It's orderly and precise and clean and mathematically regular and it'll do the same thing every time. He might be in love.

It takes him about twenty minutes. By then someone else has brought in Lastwall's code of military regulations, the oaths of the Knights of Ozem and two other paladin orders that happened to have members deployed to this fort, the Acts of Iomedae, and a history book that someone who likes history books happened to have.

If it's single target Marcy is the optimal person to cast it on. How long does it last?

"A full day, sun should be about the same place in the sky tomorrow when it expires. One of the priests can do it for you tomorrow, priest spells aren't as valuable as wizard spells generally but they get theirs at dawn and can't change them up midday when needed."

And he taps Marcy with a page from a dictionary to impart all of his knowledge of Taldane.

"This is my new favorite spell," she says matter-of-factly, and sits down to read all the texts while meditating on Taldane grammar and vocabulary.

A lot of most people's difficulty learning languages, Marcy believes, comes from their tendency to learn words by memorizing the correspondence between a word of the new language and a word of their native language. This isn't how they learned their native languages and it's not the right way to learn a new one. The right way is to learn the correspondence between words in the new language and things in the world directly. And indeed, this is exactly what the spell has given her: the meanings of words, not in words as a dictionary would give them, but in the same sensory and conceptual form as her ordinary vocabulary. If she properly focuses on it and gets the spell recast every day, she expects she'll be able to carry on a reasonable conversation in Taldane without it by a week from now.

(A lot of the rest of other people's difficulty learning languages is that they're not as good at it as Marcy is.)

Abigail is now the point person for the foreseeable future. "Can she have pencil and paper to take notes for the rest of us?" They're all going to learn Taldane eventually but it won't be fast enough to obviate needing notes.

"I'll ask for it." He starts putting his spellbook away. There's actually a knock on the door before he stands up.

"Thanks!" Abigail is already standing, so she goes to get the door. Is it someone thoughtful with pencil and paper, or the person they're supposed to talk to about magic systems?

He introduces himself as fort commander Rethin Tavas, and he does not happen to have pencil and paper. Marit stands at attention. 

"I want to ask the four of you to not identify yourselves to other people as aliens from another planet with exceptional and rare sorcery," he says without preamble. "Marit knows, and will be reassigned to accompany you and help you compare magic systems and so on. I understand that you may in the course of learning about our world want to tell the whole story to some people outside Lastwall, and that is of course your right. But your powers are unusual, and unusual things are much much more of an advantage when they are secret. And your powers are sorcerous - that is to say, hereditary - and there are many unscrupulous parties who'd be interested in having control over a sorcerous bloodline. If you present yourselves as adventurers, two paladins and two spellcasters, who're from far off as people will infer from the fact you are of two different human ethnicities, you'll raise few questions. And I think you'll be safer."

Abigail nods along thoughtfully. "Those are important considerations, and we'll take them into account before telling anyone else and default to avoiding it. When you say two paladins and two spellcasters, do you mean that Marcy and I should avoid using magic at all when anyone else is watching?" She frowns. Pretending not to be a wizard sounds like a major stretch of her acting abilities even if they make sure to stick together so the boys can cast anything they need and only do anything that's obviously mana-building in private.

"Powerful paladins have some spellcasting. You'd want to be conservative with it, though, lest people notice the things you're doing are not the things they can usually do."

"Maybe Kevin and Franklin should be out and about and Marcy and I should mostly do alchemy and artifice  off in a workshop where nobody's looking. Right now it looks possible that a lot of our usefulness is ability to do enhancements and items for lots of people, and it wouldn't have to be obvious where you got them."

“Yep, I think that would not immediately lead people to the conclusion you are aliens, and could be enormously useful for helping Worldwound forts have more emergency options. And of course lots of operations are secret and if they go well no one would know you’re involved. 

What resources can you make use of right now?”

She can give a rundown of alchemy and artificing supplies and equipment, prefaced with the understanding that they'll need to adapt to what's available. Pretty much all plants are useful for something in alchemy; she'll need to do a bit of experimentation if they have different plants on this planet. Other useful substances include wax, rocks and minerals (many of which are catalysts that can be reused for several batches of a potion), and certain animal products. Various apparatuses for heating, cooling, grinding, filtering, and sieving are also helpful. Artificing needs basically the same equipment one would use for nonmagically creating glass, wood, or metal tools, plus a subset of the alchemy reagents. 

That’s not exactly how local magic item creation works but it’s easy to accommodate and they’re happy to provide, in exchange for a fair share of the products or some other reasonable arrangement. If they can make potions relatively cheaply by local standards that would be very valuable and easy to make a lot of money off while concealing responsibility.

Some sort of trade of potions and items for equipment and either money or room-and-board-and-such seems logical. The cheapest potions they expect to be useful do things like keener vision or hearing, steady aim, faster reflexes, night vision that doesn't work on magical darkness, and the somewhat more expensive "potion that makes you faster and stronger and tireless and able to ignore injuries for an hour and then you fall over for three hours". Artificing is mostly Marcy's specialty; she makes ranged weapons and ammunition that do all kinds of different things.

All of that is possible but expensive with their magic and if it’s cheaper for the aliens there is a ton of potential value there. Maybe Marit can walk them through more comparisons of what magics can do so they can identify anything else valuable. They’re fine with a payment agreement that’s not all that complicated, it’s just better to have one up front so no one is under the impression of being owed favors for anything anyone else thought was paid.

And of course they are honored and delighted to be working with them.

Having an upfront payment agreement is very important; she'd offer to write up a draft but it would be in English and she doesn't know how much the local money is worth. They're likewise honored and delighted to be working with Lastwall.

They can draft one for Marcy to review. For a larger scale thing one often goes to the Church of Abadar, god of contracts and trade, which can also arbitrate disagreements, but that probably isn't necessary or worth the added complications for a temporary agreement to pay Golarion-standard rates for potions and charge locally-typical prices for ingredients and room and board.

She expects standard rates will work fine, though if they include a price sheet explaining how much of their currency buys various common objects it will help prevent misunderstandings. They're used to an informal barter system of mana, objects, and favors but adults from their world use money and they basically know how it works if not what things are worth how much around here.

They can provide a price sheet for standard things and how much they generally cost! Potions and magic items but also mundane utility things like cloth and rope and shoes and horses and swords and housing. For comparison here's the pay schedule for Lastwall's soldiers. 

(A person from Earth and not the Scholomance would probably find these fabric and shoe prices mindboggling.)

Abigail can generally tell when someone is trying to screw her on a deal and commander Tanat isn't. She shows the price sheet to Franklin so he can get a start on budget math.

In that case he'll leave them to it; they can of course contact him if they need him further. Marit has new orders so that he can spend most of his time helping them with magic system interaction testing, outside emergencies.

If they don't get unlucky with the local plants they're gonna have several outfits each. (If they had gone back to Boston they would already have as much clothing as they could want but here they get spare clothes and cool local magic, so.)