Near this park there are carts selling roasted corncobs and potatoes, fruit salad, whole rotisserie chickens, beef stew, lentils with vegetables, boiled eggs, cheese balls, and steamed buns. Some of the carts are cooking the food on the spot, others have small fires going but are just heating up little objects to swap the warmth into a potato or a chicken on demand.

...Fresh-cooked food seems pretty reliable.  ...Say, where does one get drinking water around here, anyway?

There are big ice cubes melting into dispensers, and somebody wanders by with a tree stump or a chunk of dirt every now and again to swap the sizes of the ice and the object they're wheeling on the dispensers that have melted the most. It appears to be a bring-your-own-cup situation.

Neat.  Well, she has something that'll at least work for that purpose.

Having sated her immediate biological needs...back to...hm.  The university, she thinks.  Is Beryl still doing her office sand?

She is, but she's with a student.

Well, that's fine.  Is Wheat in?

Nope.

Well, that's great.  And by great she means frustrating.  May as well see if Beryl will humor her some more.

Beryl shoots her an irritated look when she spots her loitering.

What are you expecting her to do, not seek knowledge?  She's not interrupting the office hours!

Beryl continues explaining nutritive troportation to the student, who seems confused about Mira's presence. Eventually the student leaves.

Mira seems pretty fascinated by the discussion, as it happens.

"...Tried an experiment, but I can't tell if it failed qua hypothesis disproven or failed qua my troportation sucked.  Can you tell if this rock has the klaon-repellent property at all, perchance?"

"I'm not a klaon," says Beryl flatly.

"I mean, yes, obviously, you're not a mirage.  What I do not presently know is if an experienced troporter can tell the," she wibbles a hand, "volume of a trait they're trying to troport, when that trait has a magnitude that's not already visually evident.  And I'm really not an experienced troporter since I've only been able to for...what...two days, times - ...sixteen, divided by two...a grand total of sixteen sands, or so."

"No, you can't tell."

"...Damn.  That's rude of whatever caused troportation to exist.  Well, in case you want to steal the credit if it works," she gives a wry smile, "what I did was repeatedly grab a twig from a live tree and attempt to transfer the klaon-repellent property back to the tree repeatedly, which should, because math, result in an exponential doubling thereof, instead of having to get thousands of individual bits of wood - if the tree sustains the now-troported property, at least."

"Well, I suppose it's slightly cleverer than ripping a sheet of paper into a thousand pieces. Was there anything else?"

"Nope.  Thank you for the help.  Shall I leave you be, then?"

She's about flat out of things to do, right now, if so.

Perhaps she'll read up on history.

Beryl does not seem to want her to stick around.

There is plenty of history in the library! What is she interested in?

She'll pick something out at random.

(How the fuck do they have so many books and no industrial presses!  It's confusing!  Okay it's not really confusing but it's certainly something.  Really, it's the paper and ink supplies that surprise her.)

This random history book is about the Pansh Dynasty of a faraway kingdom. It incidentally can teach her interesting background about how families work when everyone has four parents; the Pansh Dynasty solved some of the problems of bloodline dilution by making it customary for royal siblings to cohabit.

Ugh, royalty.  Not even once.

Say, are there any surveys of demons and their traits?

Yup, the zoology section has lots of books of demons complete with block print illustrations.

Cool, she'll just...leaf through those for a little while.  She's got nothing better to do.

The demons are of various rarities, sizes, and shapes, and have different vulnerabilities and patterns of attack; the books are mostly aimed at people who might be going into the wilderness and need to fight them. Most of them are black.