"I was made to be a tomb-guardian after a lifetime of loyal service, and have, since that tomb's destruction, had to find other work." 

"I see. Uh, my condolences?"

"Freedom is not a downside!" 

"Were you being forced to guard that tomb, then?"

"It is hard to tell the difference between being forced to do something and doing it merely because it is what you were created to do, and leaving your post is physically difficult. My kind are greatly weakened, if we leave the post we were made to guard." 

"I see. Well, thanks for answering my questions, and I enjoyed the pastry! Have a nice day!"

Sida heads back to the library to do some more reading. She's still orienting herself to this strange new world and wants to answer some more questions before she's ready to make any decisions about what she's going to actually do with her life.

The library continues to be open, and she still has her access token to the outer library. 

Sida returns to the theology book to read more about a few of the gods she was curious about. Specifically, Knowledge, Understanding, Death-by-Disease, and Air-That-Moves-You.

Knowledge is one of the least person-like of the Pantheon gods; in some ways, it's more appropriate to think of it as the institution of a library, with agents and workers and councils and heads to those councils, but no true self underlying all that. It's blessing come in the form of both literal answers to questions, but also in the form of guidance to less terse sources of information. Its agents have an uncanny sense for the location of troves of hidden information. It values truth, knowledge rendered into more useful forms, and good literature in general. 

Understanding presides over the idea of not just knowledge for it's own sake, but knowledge to a purpose - it values self-knowledge and other-knowledge and building a correct model of the world that can be used to interact and engage with it on a more profound level. It cares more about building this within yourself than it does about effectively transmitting it, but the latter is still encouraged. It's blessing comes in the form of precision, the communication of lessons which cannot be put into words, and the foiling of hostile spells. Those who pursue it's greatest insights find themselves thinking faster, deeper, and broader, allowing them to reach greater heights of understanding with fewer resources. When intervening in the world, it protects the learned and centres of learning, preventing the destruction of knowledge or insight, and rewards those who have found mastery and understanding. 

A wise man once said:

Your mind is software. Program it. 
Your body is a shell. Change it. 
Death is a disease. Cure it. 
Extinction is approaching. Fight it.

Thus commands death-as-disease, patron of those who fight pandemics and transcend biology. Sits on a throne carved out of ancient evils ruling disease and necromancy. Blesses people with health and the will to continue fighting the good fight, and with the tools they need to keep doing it. In favour of ethical necromancy as part of a balanced program of working to defeat the metaphorical dragon, death, and also literal dragons, if they're asking for it. 

Air-That-Moves-You is a flighty god, one given to sponsoring wanders and seekers and strangers, and keeping these people alive through their travels. It abhors boredom and allowing yourself to become static and solid. It preaches no one true insight, but rather simply the yearning in your heart and the rattling in your bones, and the need to keep moving. It's blessings are warnings and fair winds and dreams of places you've never been to. It asks people to keep moving even when that's hard, and rewards those who can with new ideas and new destinations. If it has any agenda to push, it's just one of making the world more amenable to these things - it asks you to help travellers, teach the curious, and break barriers where you find them. 

Knowledge seems very strange, mostly. Understanding's values are very close to the core of Hadar, it's fundamental center. Death-by-Disease would be an ally, to be sure, but Sida doesn't personally feel very strongly about it's aims. Air-That-Moves-You, as described, cares about exactly the things Sida always has, and perhaps is the one she feels the greatest kinship with.

Sida definitely feels as though she might eventually seek out a god as her patron—the potential upside is huge—but that can wait for later.

One thing is certain: Sida is going to learn magic. She wants to do so terribly badly and is more excited about it than she has been excited about anything in years. Which isn't to say that her life wasn't exciting, just—magic!

Based on her reading so far, most of the magical traditions are pretty specialized, with limited spells available. And while some of them could be quite useful, it seems... sad, or disappointing, to be transported to another world where magic exists, and immediately embark upon a path that closes off most of what can be done with it. Many of these traditions also seem like they're mainly good for fighting things. And although Sida is perfectly willing to fight things in order to grow stronger, growing stronger merely to get better at fighting things does not appeal. There's only one choice then.

Returning to the books about magic and training, what do they say about what she needs to do to learn ritual magic, to start on that path?

