This is one of the ancient centres of civilisation, they can get all her stuff working fine. 

Oh, now, buying stuff, that they can do. She might like to look around the grand bazaar, it's where you buy stuff, like, in general, if you want to actually get what you need and don't mind the price and can be here. It spills out onto the massive harbour and the open sea, a great nexus of surviving civilisation. You get wizards from all over the world, here, and the agents of far-off princes, and wandering disguised dragons, and genies with strange ideas, and stranger things too. 

As for a warehouse - a city this size relies on enormous granaries and storehouses, but those seem to be mysteriously entirely unavailable. Transportation - land on the canals is expensive -

Not that expensive.

- Fine.

As for her weaving machines - 

- they have dug up an anxious-looking young cleric of Moradin who has made a name for himself as a scholar and lecturer on different types of trade and is also hopefully both trustworthy to know about all this and able to quickly understand that this is not normal. The problem, it develops, is that Silvermoon is hundreds and hundreds of miles away, beyond the Empire. Not very many people can teleport. Travel is expensive and dangerous, it works by - (he has a long explanation of the tradeoff between safety and speed and how rare wizards play into this, and which cities here are more or less distant in real terms no matter how many miles may happen to be between them). These machines had escaped his notice but it sounds incredible. ...It is going to cause an absolutely enormous shift once it catches on, and possibly make many, many people extremely unhappy before it eventually improves the world. Textile merchants are a big deal. 

She, in fact, does not lack for visitors. Lots of exciting things happened when Her Radiance made a state visit, but there are lots of people in Mansur and important people would like to talk to her. It's something of a torrent of information, but it is at least easy to gather that there is no centralised body, but a huge variety of competing merchant houses, associations, confraternities and so on. And a bewildering array of colleges and philosophical academies and so on. Lots of them would like to make her offers, if she's planning to make it at all public what she's working on.

She's been spending this bewilderingly busy day mostly looking around the large canalside townhouse they've been given, white stone and gleaming glass and many, many interesting contrivances. Someone spent quite serious money on this. She does enjoy the whirlpool with the hot-and-cold jets and the oil fountains and so on. 

This city is incredible can they explore. 

Alright.

They can explore, meet people, talk to them. It really is a rather nice place, especially for the tech level.

One thing at a time. Working with more people is going to be the biggest blocker long term, so recruitment gets bumped up to top priority. She'll meet people, talk to them. No grand speeches, but to try to start a grassroots sort of thing. It's an alien sort of oratory and diplomatic skill, but she absolutely believes it and is burning with determination.

What she's working on is nothing less than the ultimate triumph against one of the most deadly and dangerous classes of beasts and menaces that the world has known. A stalking menace that drags and bites at the heels of all goodly things in the world, of civilization itself.

What is this monster, so dangerous and implacable a foe? That tortures its victims horribly, and leaves countless grieving mothers and sons and friends?

Disease.

The plague. Cholera. Dysentery. Consumption. Infection. And more.

Do you know anyone who has suffered from such maladies? Do you not wish you could do something to help them, to stop it from happening again? They are not facts of life any more than starvation and thirst; They can be undone by human hands. The Church has bravely held the line against these foes, as best they can, but they are sorely pressed indeed. Why not give them some help, and earn the approval of Heaven and of the great masses who need not fear epidemic any longer?

Her secret weapon against this foe is a selective poison. Just as some toxins are lethal to dogs but not humans, or to cattle but not birds, there are poisons that are lethal to these diseases but safe for people. It is not a mere wizardly spell, that is limited to one or two souls. It is a craft to be taught and a tool that can be manufactured like nails and cloth and soap. If you're interested in this noble craft, she's surely going to teaching sooner or later.

Not that it's going to be easy. She's going to need the help of thousands and thousands, tens or hundreds of thousands, of likeminded people who see that disease is a great evil to be overcome, and a thing to be proud of participating in ending, People who work hard and learn much. Such titanic obstacles are not demolished easily. But people can slay these foes. We will do it. She has done it to a man near Silvermoon, and the Church looked upon this and said that it was good. 

Spread the word if you're interested.

Well. 

That sets a seismic shift going, at least. 

This foreigner sorely underestimates the many glories of the ancient City of Delights - 

- No she doesn't, were you not there a few years ago - 

- That was entirely the fault of the disgraced Master of the Waterways - 

- Oh, right, and the new one is so much better? -

- Yes! He's a trustworthy man of a good family, not some wizard apprentice with big ideas and probably heresies - 

- Whatever, they had to close off half the city for weeks and borrow hundreds of clerics and the markets arguably still haven't really recovered, she naturally had to step in and bail out thousands of her employees, do you know how expensive that is - 

-  Listen, he's tried to explain this so many times, if we simply borrow some apothecaries now and sell them now we can buy them back and return them after they're worthless, what do you mean that's slavery put the swords away he uh meant the shops -

- Poison is an evil and dishonourable weapon and she will have no part in it -

- You cannot poison a disease, a disease is a divine punishment for your sins, oh come on you just call anything you don't like 'heresy', these are facts of life - 

- Would she be interested in giving lectures? - 

- Is she interested in loans? -

- Can she poison old age, too? - 

- How did she work this out?

If anything the apothecaries might be even more valuable as storefronts. She's going to need points of distribution after all.

She is definitely going to set up lectures. Maybe a medical college. As to the source of such knowledge, she's pretty sure that's classified.

She isn't promising anything on old age but it's not impossible. It wouldn't be poison, it would be repairs.

She's probably interested in loans once she has a better idea of her one, three, six, and twelve months projected expenditures!

