After Sida wakes up, she eats breakfast and asks if the inn has baths available.

It does, but at an additional cost of 2sp to cover the cost of fuel and the trouble of moving water. 

Oh, thank goodness. She probably can't spend money like this indefinitely, but right now a bath is needed. Her clothes will have to wait.

After getting slightly cleaner, enough that she won't be embarrassed to be in a library/temple(?), she leaves the inn and heads for the Order of Edification's headquarters. On her way there, she looks for someone selling a handkerchief, neck gaiter, or other cloth garment she can comfortably cover her lower face with.

Such a thing can be obtained for a pretty low price, only a couple of SP. Though it does seem to be intended mainly for identity-concealment purposes. 

The grand library is a little less busy, first thing in the morning, but it's certainly open and people are buzzing about doing things as they were yesterday.  

She can get easily sent to the same room as previously, where Sendra is waiting for her, taking notes in her notebook. 

Identity concealment isn't necessary, but it isn't unwelcome either. She'll take it, with a minimum of haggling because she's got much more exciting stuff to do.

She didn't realize Sendra would be waiting for her, but that works just fine.

"Hello!"

"Hello. Did you find somewhere decent to stay? I figured I'd work on my thoughts about questions here rather than in the library nook I was using for research before I met you, so that I'd be easier to find. Do you want to read in the library in the meantime? I have a spare access token I can loan you, for now. The outer library has a lot more stuff in it than the public library, though most of it is probably too specific for your purposes."  

"I stayed in an inn, which was kind of weirdly nicer than I'm used to and worse than I'm used to at the same time. I would like to read in the library, and a token would be appreciated, although I'm not familiar with this hierarchal library organization and I don't know what to expect from it."

"Ah. The public library can be accessed by anyone who isn't actively trouble for the library. The outer library can be accessed by anyone who buys, is given, or is awarded, an access token; they expire at the end of the year. Our access price is on the cheap side for access to a good library, but the need to buy a year's worth of access at a time can be restrictive for many people, and it's still just straight-up out of the reach of many. Access to the contents of the inner library is on a per-subject basis and yet more expensive; that's where we keep things like the rare and powerful magic and the lore that someone had to risk death to learn, to ensure that it makes a return on that cost. The core library contains the things which we can't afford to distribute to anyone outside to guild, or most people inside the guild. Even I don't know most of what's in there. In practise, if it's not related to high-level magical or extraordinary techniques, or politically sensitive, or key to someone's adventuring plans, you can find it in the outer library; that collection alone can be considered one of the three most comprehensive in the city."  

"Oh, right, you wouldn't have government funding, that makes sense. Thank you for the explanation, and the token."

Sida takes her token and head for the library, public section first. She looks for a librarian, of the type that you can ask for help finding things, if they have those.

They have substantially more librarians of the "staff busy maintaining the building and the books who you can interrupt to ask for help, and they will happily help you because they are the sort of person who works in a library" type, but there is also a dedicated help-desk person at the entrance to the public library, which is, it turns out, a single large room whose centre is full of rows of reading desks, with a high ceiling and big windows to let in natural light, while the outer walls are lined with bookshelves full of use-worn tomes. 

She heads for the help desk.

"I have a sorta unique flavor of ignorance and I want to find some books to help me fix that, are you the right person to ask for recommendations?"

"That I am!" The hyena-person (A gnoll, translation magic supplies) staffing the desk laughs disconcertingly. "It is the duty of the Order to ensure that all who look for knowledge can find it. What do you need to learn about?" 

"I got here yesterday from another world that doesn't have magic, or gods, or the thing where people challenge themselves in dangerous situations to make their souls stronger and become more powerful, so I have no knowledge of these things. As in, I don't know nearly any facts about them, and I don't have any of the cultural knowledge and expectations to help me think about them. So if possible I'd like to find some books that can help me figure out what is going on with those things. Stuff like, what is magic, what can it do, what are the different types of magic, what are the different types of ways people strengthen their souls—if I understood that part correctly—what are the gods, and what do they do."