A ritualist needs:
- A broad understanding of magical theory and arcane lore in general. 
- The ability to read magical notation, and probably their own shorthand for writing it in. 
- To have memorised the entire content of the spell "Read Magic", which is a sort of hyper-specialised translation spell that only functions for magical notation. (The theory is that since all ritualists use the same underlying logic and laws, the spell needs to translate only symbols, rather than syntax or truth) 
- A spellbook, with rituals in it. This is very expensive, with even common spells that are not valuable as secret knowledge costing as much as 100gp per page to copy just from the cost of materials and artistry. There is a shop that sells dead people's spellbooks for somewhat less than that, with any pages describing anything interesting cut out of them. 
- If they have any sense at all, enough combat training to avoid freezing up, and either skill in some weapon or use of one of the rituals which grants access to a repeatable magical attack. 
- They also recommend finding more specialised "how to be a ritualist" books. 

Why would everyone develop their own personal notation, and then use a spell to translate other peoples' notation? And why do the spellbooks need to be written in such an expensive way? Are they magical themselves? Because surely if they only contained information there wouldn't be the need for such extravagance. If this book doesn't have answers to these questions she'll just have to figure it out later.

She also wants to test something, which should be simple enough. If any of the books in the library have a sample of magical notation, they don’t even need to be a proper spellbook, she'll take a look to check if her mysterious translation superpower lets her read it.

She needs to find a book about magical notation to answer these questions, which the library has several of, and this obtains several theories as to why this is considered necessary. The first is that Ritualism as an academic field and has existed over thousands of years in every culture on the continent, and since it's fundamentally academic in nature, any given practitioner will be working with whichever set of sources are most suitable (due to availability, translation, suitability for purpose, author-reader compatibility) for them specifically, and thus they will naturally develop a personal set of idiosyncrasies in the way they talk and think about a truly complex discipline - a mish-mash of schools of thought, ways of notating abstract concepts, and personal takes that renders their understanding of the art fundamentally different to anyone else's. The second theory is that it's beneficial to avoid standardising your notation because even mundane notes on rituals (let alone the actual content of rituals and spellbooks) is rare and valuable knowledge, and a unique set of notations that forces anyone other than you to do time-consuming translation work to read forces any attempt at stealing that knowledge to be overt theft, rather than subtle espionage. The final theory is that since ritualism is, on some level, about trying to write down the fundamental nature of a universe that is profound beyond human comprehension, all systems of notation are fundamentally flawed, and growing as a ritualist is about finding a set of flaws in your notation that works most ideally with your personal set of requirements and magical style, while working to transcend as many of those flaws as possible. In any regard, even if you choose for some reason to perfectly mimic some existing system of notation even when this proves slow and troublesome to you, you will absolutely want to learn to cast Read Magic for when you have to deal with the ten thousand different ways to notate the same fundamental magic properties and behaviours that have emerged as ten thousand mages and wizards across dozens of continents and several millennia all study the same art, and you try and cannibalise their work for occult power. Or you would, except actually whatever is going on with Sida's translation superpower works totally fine on magical notation systems, to the extent that she can tell while not actually knowing very much arcane theory.

Regarding the expense of proper spellbooks: A ritualist is someone who does rituals. Those rituals need materials that exist outside just the caster's mind; usually specifically complex diagrams drawn in arcane inks made from ground gemstones and herbs that grow only wild places. A spellbook is thus not just a set of instructions on the procedure for casting a spell and the expected effects, but essentially a portable ritual ground that functions as a tool which enables the spell to be cast. Spells can also be cast using larger, static, ritual grounds, made from cheaper materials, or memorised until they're ground into your very soul, but the former is static in location and slow to do, and the latter consumes both heroic quantities of effort and some portion of the ritualist's growth potential, and neither system permits the use of the same exact rituals as the spellbook method; thus the fact that nearly every ritualist in the city uses the spellbook method is, itself, an incentive to use the spellbook method, since swapping, buying, or stealing spells is vastly preferable to producing them yourself - developing an efficient spell for a given level of power is a noticeably harder task than using one, even not taking into account that the most-distributed spells were all the work of true masters of the art and once-in-a-generation geniuses. 

All of that makes quite a lot of sense, actually. Although, if ritual magic existed at home, there would definitely be a standard notation for it.