She's going to find a moment to approach her using her best bet as to when that won't become another imposition. 

"You've been busy, today. How are you doing?"

"Hm? Oh, I'm in my element. It's not fun exactly but this city makes sense to me on levels that Silvermoon and the Church do not. I know how to talk to these people. I could use an actual break, a nice restaurant or something, but it's hardly urgent. I won't bring up the whole every second delayed is a life thing, because you'll just bring up the risk of burnout, which is real and pressing. That's why my real duty is probably to teach."

"Interesting. So your home was like this?" She arranges herself more comfortably over the soft divan, stretching in luxury. "And a break could certainly be arranged. Depending on exactly what you like most."

"I miss browsing the 'net. A hundred million people writing and taking video recordings of whatever caught their fancy, uploading it to a shared invisible library. Everything from leaving an angry review about a bad merchant to arguing about which character ought to get with whom in a novel published the same way to porn to giving each other technical and life advice. The social forum of the digital age. But if you meant in terms of restaurants, somewhere that's known for cooking without meat. Tasty food and lots of it, more than a luxurious atmosphere and view. Sweet, salty, sour, savory, spiced and fried and roasted. Huh. Maybe I can sell SCOP..."

"...Incredible. I would love to have seen that - is that something you can build here? ...There must be so much porn, my goodness."

That is in fact an intriguing thought. ...It seems - fascinating, and like it would open so many new worlds, but... also sort of worrying, in a way? She's not sure why. 

"I don't know of SCOP. But that shouldn't be difficult. This city never, ever sleeps, I've never been here and even I know that."

"It's a possibility. Of course, there were - mm. How the internet gets used if it goes public is an incredibly wild and unpredictable thing, a social phenomenon. There are bad factors too- Scammers and hackers, trolls and echo chambers. Spam, popup ads. For a while it was limited to academic and military contexts, mostly used in universities and laboratiroes. SCOP is basically, vat-grown meat substitute. I don't want to eat anything that used to be part of an animal, that's filthy and inefficient and cruel. Eggs and milk possibly excepted."

"Mm. Now that I think of it... I think humans would worry about - slander and heresy and so on - it seems a shame not to make it because of that, right? Maybe some kind of test first... was there anything like that?" 

She snorts. "No, and people back home would tell you a test would defeat the point. Sensible parents would keep literal children from getting engrossed in it, but... It's too vulnerable to censorship if you institute a test. In some democracies, people floated the idea of 'voting tests', tests you had to pass in order to vote. Of course, one little group designed the tests, so it was just a thin excuse to exclude other groups from being possible to vote and usurp temporal power. I would imagine an 'internet test' to be a means to suppress some peoples' ability to complain and organize their communities, either for ideological or economic reasons. An internet test would, in my opinion, violate one of the rights enshrined in the American constitution- The freedom of speech. This is the kinds of shit humans get up to, you know. We need... Peace and understanding, and levers to keep 'slavery' and other forms of corruption from fermenting."

"I've spent time among humans but really I still don't understand very well." It is a little strange to talk about a whole people from the outside in generalities like this, still more so to do it to her own people, but strange things are wonderful and she's getting used to it anyway. "That... does make sense. I think people would worry that you don't want, say, heretics and diabolists to organise their communities. But... it's a beautiful idea."

"You just can't. You can't have freedom and liberty, except for the people I think are evil, it's an eternal series of tradeoffs and self-justifications- Murderers and racists calling to slaughter the negroes are one thing, but a society has to decide what the line is and, in general, the tools to repress evil and hateful people from doing evil and hateful things work mostly as well to repress people you just happen to disagree with on whether sex changes or boys kissing boys or the Irish or whoever are acceptable. The most brilliant moves in the game tend to be the ones that decentralize power, that make people safer from tyranny. Say, giving everyone a way to report demon summoners to the Church as well as their current location immediately. I don't know. I'm rambling, it's relaxing to ramble and I apparently consider you a valid target for them now."

"I'm very glad you find it relaxing to ramble and are willing to do it to me because I find you rambling to be oddly wonderful. I really don't know much about human law but -" how to phrase this - "I think actually it's not technically illegal just to disagree with the Church, under canon law, and temporal laws aren't supposed to punish just saying things in good faith. I'm - not sure they could keep that up if anyone could publish heresy to anyone at any time, that sounds dangerous. ...I thought there weren't elves in your world, and why would anyone object to kissing boys or the 'Irish'?"

"You can do that with surgery and hormones. It's much slower and nowhere near as safe and efficient. And, because they're stupid?" Sigh. "Do you know any restaurants already or am I going to wander into my lab and try to make SCOP in about thirty seconds?"

"No eating things you cooked up in the laboratory instead of dinner. I have met wizards before."

And she will take her hand and drag her out somewhere, anywhere. 

The city is not only lit but well lit at night, brilliantly so, the significance of which around here may be lost on Dr Baika. 

It is not at all difficult to find somewhere to eat food that was never part of an animal, or at least not a part the animal would miss very much. 

She finds them somewhere outdoors in the surprisingly cool night air, under an awning overlooking the public gardens, where some street performers have gathered under the fountains to put on some kind of improvised play. It's rather beautiful. 

It really is.

She turns down her mental acceleration some. Not all the way. Down from 3 to about 1.5, maybe. 

It probably has some ineffable qualities of connection with the world and the people around her, or something. Even if it feels really slow. It's a chance to just not. Let the schedules and draft textbooks rest, and watch the skyline and the garden and the night above. And enjoy delicious food too.