"Ah, Hmm. Well, I'd recommend On Theology, the conclave-approved edition, to learn about the approved pantheon and their main blessings. It even has some relatively neutral coverage of some non-pantheonic gods, which is surprising for anything that came out of a conclave of approved gods. There's a big index of magical traditions, I forget who wrote it, but it's fairly comprehensive. We have two copies in the public library, lots of people want to use it to figure out what it was that hit them. And then Tweet, Cook, and Williams "Handbook of training" is considered a classic text on what can be agreed on about the mechanisms of power growth, though it's written with an eye to giving practical advice rather than a metaphysical grounding. Not that anyone actually understands how it works on a metaphysical level, but you might want to skip over the sections on weapon selection and camping and so forth."

"Thank you, I'll start with those."

She'll first take a look at the index of magical traditions, what do those look like?

Sida can read an incredibly comprehensive book describing the various ways people in this setting can be magical! 

Some highlights include: 
- Mages, who usually have a finite amount of powerful, thematically limited magic they can do in each day. Comes in "Healer", "Necromancer", "Beguiler", "Warmage", "Druid" and so forth. The bulk of "conventional, obviously magical things"  
- Ritualists, who have access to a wide array of repeatable spells, all of which are too slow to cast in combat. Would be considered weak but for the sheer utility of repeatable, versatile magic. One of the only traditions who can gain additional powers without gaining additional experience. 
- Psions, who use a reservoir of internal power to do their finite daily allocation of magic in a different way. Comes in a variety of different traditions each with a limited theme, but the highlights include "wilders", who hyperspecialize in a few powers, and elocators, who specialise in a variety of teleportation and mobility magic. A style of magic common far to the west of here, apparently.
- Warlocks, who let a god or similarly powerful being shape them and thereby gain a small number of thematic, repeatable, powers. Traditionally considered untrustworthy by religious sorts who earn their favour the hard way, especially since they're not obliged to keep working with the one who empowered them. 
- Spellshapers, who learn a small number of highly flexible techniques, using them in many different ways, but mostly as attacks. 
- Several traditions which claim to imitate dragons, gaining their physique, ability to use "breath weapons", and other traits. 
- A large number of different martial arts traditions, offering everything from setting your blade on fire to inspiring your allies to supernatural heights to teleportation to merely hitting things incredibly hard. 
- A large number of martial and pragmatic traditions which aren't considered *magical* per se, but which can achieve "mundane" things like training a dog so well that it grows 12ft tall or leading so well that your soldiers are physically harder to kill, or balancing on a cloud through sheer technical skill as an acrobat. Though the book only records two individual people in history who've achieved that last feat; nearly everyone who wants to do that uses more direct methods than "empower your skill as an acrobat until you can achieve the task through technical skill", and the quantity of power needed limits it to specialised epics anyhow. 

It's taken as given that advancing in every tradition comes with a corresponding increasing in how hard it is to hurt or kill you, and an increase in your day-to-day skills. Overwhelmingly, traditions have some use in combat, and those which don't are considered weak or foolish. Every entry in the book comes with references to at least one, and often more, other books detailing the capacities of that tradition in particular, and often ways to join or fight the tradition. 

Wowww, this is a lot of stuff. Clearly it's going to take a while before Sida has a good understanding of what specific things people can do, but this did help her improve her general expectations of how things work.

It seems like magic—except for what ritualists do—isn't really a generalized part of the universe that happens everywhere as much as it is a thing that specific people with powerful souls do. Although perhaps she's getting the impression because of what the book focuses on. The soul strengthening thing—what do you even call it? They don't seem to have a name for it because they're completely used to it. It's still a really weird phenomenon. She takes a look at the handbook of training next.

The handbook of training is split roughly into three parts - the first is a summary of how the author's understand the world to work, including both a summary of the same rough intuitions about Experience, as this author chooses to call it, as Sida has already heard. The two key insights that the authors try to get across here are firstly that while all else being equal, someone better-trained will beat some worse-trained, these differences are rapidly eclipsed if the worse-trained person has a deeper pool of Experience to draw on,, so mundane, low-risk training, while vital for acquiring new capacities and keeping your edge, should make sure to take second place to other things you can spend your time doing, like looking for good ways to take risks and grow, or maintaining your mental health. The second, the constant mantra of this first section is *that gaining Experience is dangerous*. There are better ways and worse ways, but there's ultimately no way around the fact that if you're getting experience, you are in danger. This world doesn't have good demographic statistics about this, but the author estimates that more than half of everyone who sets out to adventure dies of it, and that every great name has a trail behind them of a hundred people who tried to reach that height and died of it. 

