That seems like a really weird thing to have a monopoly on, but okay.

"That sounds like there's potential for more trade one day. If there's a geographically convenient region with enough of the right resources nearby, it might be possible to start industrializing there and spread out later."

"Indeed, but it hasn't happened, so I don't know if such a location exists or what is currently preventing it from doing so. It might be something to research, if you can give us better commentary on what doing so would require."  

"I think the last thing I wanted to ask about was economics - how do you structure your society, how many people do you have, how wealthy are you. That sort of thing. Apparently you thought gold was less valuable here?" 

"Well, that's a broad question, but I guess I can give you an overview. There are about five billion people living on the planet. We are... wealthier than we used to be, for sure, but I don't really know how to describe how wealthy. If all you want to do is make enough money for food, water, and shelter, you can do that by working ten or twenty hours a week, which should give you an idea of how much labor is needed to produce that food, water, and shelter. But most people work more than that, because they want nice things. Gold is valuable, because it's rare, and people like to use it for jewelry. I think it's probably less rare here, because the amount of gold you gave me would have been a lot more money back home, and the exchange rate with silver is a lot more than ten to one."

"I'm not sure what you mean by 'how we structure our society', in the context of economics. People buy and sell things, and that's how they get what they want? I'm not sure what else you're looking for."

notes notes notes. "Mostly I'm thinking about - who has the power to do what? Who holds monopolies, what people do to get ownership of land, what sort of institutions do you make to coordinate people, that sort of thing. Those things get set up in a lot of different ways across the continent."  

"The Union Government is the institution which solves coordination problems for the whole world, like taxing land, resource extraction, and pollution, upholding the legal system, and funding various useful things the priesthood does. Cities or regions are sometimes under the control of a municipal government, and they do lots of things in various different ways depending on how the people there think the municipality ought to be run. Generally there aren't monopolies, but sometimes municipalities will want a local monopoly, and for some things, like parts of the road network, rail network, or electrical grid, it makes sense to have a monopoly run by the Union Government. Anyone can own land, as long as they pay the tax on it, so I suppose in the final sense the Union owns all the land."

Some more, final notes. "I think that's everything I wanted to ask. Probably once I've got this written up more formally, I'll want to ask some follow-up questions to clarify, but that will be a problem for another day." 

"Sure, happy to help!"

"I have a few questions for you, about magic, which I think it would be better to have a human answer than try to find in a book."

"Sure, ask away."

"In my reading, I found a few references to mind-affecting magic, which is... not something I'm used to having to worry about. So I want to get a better idea of what my vulnerabilities are, what I need to watch out for. How can magic be used to affect my mind? How common is that? Can people read my thoughts? Can they spy on me from far away without me noticing or otherwise magically discover information about me? I need to develop new assumptions about how much privacy I have, and how susceptible I am to outside influence."

"It's ... decently common. There's a fairly common tradition, beguilers, who specialise in mind-affecting magic like enchantments and illusions, and I think there are psionic analogues. Most other traditions have some mind-affecting spells; as a healer, for example, I can construct an aura around myself which prevents people from attacking me as long as I don't attack them first. Nearly every recorded mind-affecting spell or power can be resisted with a strong enough will - it's a skillset that most casters pick up naturally as part of the process of learning to cast. But you can't rely on that when dealing with the powers of a peer enemy; it's still a bit of a coinflip who will win out. You can also prevent spellcasting by physically interrupting the casting process - it takes time on the order of multiple seconds and usually requires both speech and gestures, but beguilers nearly universally study methods for concealing or removing the need for those gestures, given the subtle nature of their spells - none of those methods are without cost, though; it's much harder to cast any given spell in that way than to do it in the obvious way, so being able to do so for any given spell is rarer. Nearly all of the dangerous mind-targeting effects need to be done by specialists consuming their daily resources to do so - a beguiler of my power who did nothing but read thoughts could spend perhaps an hour a day maximum reading a single person's mind, and I'd be surprised if there were more than a hundred people with the capability in the city; there are probably many fewer. The common spell for that, it's called "Detect Thoughts" only has a range of about 60ft. A ritualist could use the spell, but they'd be spending more time re-casting the ritual than benefiting from the spell by an order of magnitude. Ritualists can Scry to view people from afar but they have to be nearly name level to manage; it's practically easier to teleport to someone than to spy on them without noticing. 

Regarding active mind control, there are a lot of unsubtle combat effects like stunning someone with sensory overload or putting them to sleep, but that doesn't seem to be what you're worried about. "Charm Person" is a common spell, one of the ones every Beguiler will be well-practiced; it makes someone seem likable and trustworthy, like they were a well-regarded friend, but doesn't give them any particular power over you beyond that. "Dominate Person" is a spell that name-level beguilers (and thus also ritualists - beguilers and ritualists share the same intellectual lineage, along with warmages, so ritualists find copying spells of those other traditions easy) can cast; consider it about as hard for them to do as resurrection is for a healer. It allows total control over the target's body and actions for a period of a week or two; since it can be recast usually more often than daily, once you're under it's control, it's very hard to break out through sheer will, since they can layer effects until one takes, but it's expensive and long-term control is obvious. I'm not sure if there's anyone in the city who can cast it, but why would they make it public knowledge if they could. The intermediate point between those two is "Suggestion", which forces someone to obey a single order for a handful of seconds - it's about halfway in difficulty between those two. None of these effects can order you to commit suicide, or to do anything which you'd want to do less than that.

