished so much stuff, it sounds like! Maybe she should get a mage with a Shadow to take her there and back? Set up a trade route?

(Silda is thinking very very quickly.

From her selfish point of view, she wants to stay here. She can take over a world and fix everything right by herself and it will end up wonderful and amazing without introducing any of the things about the Attani empire she dislikes.

But, in actual fact, the ethically correct thing to do is to give the Attani Empire magic so it can make everyone immortal and take over the universe. She has no idea if magic even follows the laws of thermodynamics, but whether it does or doesn't, giving the most functional human state tremendously more resources would be worth her death, which would happen if her secret identity became known to the rest of her classmates. Which it almost certainly would.

So, is Silda an ethical person? At all? Even in the slightest?)

Silda thinks that would be an excellent idea.

They can probably find a mage with a Shadow around somewhere within a few days.

Oh good.

What should they expect once there's a way to and from her country?

The obvious thing to expect is that lots of people will show up wanting to trade, and teach classes, and see about hiring mages to do things mages can do cheaply and that can't be done without magic. Some people will want to move in, either because they don't like living under the Attani or because they want to buy land or because they want to avoid high taxes or just because they think living in a world with magic is cool.

The Attani might want to take over but since they don't have any mages and they don't have any Shadows they would have some problems just getting here, let alone doing anything once they do. 

That does seem like it would make it hard for them to invade! Even a Shadow can't take more than a handful of passengers anywhere per day.

Oh good.

It's inconvenient.

This is very true, but under the circumstances it's also very useful for not being invaded.

Yup, even if they suborned a few mages who happened to have Shadows they'd be able to land troops only very slowly. But people are always hoping to find a way to replenish magical energy.

Of course, of course. Is there no known way to do that?

There is not! It means a lot of magic-intensive work takes longer than it seems like it should if you watch mages working.

She doubts she can solve this problem, since her world doesn't have magic, but if they want technological and/or economic assistance, she's very qualified to help!

Is there a way technology or economics can be used to refill mages?

She has no idea, since her world doesn't have magic. It's clearly worth investigating, though.

How exciting! What would her research avenue there be?

There are individual techniques they have to make doing research better (she'll want to get into the math later, it can be tricky to follow,) but basically she'd want to try to sort mages by how much energy they can store or how quickly they refill it, then see what things mages with very high capacity or regeneration rate do, then see if, if other mages start doing them, they get more capacity or more regeneration rate.

Oooh, that sounds like such an obvious idea in retrospect! It's a pity they don't have a way to precisely measure that.

Are there any spells that all mages can do, that drain a small fixed amount of magic regardless of how well you cast them? If so, you could use the-amount-of-energy-that-spell-costs as a source for your unit-of-measure.

Not really. You can get more efficient at casting a spell.

Oh. In that case you're trying to measure something imprecise with something imprecise and that's much harder. Is there... a rate at which mages can recover magic, or take magic from elementals, that's fixed?

They can take from elementals as much as they want but the elementals run out. Mages seem to recover magic steadily at all times unless they're full up but different ones take different amounts of time to fill up.

... Do elementals recover magic steadily at a rate, or have a limited capacity? They might be more standardized than humans.

Elementals both recover magic steadily at a rate and have a limited capacity! It seems plausible that they are all the same.

Then in that case you could take all of an elemental's magic (she really needs to do the double-checking that elementals aren't people, at some point), wait one minute, take the magic again, and call that your unit of measure.

(Or one hour. Or one second. What precise unit they pick as a base doesn't matter much, though they probably want to decimalize their larger size-units.)

That would work if they had... timekeeping.

Right.

Here's a very short description of how pendulums work, here's how pendulum clocks work, here's how water clocks work, here's how hourglasses work...

Ooooooooh!

Any other problems they need solved?

Does she know how to prevent death in childbirth?

No.

She knows how to mitigate it, though; antibiotics, doctors washing their hands (with soap!) implausibly often, and extremely clean working environments. Also a lot of other drugs they don't have the tools to make.

Okay. They do have soap, so maybe the - midwives? Did she mean midwives? - should just take up aggressive handwashing.

They can also concentrate wine and use that to disinfect surfaces and wounds. But yes, having both people and environments far more clean than you could possibly expect to matter are very important.

That's really interesting! Why is it that way?

You know how some people have worms in their body that take blood from them and make them sick? There are lots of things much much smaller than worms all over that can get into cuts and things and make you sick, too, and she bets that glass mages can see them if they're good enough, or else she can show you how to make devices that can see them. Some of those do useful things inside your body instead of being parasites but have bad effects if they get in the wrong place, but others of them are just very bad and shouldn't get in you. You can kill them with heat, by baking or boiling food, which is one reason why cooked food is so much healthier than raw, or by using something poisonous to them, like alcohol.

Gosh. So they should all be drinking more?

... So, actually, alcohol is very mildly poisonous to people for the same reason it's actually meaningfully poisonous to the tiny horrible creatures.

(Also, the alcohol you have is kind of weak for the purpose, she knows how to make much stronger alcohol... oh no, this is going to go very badly, isn't it.) ((Too late, she already said it.))

...gosh. So they should drink less, and... bathe in alcohol?

She successfully tries not to laugh.

... No. They should use the very strong alcohol she will tell them how to make to sterilize cuts they get, and boil or alcohol-sterilize the bandages they put on them. (applying alcohol to open wounds hurts a lot, but they only need to do it until they devise a better substitute, which is on her list of goals.) They should make sure that their food - in particular meat - is cooked through. Doctors should wash their hands really very often. And they should encourage bathing with soap and clean water, to the extent people can afford it.

Sounds doable! How do they make the special alcohol?

Use heat or cold to separate out the alcohol from regular wine or beer (by boiling or freezing it). If they boil it, they need to make sure to trap the alcohol instead of letting it escape. Silda will explain how to build some devices to this, it's really not that complicated...

(Though at some point she'll want to get to the state of the city vis-a-vis the international situation and whether there's any crises more urgent than that they're stuck in the Bronze Age.)

Once they have run out of energy for this conversation she is left to her own devices.

Great! Then she wants to find an elemental - preferably the one she ran into earlier? - to ask about just how elementals work. And whether or not they have a crisis to worry about.

The Wood elemental can be found napping on the floor of the servant's quarters, but she wakes up when Silda comes in.

"I'm sorry to bother you," says Silda quietly, with a friendly and apologetic smile, "but I wanted to talk to you more about your situation, if you don't mind. I'm from somewhere very far away and I was hoping to learn more about elementals?" Silda will turn on the very-friendly-and-helpful-just-want-to-know-more as high as it can go.

The elemental blinks at her. "Yes ma'am?"

"Can you tell me what it is you want, and what other elementals want, and what it's like to be an elemental?"

She thinks about this question for a while. Sits up. "Elementals are never children but do start knowing very little about how to behave," she says. "I have learned a lot since coming to be among humans. I don't know other elementals very well."

"Then can you tell me about yourself?"

Come on, charm, work for me here! Don't be limited to humans!

"I don't think I'm very interesting."

"Why not? What do you do with your time?"

"I help with the orchards and repairs."

See, the whole reason she tried to get charm is because she knew she isn't any actually good at this.

"What does that consist of?" Silda has ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD.

"I can reshape the trees, and mend the fences, with magic."

She smiles. "Can you tell me about that?"

"I... do it the way my master tells me if it's not obvious?" she ventures.

She cocks her head and listens intently.

"I overfly all the fences on the property every day. To see if they need fixing. Otherwise the livestock would wander."

Liiiisten.

"...and I... espalier the fruit trees, and coppice some of the others..."