It's harder than she anticipated to find a printer who'll talk to her. Even some of the ones who print underground newspapers won't!

Carmen finishes up her translation, and then collects the papers in a box she sees on the other side of the room. It'll probably need a lot of editing from a native speaker, but as a draft, it's complete. She labels the box with "Draft novel. Do not discard." in big letters.

Eventually she talks to a guy who says "come back in three months" which means six weeks, four if she acquires some money, and she's satisfied and drops back by Izindal's.

"Did you find a printer?"

"Yes, but not immediately, but he'll come around. You write very very quickly."

"I'm just translating. It'd be a lot harder for me to write something from scratch. I think I'm OK at lecturing, but I don't think fiction is my strong point."

"Nonetheless. I'm not even sure I could copy a book, even sloppily, in a day!"

"Well, um, it's not really 'copied'. After the first dozen pages, I started developing a short hand. There is now a translated version, but most of it will look like gibberish. On the bright side, I was able to write it down really really fast. I'll probably have to write it over in the regular script if it's going to be edited, though." She sighed. The job was never done.

"I wish our people had your command of languages. Astonishing."

"Eh, I bet you can do other things that I can't. Like, you said you'd remember a language even if you didn't use it for a year, right? I can't imagine someone having such a long-lasting memory for something they weren't especially interested in. I can barely remember mundane things that happened last week. Mind, this has been an unusually eventful two days."

"That sounds terrible. How do you have a sense of self if you forget anything you're not constantly thinking about?"

"Not everything. There is an underlying sense of continuity, but we're... Easily distracted, I guess? Things slip our minds pretty easily, unless they're related to a topic of intense fascination. Most of us have at least one such topic, and a few have two or three. Mine is history, so I will remember things related to history in great detail. Other things I forget more quickly. I remember the formula for gunpowder because it relates to the history of a specific military campaign. I don't remember how to make a gun, because I haven't seen that linked to an interesting historical narrative yet."

"Huh. That is as foreign to us as the minds of Elves, I should think. Well, would you like to go charm my old acquaintance?"

"Certainly! Lead the way."

So they head out of the city. Carmen, she decides, looks respectable enough and anyway should look like a mysterious foreigner, that being exactly what Gimlith had promised. They only collect a few stares as they head into the nicer parts of town.

She looks around, admiring the architecture and the oddly-dressed strangers. She realises, with a start, that she is an oddly dressed stranger. Maybe she should ask about local clothes? At the very least, she needs to do laundry soon.

And they're at the friend's home. She can't go in the front door, so she meanders around to a servant's entrance, opens it, and walks in like she belongs there. No one particularly stares. "We'll go to the gardens."

Carmen follows. "So, how do you know this person?"

"Acquainted when we were younger, went to find her while you were furiously writing your novel and said hello and convinced her to meet us and host us for a bit."

"Is she an Elrosian? Or are there other people with fancy houses you know?"

"No, Elrosian. Nearly everyone with a fancy house is."

"Huh. Do you not have anyone who is rich because they started a business or lend people money or something?"

"That'll get you rich, it just won't make you respectable. So then you have to marry some Elrosian family desperate enough for money to overlook your blood, and then your children have a shot at respectability and really valuable marriages."

"Ah. This seems to be a pattern with most societies with a reasonably large noble class, unless there is a strict rule about nobles only marrying each other. Actually, do you have any economically successful minority groups - ethnic or religious - that only marry amongst themselves?"

"Only the Elrosians. Is that common elsewhere?"