"...the students. By paying tuition."

"...Right, don't know why I expected not-that.  Well, no, I do know, it's because every single university back home got into the habit of soliciting wealthy alumni for donations.  Who funded the initial set-up, then, was it the assembly, or private citizens?"

"I don't know, actually."

"Huh.  Well, I've got a place to rest my head to find."  She blinks, and then facepalms.  "...I'm going to be digging sleep-related idioms out of my language for years, aren't I.  Well, anyway, thank you so much for hearing me out!  ...Is there anyone who you'd recommend I talk to about architecture or mechanisms?"

"Do you have things they want, or do they just have things you want?"

"I'm pretty sure it's the former, but I will admit that I'm not sure how immediate my usefulness will be.  I'm very certain that I can develop architecture simulations, though, once I have electricity working enough to power my laptop.  That's what my degree's in.  ...Well.  My course of study."

"Do you have a time estimate on that?"

"...t equals a few decacycles to be in a position to do more than punch numbers on a calculator, t equals maybe another month on the actual development, then add some cushion...

"I don't foresee even the most ambitious goal of 'having a minimum viable building simulator' more than a hectacycle or three from now, and that's not all I have available for either field."

"...that's very confident."

"Most of my error bars are in the make-electricity-reliable part.  I've already got nine tenths of the physics simulation, because that's part of my profession's toolkit; the rest is mostly data entry.  And maintaining focus, but I do think it's honestly conservative.  ...To be clear, 'minimum viable' is just 'this will break', not anything like showing how."  She is so glad she never uninstalls shit.  She has Unity and UE4.

Also any chance of surprisingly-helpful Minecraft modpacks, depending on their installed mods, but she's not including that in her time-estimation.

"The things you want - a workshop, food - those are ongoing expenses," says Feather. "Are you selling the calculator or renting it out?"

"Renting, I should think.  It's mine; it should stay mine.

"...Right, I'm just going to ignore the yawning pit of psychological issues in potentia that that line of thought reveals.  Moving on.  Yes, renting the calculator short-term, and eventually hopefully transitioning to providing programming services.  Or just having some sort of passive income from having developed something that's actually useful to y'all.  ...Maybe the necessary tech for indoor farming; I imagine that'd be pretty useful."

"...why would indoor farming be useful?"

"There's demons outside the walls, yeah?  And therefore if you can fit farming inside, it's better?  Or am I thinking on the wrong scale and the Barricade is really big?"

"...there are demons outside the walls. But if you already... have room for a farm... then it doesn't seem like it would help anything to also give it a roof."

"A farm that you can put a roof on, is a farm you can put stuff on top of, e.g. another farm, or housing, or...so on and so forth.  Think vertically."

"I don't think a lot of people currently find it worthwhile to have gardens on their roofs. Anyway, I don't really want to rent the calculator."

"...Well, yes, because a, dabbling won't generate sufficient yields to make it worth their while, and b, the actual farmers exist and civilization is the gradual process of specialization of trades.  But what I'm talking about is 'making it profitable and space-efficient to have the farmers, inside the city walls'.  Hydroponics actually have even bigger yields-per-square-foot than traditional farming; the biggest reason it wasn't used more back home was because the land would have sat around anyway.  But here you have monsters; even if the threat's less present than I imagine, cleared land's precious.  You want to maximize the use you can get of each safe square meter.  Thus, building both downwards and upwards, and seeking to compactify where you can.  There's a concept called an arcology, back home; you put up a huge dome and inside that dome you fit an entire self-sustaining polity.  I'm thinking on that scale."

"I don't want to rent the calculator," repeats Feather. "Do you have anything else that I, a math teacher, may want?"

"...Calculus of infinitesimals?"

"Go on."

"So what sort of math do you normally do, to - know what I'm working with, I guess?  I need to know where you don't know what I know, to know how to tell you what I know that you don't.

"...Let's try that again without the tongue twister.

"So, I've taken a whole damn lot of math as prerequisites for my field of study, and it's kind of all over the map.  Geometry, trigonometry, a bit of drafting, formal logic, use of the modulus operator, a bunch of proofs of this that and the other that I mostly just memorized the results of but could plausibly reconstruct, finding the slope of a curve at a point, finding the area under a curve, the very utmost basics of complex numbers - taking the square root of negative one, but honestly I'm not very sure of how to work in the complex plane instead of just the reals, just that it's definitely possible - matrix operations...do you have matrices, actually, I don't know - and then I have 'applying all this math I know to construct models of objects' physical behavior' as a specialty on top of the math.

"And I can definitely formalize at least some of it just by myself, let alone the stuff that I can probably reverse-engineer from physics engine documentation and other such things."

With all that laid out, and some additional demonstrations done...Mira finally has someone interested in seeing her through the period she'll need to find her feet, all for the price of some math tutoring, which, frankly, she's happy to do.

It's not manual labor.  She is not built to enjoy that sort of work.  Avoiding that and teaching someone?  It almost makes her happy.

Then, shortly after leaving, an idea strikes her like a bolt from the blue as she muses about how the fuck rectifiers, and making signal from noise, could possibly exist.

"Eureka.  The answer is crystals!"  Quartz timing crystals in watches!  Crystal radio sets, signal selection simply done by wire placement!  It's going to take experimentation, but it's something experimentally verifiable!

And even if she's wrong, there's probably some useful knowledge to be found in failure!  ...She really hopes, at least.

Still...it's time for office-hunting!

Various buildings exist in this city and some of them may be offices! What is her search procedure?

...Mostly wandering at random, honestly, and looking for 'for rent' signs.  She's not exactly done this before.

Still, her requirements are actually not very strict at the moment; she just wants some tinkering space slash somewhere to keep her stuff slash somewhere to get mail.