"Would the door disappear if you went into my world? My thinking is, maybe I stay here, you go back to my world and get help, and then you take the door back to your world? Does that sound like a good plan to you?"

"It seems reasonable, though if it'd be easier for me to immigrate I may be interested."

"Feel free! We'd be so happy to help someone who's totally different like you! We really like helping people in tough situations."

Karasauriu suddenly looks suspicious. "…can you tell me more about that?"

"Well, we have something called basic income. Basically, everyone gets enough so that they never need to work, because lots of people do helpful things that have negative side-effects, and they pay everyone else for the negative side-effects they're doing, and we're rich enough that you can live well of the money they have to pay for doing those. And we really like being able to care for people and make them feel safe and happy, like by hugging and massaging people in hospitals. And we think letting immigrants move in and be well-cared for produces that same nice feeling."

This does not make Karasauriu look all that much less suspicious. "How stable would you say things are?"

"Things seemed pretty perfectly stable to me? Like, we spend tons of money to pay people who have kids, because we want to make it so there aren't any problems with too many old people and too few young people? Can you give me some examples of things that might not be stable?"

"Volcanoes. The liquids in lakes being water and not anything more reactive. Plants with lacework patterns growing the best. Whether healing magic looks like the same kind of magic as zombies use or the same type temple water uses. I could go on."

She doesn't mention mental states, that's offering too easy an answer.

"Well, volcanoes haven't caused big damage for over a century now! Also, we could probably handle volcanoes making everything cooler, even if it would be a terrible thing to happen. We only have water in lakes, and plants don't have lacework patterns. Also, I'm pretty sure we don't have healing magic, and I have no idea what zombies or temple water have to do with anything. Although maybe I should really read more about how we do medicine? I feel like I should know about healing magic if that's a thing."

She fiddles with the fake gecko slightly above her wrist.

"If you're going to learn book magic your teacher will explain about the kinds of magic, and temple water and zombies are different kinds. Healing comes from the gods, and it usually works about the same sort of way, but the type of magic it is varies."

Candace's fidgeting draws Karasauriu's attention to the gecko, which looks strange and very calm, if it's alive. Asking if a familiar is an item is rude, the counterpart less so. She gestures to it. "Is that your familiar?"

Candace looks on in confusion to hearing the explanation of magic. Nothing she's hearing makes any sense.

"What's a familiar? This thing is my continuous glucose monitor. It chirps to let me know if something's going wrong and constantly sends a signal to my phone, so I can constantly check my levels."

"Some book magic people have animals they have special bonds with, a familiar is one of those. What's glucose?"

"Well, this is a fake gecko, it isn't even alive. Glucose is kind of like, the kind of sugar that ends up in you blood? I have an illness where it doesn't change in a healthy and slow way, but in a much more sudden an dangerous way, so I kind of need to use a special anti-sugar when there's too much of it."

"Huh. You have anti-sugar? What happens when it touches sugar?"

"It makes the sugar move into my body and out of my blood? I don't think it does anything special to the actual sugar."

"Oh, okay. So it's not like anti-feldspar."

"Not remotely. I think... Anyway, you said you wanted to immigrate? I think there could be some worries about illness, either you getting sick or us getting sick. But at the same time, we think it's almost fun to handle worries like that, so I'm sure we can handle it."

"If you're telling the truth, sure. I like the idea of stuff like volcanoes not being my problem, haha."

"It sounds pretty impossible to deal with volcanoes being your problem! And yeah, I know it's pointless to say it, but I am telling the truth. I really want to make life better for you and help you, even though I've only met you just now. Actually, I think that this magic door could be a really good chance for us to be able to help people, and for them to help us. Like, we'd be really happy to have people who like raising children or working on farms more. Those are things we have to do, even though we don't like them too much."

Ah, so they want servants and serfs. Well, better doing that than dying of starvation in Milliways or swords outside it. "That's an interesting idea. I'd like to talk to Bar about it, if you're not in a rush."

"Feel free! This isn't an impulse decision, not even slightly. You should probably talk to tons of people before making your decision. I was planning on spending a lot of time here anyway."

"Room and board aren't free, but it's reasonably worth spending savings on if you have them."

And Karasauriu will head over to Bar. What are published works by and about farmers and childcare workers in Thomassia like? How often do they publish works or have works published about them, compared to, say, weavers or bakers or mayors of cities or such?

Bar, when responding to these queries, would also like to see if she's got any intuitions about Thomassian food preferences that suggest a significant portion of the population suffers from malnutrition, because she can model what Karasauriu is interested in here.

"The Optimal Size of Farms: Grains and Fruits, Annual Edition No. 208" is perhaps 200 pages. After a brief introduction, there are dozens of pages that are just tables with information about the sizes of farms dedicated to all sorts of plants in all sorts of soils and geographies. There are then a few different quite nice-looking infographics, comparing the sizes of different kinds of farms and explaining the constraints that keep them their current size. Finally, the bulk of the book is a brief and summarized explanation of how to work many different kinds of crops, how to keep schedules and follow harvesting calendars, how to handle natural features that leave the farm looking different than the ideal featureless flat plane, and finally some advice on how to reshape farm plots in order to use awkwardly shaped areas more effectively.

The book helps Karasauriu learn that labor-intensive crops like strawberries, require the use of significantly more, extra-complicated machines that move slowly, with higher maintenance needs, such that a farmer can keep up with a much smaller farm. When it comes to wheat/rice/soybeans, the book claims that the money is better, and present-day robots and tractors, together with hyper-intensive cultivation, have meant that optimal sizes are hovering around the 2000-acre mark. The days are long and the work mind-numbing, but it's a fantastic way of making money if you can accept the isolation of living in a farmhouse surrounded by so much farmland.

"Caring for Under-5s: Nurturing the Next Generation, Annual Edition No. 63" is a slightly slimmer book. It spends more time on babies under 2 than children from 3-5, and it has information about reward schedules for children to help reinforce positive habits, how to comfort crying babies, advice for when to summon a reserve babysitter, the importance of using touch in order to have children feel relaxed and safe, how to set positive examples as a method of instruction, the importance of integration into adult society at a young age, usage of GPS trackers to let children enjoy playing in total freedom, controlling screen time and teaching children ethics and manners.

The book about caring for children does have some information about when it's OK to use milk from a milk bank instead of milk produced by the caregiving mother without harming child outcomes, but beyond that, neither book mentions nutrition or what people eat at all.

It generally seems like farmers and childcare workers, write relatively less and have less written about them. There are a nigh-endless amount of writings from weavers, bakers, and mayors, consisting of things like clothing designs and fashion manifestos, subtly different recipes for a huge range of pastries and breads, and a near-endless amount of different attempts by mayors to build ideal cities, unless they chose to publish some interesting sci-fi about radically different societies instead.

Bar can share these with Karasauriu, along with the information that there doesn't seem to be a systemic malnutrition problem from what she can tell, including among farmers and childcare workers.