Personally, I wouldn't be substantially more worried about minor mind control than I would about mundane forms of deception, and I wouldn't be more worried about major mind control than I would about any other method by which a great name can choose to kill you or make your life hell."

"Thank you for explaining that, it was helpful."

"Wait a minute, did you say resurrection?!"

"... Healers at the name level can bring a body which is still largely intact and undecomposed back from the dead, if the person's soul in the afterlife agrees with that. At higher levels the requirements get lighter, needing only the head or skull, and then needing nothing but an unambiguous reference to the person to be raised. The basic techniques also do irreversible damage to someone's soul and metabolism, though the soul can be regained the hard way; more advanced ones focus on preventing that. There are to my knowledge two people with this capacity in the city; between them, maybe 5 to 10 people are raised per day, at a cost of between 10k to 20k GP each - the process consumes diamonds in large quantities, a trait common to most major healing. You can technically resurrect someone who has died of old age, but they won't be younger, so they will usually die again in fairly short order. I think Druids have a workaround for that, but if they do, it's not in common usage. If you want to remain in this world forever, the usual strategy is some form of undeath."  

"Holy shit."

"Uh, can you explain souls, the afterlife, and living forever with undeath? I didn't realize necromancy could do that."

"And I should mention that it's possible to synthesize diamonds with the right machines, that might be a big deal."

"Synthesis of diamonds could be extremely valuable, but the limiting factor is people with the right skillset, not the diamonds themselves; plenty of diamonds get made into jewellery or ground up to power someone's experimental wheat-mutation project or what have you." 

"Every person with a mind, and a number of entities which are not people, has a soul; they're the thing which accumulates weight and experience. Even attempts to make a mind which don't involve soul-craft end up with the mind in question being ensouled; the process is unclear. When you die, your body and part of your spiritual nature remains here, but the soul is taken to the afterlife, where it travels to one of several realms based on heuristics about which one it will find most satisfying to linger in. In the afterlife you only have access to the parts of you which are encoded in your soul, rather than your body and non-soul spiritual anatomy, which is only your most fundamental nature for people without weight and nearly all of it for someone at name level, and the process of dying is traumatic at the best of times, so you shouldn't consider it a second chance. The afterlife also contains many entities which are the product of merging the nature of the afterlife and the soul-stuff it is composed of with that of souls present there; we call those outsiders, and they're the least-seen form of spirit, since they're far away and usually preoccupied. The afterlives can be visited like any other planes - there are a few portals here and there, even, and the gods keep and other powers that be often keep a lot of their stuff in them.

Dead bodies continue to contain a lot of what made you alive and able to do things; improperly buried or traumatically killed bodies can return as resentful dead, but necromancers can also reanimate them as servants. With the right rituals, the soul can be trapped and bound into it's body after death; this can be done consensually or non-consensually. Someone thus bound is already dead, and thus cannot die again, though sufficient damage to their body can destroy them. Necromancers are skilled at arts that prevent the weight of ages alone from being enough to destroy them, though. Many prefer the afterlife to such a fate; being undead can be quite unpleasant in a variety of ways. One method of particular note is Lichdom - a Lich is a powerful spellcaster who has bound their soul to one or more anchors and cannot be truly destroyed until every anchor is; they can be separated by substantial distance or even kept on different planes. It's considered the gold standard for undeath-based immortality, and it's very difficult, on a technical level, to achieve the state ethically."  

Okay, yikes, maybe she ought to be more worried about death than she was. That sounds less fun than ending up in another world or ceasing to exist.

Sida isn't quite sure what 'gold standard' is meant to imply, as her world largely stopped using metal-backed currency decades ago, abandoned for it's shortcomings.

"Thank you for the explanation. That was all of the questions I had for you right now, I guess."

"You're welcome. We should get you those supplies I promised, and some official compensation for your time, and then you can go about your business." 

Sida wasn't expecting more compensation, but she won't turn it down.

"Sure."

Compensation is to the tune of a blank book of parchment, writing supplies, and 20gp. "We want to be the sort of people, who when someone has a unique potentially-worldshaking experience, they can go to us and let us write a book about it."

"An admirable goal. We'll meet again, but until then, unconcealedness!"

"Sorry, that's a lot less awkward in my native language."

Sida leaves the library to get lunch. She's looking for some relatively cheap street food.

The *very* cheap option is going to one of the Deep Gardener Kitchens and getting a free bowl of mushroom stew, and the next-cheapest option seems to be "that, but you buy some of the many condiments that people offer for sale outside those kitchens to improve the flavour of the stew". For a silver piece or thereabouts, Sendra could also get skewers of grilled pork in a herby sauce, or a bowl of richly flavoured rice, or a plate of eggs fried in the fat of a sort of lamb confit. For a little more than that, she could get a large and hearty pastry (somewhere between a pasty and a beef wellington) that is claimed to be favoured by the god of Death-as-Luck, sold by, of all things, a flaming skull handling it's wares with telekinesis. 

The mushroom stew does not look appetizing and Sida will optimistically assume she will never be poor enough that she has to eat it.

She decides that she has to talk to the flaming skull, and buying their product seems like it might help a little, so she goes for the pastry.

"Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?" she says to the flaming skull.

"I am always ready to help the ambitions of puny mortals."

"I was wondering, were you always a flaming skull?"

"A tricky question of identity! This skull once belonged to a mortal, but I am not he!" 

"How were you born, then?"