The next section is - well, then, what to do about it? The author discusses a series of historical contexts and projects where people have done adventuring and adventuring-like activities. Artificially designed dangers seem like a good idea because they give someone powerful control, but they don't achieve anything productive and they don't ensure the loyalty of the people so Experienced to the person funding the thing, so they tend to be resource sinks for the people who made them and little more. "Dangers of Civilization" like slavery or courtly intrigue work, but again tend to be zero-sum games that end with some institution tearing itself to bits. Warfare (which seems to, in this setting, be a slow thing of circumvallation and contravallation punctuated by deadly raids by small powerful teams) is too deadly; you can't, as the ambitious weak person, ensure that you're not used as chaff to ward off some great name for another 12 seconds.

Instead, the ideal circumstances, the authors determine, is monster-hunting or the exploration of strange and dangerous places (like foreign countries, wilderness, ancient ruins, anywhere underground, and, at high levels, other planes). The reactive nature of these threats ensures that research, threat assessment and mitigation, and outright retreat can be used to maximise the rate of survival on a given level of danger, and the valuable nature of these tasks makes them both prosocial and profitable -  which isn't true for the weak participants of any other activity they've listed. The author gives advice on the best way to get strong without dying in each case, but the most attention is given to the suggested tasks of monster-hunting and exploration of dangerous places. For this, the authors say you should operate in groups of 3-6, with everyone being of approximately even strength and experience. The group size is because the group needs to be large enough that if you *do* slip up and get seriously injured, the group can recover and save your life, while anything dangerous enough to threaten a larger group would also be dangerous enough to consistently kill a few members of it. The ideal group, being big enough to survive mistakes but not big enough to force them, can thus take more risks and grow faster and more safely. The need for a "balanced" group is suggested to be because the Experience obtained from any given deed is assessed by the power of the strongest member, and that member tends to have done the lions share of the work as well, so it's less efficient. The authors don't have hard evidence for this one, though.

The final, and longest, section is a compilation of every bit of advice and pragmatism the authors thought to put into words. This is everything from advice about how much money you should spend on equipment before you can consider yourself comprehensively equipped (the numbers are in the hundreds of thousand of GP for great names), suggestions for weapon choices (short, versatile polearms are the top suggestion, combining reach and ability to function in an enclosed space; the authors seem to consider the main job of a melee fighter to be pinning down as many opponents as they can without dying while archers and mages actually deal with the problem), to long lists of potions and effects which you should try to have access to (Healing is the must-have, but healing potions are relatively cheap and common - *rare* must-haves include things like immunity to fear or being stunned, or flight that isn't dependant on a mount). There's more here than can be read in a single day. 

Well, there's really only one choice here, is there? Sida will have to become an adventurer.

But she's not starting immediately, so she'll skim On Theology first.

The gods are *absolutely* real, and very opinionated! This is a book designed to give a summary of them to someone who has mainly grown up with local festivals, and who is now stepping out into a wider world with a heart full of curiosity and ambition, so there's a lot of "well you know how your village death-as-absence priest probably presided over deaths by old age, that's *technically* incorrect but death-as-disease isn't fussy about it so it's fine", "You know, attacking temples to steal things is a Very Bad Idea no matter how shiny the god of wealth's decorations are" and other bits produced by the fact that this book was written by priests of 35 different gods all trying to get a say. The pantheon of civilized gods is the 35 gods most commonly worshiped by humans and considered to be basically safe to worship even when they encompass domains like "Fire in it's aspect as a destructive force" or "Sand considered as a force of division, erosion, and weakness", but the book also describes that many again gods which are not considered normal or civilized, for reasons ranging from "foreigners worship them" to "they refuse to have a church" to "they're a malicious force that seeks only harm, please do anything you can to reduce their influence over the world" to "It's a city-sized scorpion that pings as divine to some kinds of test but which mostly acts like a city-sized scorpion who was also a person would (i.e. by carrying around a city full of people claiming to be her descendants on her back)".