When she decided to learn magic, she didn't realize it would be this expensive. Fortunately, she has a few ideas to make money.

Sida puts away all the books she was reading and approaches the help desk, if they aren't busy.

"Weird question, but do you know this city has a... publication or clearinghouse to connect buyers and sellers of unusual or obscure goods and services?"—baal, that's fifteen words in this language?—"I'm trying to find customers for translation work and I don't know the usual way people go about buying translation in this city."

Sida is vaguely aware, in some corner of her mind, of the concept of advertising, but it's rarely done in her world.

The librarian thinks for a moment and then answers: "Well, if you joined the guild, there's an internal market for that sort of thing, but we don't share with outsiders. Otherwise, I should think that there are plenty of scribe's workshops that could use a good translator - maybe look for ones with signs or offers in multiple languages? Other than that, the coffeeshop district has a constant buzz of scholars needing things done, but you'd have to find and impress individuals until you had a reputation."  

Sida thinks she can impress some people.

She thanks the librarian and leaves for the coffeeshop district. She might need to ask for directions.

The coffeeshop district is strung out on the main streets connecting the hillside dungeon-fortress of the Antediluvian Exploratory League and the nine-story library-tower of the Institute for Supernal Dynamics, which puts it on the outer part of the eastern side of the city, just before the slopes of the river-valley the city is built into become too steep to comfortably build on. The instructions to get there are simple - keep going uphill, and then follow the sounds of people arguing. It seems like while the overt purpose of the district is to provide coffee, beer, supplies, and homes for the scholars of the city, it's more (in)famous purpose is providing them with a venue to bicker, shout, and, show off with, at, and to each other. The coffee shops are filled with scholars young and old, magical and mundane, and with the sounds of friendly (and unfriendly) disagreement, along with the occasional bang or hiss of ill-considered magic. 

If they're arguing loud enough, maybe she can find customers that way. She'll start by walking around, listening for any arguments that mention language.

Dismissing out of hand all the arguments that are merely in foreign languages, the first mention of language she hears is merely a poorly-considered attack at someone's source, insulting it for it's foreignness. The next candidate is specifically bemoaning lacking funds to hire a translator. Finally, as day drifts towards evening, she strikes paydirt -  "- and where in the 15 hells (tl note: not literally hells, but a profanity referring to the afterlife) are you going to find someone who speaks southwestern-dialect drow in this bloody city." The people arguing appear to be two scholars. Both have the same ever so slightly uncanny angular look to their faces, like they've had cosmetic surgery done by someone whose tastes run in a peculiar direction, and pointed ears, but where one has pale-blue skin and darker-blue hair, her conversant has bone-white hair, purple-black skin, and a wide-brimmed hat keeping any sun from falling on his face. A few more moment's listening informs that they seem to be discussing possible lines of research into a matter of comparative religion. 

Ah, the sweet smell of opportunity. She pokes her translation superpower to make sure it can work with southwestern-dialect drow—she's not sure if she can simply start speaking it without having heard a sample. Assuming she can, she approaches the pointy-eared people, and says—in that language—"Today is your lucky day. I happen to have a gift for languages."

It takes a bit of concentration, as she navigates a sort of mental map of dialects and sub-dialects to pick one, but she can indeed speak southwestern-dialect drow without prompting. She rapidly comes to regret that - the language seems to have been carefully designed to be as unpleasant to speak as possible, with a mess of grammar rules to make any English-speaker feel fear, and a phonology which is almost painful to produce with the human tongue. At least it all seems to happen automatically. 

"well, that could plausibly be south-western drow, it's not like I speak it." says the white-haired man. Switching languages to one which shares not so much a vocabulary but a design aesthetic with southwestern-dialect drow. "Do you speak eastern drow as well?"  

She switches to eastern drow.

"Yes, I do. I speak, and write, many languages. Possibly all of them except the extinct ones."

"Ah, some kind of language-magic then? You wouldn't be offering translation work if it was a Permanency'd Tongues. Are you an angel then? I hear those have language-magic. Either way, if you can read my books, I'd be quite happy to hire you to translate them."

"It would have to be some kind of magic, but I don't know what kind. I got it when I showed up here yesterday. I'm from another world. I can probably read them, and I'd love to be paid to translate them. How much do you want done?"