"Makes sense." 

"Books are a gold or two, unless they're rare for some reason, and books about economics are actually subsidized by the church."

"There are also economics classes for free at the church, if you want to dabble during downtime."

"Your country is, um, really something. Anyway, I guess we could go shopping next? And then talk about strategies for excavating a buried city, if you still wanted to do that."

"Sounds great!" And they can go shopping! People haggle a lot here and his party members can do that for him if he's like or at least tell him if he's being scammed. 

Vanyel would appreciate help with the exhausting and unfun part of shopping!

Hagan does most of it, "because Fazil and Mahdi are both obviously rich -" and has an eclectic repertoire of haggling techniques such as letting his snake taste things and muttering to himself in a foreign language and claiming to represent the Emperor of Arcadia and claiming to be a homeless beggar (in the same conversation) and flirting (most of the shopkeepers are men but he pointedly does not do this with the ones who are women) and persuading other customers to make different purchasing choices. 

But they get everything, in a reasonably efficient amount of time and for what Fazil says is a very good price. 

Vanyel finds this pretty baffling but doesn't comment. 

Yfandes thinks it's hilarious. 

Then they can swing back by the tavern for dinner and drinks and probably Vanyel will want to get a room and stable Yfandes there? There're cheaper inns but there are advantages to being in the part of town where people expect adventurers. ("adventurers" seems to be the less derogatory local word for mercenaries.)

Sure, no objections there. 

It's more crowded at night. There are drunken and slightly ill-advised displays of magic; someone who has recently learned the spell for turning people into animals turns someone else into a frog and then cannot turn him back (Fazil can, though he demands a lot of money from the apologetic drunk wizard first.) Someone who doesn't look to Vanyel to be Bardic-Gifted but is doing approximately the exact same thing plays a song about the defeat of a terrible monster called the Tarrasque. There are people recruiting for a mage school in Quantium, for unspecified activities in Shadow Absalom, to retrieve a friend's body from a failed expedition out in the desert, for Rahadoum's unspecified work.

Some men hit on Vanyel, not very seriously but not remotely with the impression he might possibly take offense; some men hit on Hagan and are brushed off with excuses ranging from 'under the mask I have more teeth than I expect you to be into' to 'I was cursed by a jealous mermaid princess to be alone until I returned to her her lost lover, and then her lost lover turned out to be on the run because she was an asshole so I guess I'm just cursed now'. Fazil puts an arm around Mahdi the first time someone comes up to him and the two of them aren't bothered after that. 

The desserts are delicious and include a bunch of sweet foods Velgarth doesn't seem to have.

Vanyel is startled into freezing, wide-eyed, the first time someone hits on him. After that he tries his best to respond gracefully. The food is delicious. 

...Their magic can turn people into frogs? It's kind of loud for a complicated discussion about it, and he misses the first spell, but he watches Fazil's reversal of it very closely with mage-sight, and plans to ask later. 

"Should I get you at dawn so you can watch me prepare spells this time?"

"I think so. I guess I should go to bed now, then, so I definitely get enough sleep. Why does the ring take a week to work?" 

"I think it needs a baseline to work off, for what a person's rested and tired and fed and not-fed states are. I haven't heard you have to be especially careful the week you're trying to get it to work but you can't, for example, put it on when you have no food and hope it'll kick in before you starve to death, it won't have anything to work off in that case."

"I guess that makes as much sense as any of your magic does." 

Vanyel trails off to bed, hoping that he'll sleep better his second night here than his first. It's a little better, and Yfandes can wake him with a gentle mental poke just before dawn so he can go out and watch Fazil. 

Fazil has a little portable shrine. It has little golden scales for weighing things, and he puts coins on both sides, stacks them until they balance, and then closes his eyes. His spell-forms - shimmerier and more natural-looking, they look like things plants could have done rather than things mathematicians drew - appear in the air around him, and he reaches out and tucks them into his holy symbol, which shines brighter and brighter with divine magic. By the time the sun is above the horizon he is done; he collects his coins and his balance and puts them back in his pockets. "Breakfast?"

Vanyel is currently without translation, since Mahdi hasn't cast Tongues yet, but he half-remembers the word and can guess it from context. He nods. 

Mahdi will come join them at breakfast and correct the translation problem. "So the plan is to go do some city excavation?"

"Sure! Um, tell me about this city and why it hasn't been excavated already by some other enterprising adventurers." 

"Tumen was once the capital of Osirion; it is in the middle of the desert and has no water source, but at the time the pharaohs were on close terms with water elementals, and the city was supplied by portals from the Elemental Plane of Water. Once they dried up it pretty much died, as a city, and now it's half-buried in sand. It's a popular target for archaeologists and treasure hunters but our magic is not particularly great at digging so they mostly just hope the sandstorms have unburied something useful of their own accord. The deserts have a lot of magical creatures that are dangerous to your random archaologist but fairly few that're dangerous to us, so it should be safe enough."

"Makes sense, and sure, that seems like a place where my magic might have advantages. Do you not do aqueducts and such here? Valdemar doesn't really, we have a wet climate, but apparently the Eastern Empire - that's a place far away with a lot of advanced magic, although it also sounds horrible, all the nobles are trying to mind-control each other all the time. Anyway, it has some desert regions which are supplied by hundreds of miles of aqueducts. I, er, found a rare book on the topic." 

"Huh! We don't, Sothis is on the Sphinx and the only other inhabited parts of the country are on the Scarab or the Junira. And any cleric can do drinkable water. If anywhere in the world has that I'd expect it to be some place like Rahadoum or Alkenstar - Alkenstar's the site of an ancient war between two powerful wizards. The land is distorted and full of mutant creatures and there are big patches of it where magic doesn't work at all so they've invented non-magic ways to do things."

"Right, being able to just make drinkable water would change things a lot! We can't – we have something we call the Elemental Plane of Water, but I don't think you can, what, tap it to get actual normal water."