People can become gods, and this seems to be how most of the current gods came to power. It seems to be considered rude to investigate what they did to come to power too closely, or to refer to them by their mortal names (the convention is to use their domain, calling the goddess of rivers "Rivers" and the god of bees "Bees" and so forth), but even skimming history, it seems to be very hard to make a new divine domain but relatively achievable to usurp an existing one. Where "relatively easy" here means "happens a couple times a century" rather than "the last time this happen was millennia ago". Gods have substantial but not infinite control over their domain, which includes being able to re-write its fundamental nature and make semi-retroactive changes (which is to say, changes that are retroactive but which a long list of things are immune to the effects of, starting at other gods and running down to particularly stubborn Names, meaning that large changes result in an inconsistent history designed to produce both the intended change and also the backstories of everyone who was immune to the change, even when these are mutually exclusive. Gods try not to do this very often, as a result; it's more practical to make subtle changes that apply going forward. Gods have limited attention, but they can construct automated processes with their power to manage common occurrences; the collection of, and rewards for, devotion, is one such process that is very standard, as are the various defence mechanisms standard to shrines and temples (in escalating order of investment from the god: Minor curses, alerting every worshiper in 20 miles that you need to die, major curses, dedicated guardian spirits, truly horrifying curses). Subverting these processes is the sort of thing which causes every god to be angry at you. Most gods have broad or multi-faceted domains (Sand is the god of literal sand, but mostly worshiped as a god of deception, division, weakness, and so forth; Death-by-Disease seems to be actively invested in reducing the impact of disease and death on the world) 

The rewards for devotion are as varied as are the gods themselves, and the humans who worship them. The gambler-god and patron of adventurers, death-as-bad-luck, grants his faithful uncanny good luck; the unmerciful smith-god Forge remakes their bodies into new, more perfect, forms - or helps them bring change in other ways. The patient Soil grants good crops to farmers whose dutifulness goes back generations, and the precise Metal grants masterworks dedicated to them supernatural efficacy. Revolution grants madmen the knowledge needed to tear down states, at the price of further madness; Bees drives apiarists mad trying to talk to them, but thinks this is a compliment. Death-as-Disease agitates to prevent all death; Rivers agitates to keep people from leaving their homelands, keeping their blood pure as she keeps the rivers pure. If it wasn't obvious, being a permitted god is not the same thing as being a likable god.

The process of devotion, then. You're allowed to worship multiple gods, though you're splitting your effort and the space in your heart. It's not mutually exclusive with non-religious paths; divine blessings have nothing to do with Experience; they come from outside you. There are many basic tasks that will establish you as a follower of a god; swearing by them; celebrating their festivals and holy days; leaving thematically appropriate offerings at their shrines and temples, but true favour requires investment of effort - *building* shrines and temples, defeating foes of the god, furthering the god's cause or domain (And a god will send chances to do these things to someone who is established to be faithful and who is living the sort of life where those chances come up). Minor devotion is enough for minor blessings - a single stroke of luck, a single scar unmade, but major devotion can grant permanent supernatural boons. It'll never be someone's main source of power, but a close relationship with an aligned god is a useful source of power. 

Sida is stepping out into a wider world with a heart full of curiosity and ambition, but her local festivals sure were different! The city-sized scorpion who carries a city around on her back is fucking awesome and she absolutely must visit someday. In some ways, these gods make the heathens of her world look so unimaginative.

People becoming gods is... promising, probably. It's good that this world can change and isn't stuck in the same state forever. If she's ever able to travel home then one day most of the gods will be Hadarites. Changing history is terrifying and Sida would very much like to get immunity to that eventually. Also, inconsistent history seems like the kind of thing that could break or destroy the world and the fact that the authors of this book know it can happen suggests it already has. Uh oh.

That the god of death by disease is against death by disease probably bodes well for her survival chances, so that's a relief. On the other hand, that the god of rivers wants to keep peoples' blood pure probably does not bode well for her survival chances, because she is from another world entirely and is likely pretty genetically distinct from the humans of this world, if the greater genetic diversity hasn't already overwhelmed that. Or, you know, if it makes any sense whatsoever to reason about the genetic differences between humans of two different worlds, which presumably do not share a common origin and yet are still definitely both human what the fuck. Anyways, it might be a good idea to pray. That's what people do, right?

Rivers—apologies but I'm not sure what the right term of address is—I more likely than not will never have children in this world. But if it comes up, I just wanted you to know I am open to swearing an oath to definitely never have children. That's all, have a nice day.

Sida is optimistic that that worked. Anyways! She will probably want to learn more about, uh, all of these topics later, but right now she wants to take a break from reading. Is Sendra ready to talk to her?

Sendra is ready to talk! She's got a notebook full of questions to ask, collected with the help of some of her coworkers! Does Sida want to start with the ethics culture questions, the technology questions, or the biology questions?