"That does seem to explain why it would need more practice to use."

"Yes. Chakra in general is hard to use without training from a young age, and medical chakra in particular is exceptionally difficult."

"Because of the amount of detail and risk of getting it wrong, or does chakra handle living flesh differently than other materials?"

"In a way, both. The first is the most commonly cited one, but most applications of medical chakra involve interfacing with the patient's own chakra system - which chakra does handle differently from normal matter, and which is a problem both in medical applications and in placing someone under an illusion. Chakra isn't bothered by living flesh, though, and has fewer problems if the patient's chakra system is suppressed."

"Can you see if the people of Tle have chakra systems?  And, if not, would that make us unusually susceptible to illusions?"

"I can't see chakra myself, but I'd be able to sense it in detail if I scanned someone. Right now I can't sense ambient chakra, though."

"And I'm unsure - it might make you entirely immune to illusions, since those work by interface with foreign chakra."

"Right, sight versus sense - That's going to take some getting used to.  Though, we might be getting a bit off-track," Elizara says, then switches the topic back to medical.

Mika is considerably faster and safer than the next nearest passes.  However, even though it would still be faster to hold literally everyone passing through for thirty days of quarantine than go around, they don't have the space or food resources for that.  Here are the metrics they usually use to determine who winds up being held or turned away.  

She shares similar metrics - ideally, you have a medic scan people, but they often don't have enough trained... Still, the gate represents a single point so they'll likely be able to station an apprentice medic there...

That sounds like a good idea!  Have they done anything similar in mountain passes or the like, in their world?  Some of their orich-smiths have managed to make lenses which could detect illness, but they had to be designed for a single specific illness and took up an infeasible amount of orichalcum.  Chakra seems better suited for it.

Mountain passes don't often match with country borders all that well, and most of their mountains aren't that high, anyways - trying to stop movements of entire populations is often prohibitively hard if your nation is large.

Mika's mountains aren't as high as the ones a few thousand miles north, but they are still a challenge to cross.  

Was there anything else important enough to bring up right away?  The visitors have been offered rooms here, and, given that they are medical shinobi and don't need to be under quarantine to be safe to either side, they can also visit anywhere in the city if they wish.  Considering that there are no other translators who know both languages, the priest can continue to accompany them for the moment, though translation magic is rare enough on Tle that they should look into other possibilities for the long run.  Perhaps they can rustle up some linguists.  Does chakra offer any benefits to translation?  

She doesn't think there's anything else urgent. And, no, it doesn't, but she can get an agent who'll be quick at learning the language.

Then Elizara will conclude the meeting for now and they can see to their respective duties.  

Elizara intends to go looking for linguists on her own side, then send more detailed logs of expected trade and papers on technology from Kor.  

Ara'Vine communicates interest in travel to their world eventually, once travel is open and determined safe.  He can offer some chargestones for medical scanning or study, though given the slow rate of creation and value warns that they won't be a scalable solution.  He gives the address to the hospital, and notes that the servants here will also be able to find it if they prefer.  

They'll welcome travelers - once everything's processed, of course.

She sends for two linguistic specialists - a skilled Yamanaka, if anyone wants to try a direct knowledge transfer, and a mousey genin, fourteen years old, who had rapidly specialized into ancient historical research and code breaking after graduation. She also has trade, technological, and medical briefings prepared.

Given the scarcity of charge stones, she suspects they'll want to design any experiments carefully.

There are a few translators who are interested in trying knowledge transfers, or learning the language the long way if that doesn't work.  Several more are merely interested in learning more about what direct knowledge transfers are.

Briefings are exchanged.  Technology seems a bit behind in most cases, though some individual technologies are surprisingly advanced, Tle having had different magics and different pressures for developing things.  

Direct knowledge transfers are a specific application of mind reading. Even specialists usually get some episodic memories associated with the knowledge, especially for languages. They can go both ways; projective knowledge transfers are harder to learn but far more organized, with less bleed through of memories.

Konoha is also behind Tle in a few areas - they seem to have barely put any development into conventional weapons systems, for one, with a few odd knock on effects from that in other fields.

That scares off one of them.  Two still want to serve as the language-giver side of the transfer, among others who would be fine receiving information only.  One has three languages and the other has four, overlapping in the local language and Korstrade, for a total of five languages from around South Cardinal.  

The shinobi seem to have fewer languages in general - the Yamanaka actually speaks an unusual amount (the mainland tongue for the Elemental Nations, a language from the Land of Lightning peninsula, a language from the islands out past the Land of Water, a language from the western Land of Wind, for a total of four), and is willing to transfer all of them to various receivers.

The receivers appreciate that!  

Tle has hundreds if not thousands of languages.  They don't know exactly how many, because the entire planet doesn't have reliable communication.  Many obscure tribes in hard-to-reach places have their own language, and it's hard to tell how many of those there are.  Korstrade will work nearly anywhere in the Cardinals though is most common in the regions surrounding Therma'Ro Ocean.  River-sothan is a common language in the western half of South Cardinal.  The others they are offered are more obscure, though not useless.  

They know they had a big empire a few centuries ago; they suspect it may have spread its language and wiped out a lot of local languages during its rule.

They've had empires try that before, though none got to more than a decent chunk of a continent or managed to hold them long enough to wipe out the native languages entirely.  Many did influence the languages heavily before they fell.  The linguists can go on at length about ancient Setebran root words popping up in unrelated languages worldwide.  Korstrade loanwords are also spreading, though Kor doesn't claim legal power over other countries.

They know a little bit about historic developments! A lot of old records were destroyed when the empire fell, unfortunately, but they've rediscovered some things.

What history Mika has is available at the library.  Events after the invention of the printing press are well documented, and it gets spottier the further back from then.  

The printing press was pretty recent, for them - it was an imported technology, actually, and they skipped the intermediate ones because those didn't work with their script very well.

It was about 500 years ago for Tle, spreading out of Garnethold.  The ones who got the language transfer can see how their language would be trickier than the local one.  There are a few languages like that on Tle, but no one nearby knows much about their history with printing.