"I've discovered the desire to save up for immortality, but it'd feel selfish to just take it. How about save it for someone on my planet? Is there a charity for that yet?"

"Not specifically, no. If you want to save up for immortality you should absolutely take it!"

"Heh, alright then. This thing work or do I need another?" He taps the paycard still taped to his cardboard sign. "I was thinking about asking if anyone wants to learn spirit-talking back on the starship. Or just wants me to talk to some spirits for them."

"Yeah, that works." Moment's pause. "There you go. I can take you back to the ship now?"

"Of course." He braces for teleportation and once on the ship, "Where do you think I should head to ask about making myself useful?"

"There's a shipboard Dwarf who's actually here to handle economy-related questions, he'd probably pay you to tell him what kinds of capabilities he can expect to be coming off the planet looking for work and point you in the right direction on the way."

"-I assume you don't mean the Digging Folk from our world. Sounds like a fun conversation. I hope your day's a good one and doesn't include any more fines."

He attempts to find this Dwarf and introduce himself.

Lisa can lead him to the Dwarf's office! "Hello! Have a seat," says the Dwarf. "I'm Revna, and yourself?"

He has a seat, then frowns and bristles before catching himself. "-Ah, cultural difference, sorry. It's a tad rude to introduce yourself or ask for a name on first meeting in my home culture. I go by Solomon."

"Oh, whoopsie. Which culture is that, I'll post a note -" The Dwarf has to physically interact with his computer to make it work.

That tickles something in his head but he dismisses it for the moment. "You're supposed to have someone else introduce you, or mention your name offhand in a way that it can be heard. To show that you are welcome and not a stranger. We call ourselves the Water People or the Lake People, I don't know what outsiders call us. If you have a map I can point out the region."

The Dwarf pulls up a projection of the globe.

There on the eastern lowlands of one of the continents, a region that does indeed have a lot of lakes and swamps.

"I've spent most of my adult life travelling and haven't been there in some time, though."

"Gotcha. Anyhow," he dismisses the globe, "Lisa said you wanted to know how your talents can make money! What are they?"

"Fairly rare ones, perhaps one in a large city with some skill and one in a dozen of those as practiced as I. I am a spirit-talker, a shaman-"

He goes over the basics again: Talking to spirits and animals (though that's harder), doing little rituals to calm or influence them, banishing ghosts, minor and slightly less minor blessings with more little rituals, minor earth/water/air/fire manipulation, petty illusions, object reading, an intuition to peoples' alignment on the four metaphorical conceptbundles of the elements, his body is magically reinforced and heals faster (that's probably not useful, he's mentioning it just to be thorough)-

"And with time I can develop new skills that have a decent metaphorical link to one of the elements. I developed object-reading this way through a metaphor with water. Oh, and I have no information on whether offworlders are capable of learning this, but I can teach it. Usually it's an apprenticeship but mostly for lack of good candidates, I'm not attached to doing it that way."

"You could get pilot funding to check if people could learn it. How quick would you expect results?"

He stops to carefully think for a long moment before answering. "I don't want to overpromise. Assuming a few good candidates who are really trying and put a day or two of solid effort per week in - not all in one block - a week at the earliest for it to become clear whether it's possible at all. If there's no signs at all after three months, I'd call it hopeless. I'll be able to tell if they're making progress before any students do. Getting to useful results would take longer, I want to say six months to a year to be able to find and start talking to the most cooperative spirits? With no guarantees that any particular person has the right aptitude."

"All right. Do you have a very loose estimate of how many shamans like you there might be on your planet?"

"...Maybe a dozen in each kingdom, more in some cultures so... More than four hundred, less than two thousand?"

"Do you have a guess how many of them are better than you at teaching, more interested in money, or both?"

"Haha, it's hard to tell. I don't have a good estimate of my teaching skills. I'd say I'm probably unusually interested in money and in the most skilled decile for pure technical skill, and since empathy is a big part of that there's likely not zero correlation between that and teaching ability."

"Great. Based on that and the fact that no other shamans have come by here yet, I can probably offer you a grant for teaching a class - how many students would you ideally take at once?"

"Hmm... Ideally I'd screen some folks who think they might fit for the length of a conversation, then an hour long group intro session, and then pick up to a dozen promising sorts and schedule them across from each other. I'm not sure how many I should screen, how much volunteering pre-screens them as it were."

"Well, a lot, but we can filter by practically anything besides personal rapport with you. A dozen to be tutored one-on-one winnowed from a candidate pool of...?"

"I've never done this before, you know," he says lightly. "So if I were actively looking for students instead of passively watching for good ones I'd need to talk to thousands of people. Maybe a hundred and then more if it's not enough? With some filtering that I have to think about for a minute."