"It's too complicated for that to be all. It's gorgeous, did you make it -"

Ah, well. "Those are the only spells active right now," she says untruthfully. "I'm afraid I didn't make it, I'm not a magical engineer." Letting people look at the Type-97, which is highly classified technology, is technically a violation of her oath of service but she doesn't see any way to avoid it. 

...well, no, that's not true, Tanya could avoid powering up her orb where anyone could see, but her personal safety overrides the dubious interests of the entirely absent Germanian Empire which she can't contact.

"I see more than two things active right now, is some of this scaffolding for having them so long-lasting, or..."

"I don't know how you count spells as separate." That much is true. "My own magic detection spell is a bit different from the local style. You might be seeing some of the shared infrastructure for other spells I'm not casting at the moment."

Tanya needs to figure out what she wants from this conversation and to set boundaries, otherwise he'll just keep on asking questions she doesn't want to answer. (Not that he's doing anything wrong, and this is much better than asking about babies!) "It's a foreign style of magic; I'm on Share Language myself, as you can probably tell" (Belmarniss said she had an accent). "I haven't decided yet how much of it I should share, or with whom, but of course I can't object to people looking at it while I'm in public." This is hopefully enough of an explanation but not so much as to draw attention, since she hasn't demonstrated any real capabilities yet.

"Ooh, can I see your magic detection spell? Where are you from?"

"The Germanian Empire. You probably haven't heard of it. I'm detecting all the time, it just doesn't count as an active use of magic that someone else could detect in my tradition." (Slightly misleading; she can't use it without powering the orb, and that anyone can detect.) "And I don't want to stop my other spells so it's the only thing that remains for you to see."

"It's not a spellbook, is it. Is it something more like an ioun stone, or..."

"It's not a wizard spellbook," she confirms. "I haven't seen an ioun stone to tell if it's similar."

"I don't have one, they're halfway to mythical, but it looks..." Gesture. "Round."

"...admittedly my thing is also round but being round is a simple, common and convenient shape. In any case this is not mythical, because it was only invented recently."

"Ooooooooooooooh. Can I see it -"

"I'm afraid not, because I haven't decided to share it yet." She shouldn't have given away that she has a physical casting implement and now she's kicking herself about it. This will make it obvious that there's something to be stolen, and that can be taken away if she's held captive! Admittedly, if she's taken captive it would be very obvious, but that's no reason to confirm it.

"Do you know anything about how we do spells around here, or did your wizard friend teach you everything you wanted to know already?"

"I don't know how to cast wizard spells myself; I understand that would require a significant investment of time. My friend Belmarniss told me about the spells commonly used around here, and showed me some of them, but I always appreciate seeing more so I can recognize them in the future. And I would like to read a list of spells that are known to exist - just the descriptions of the effects, not the formulae - there might be things Belmarniss didn't know about." A library with a focus on magic surely offers that kind of overview, and it's worth an hour to see if she missed anything important.

(Are they supposed to be paying for the use of this library or is it open to everyone who walks in? If it's free or sufficiently cheap Tanya might spend a lot of time in here.)

The library is open to the public until and unless they are a nuisance and get kicked out, and the library may be closed to the public unexpectedly if the church wants to monopolize it for a research project, and there's a prominently placed donation box.

"A list of all the spells that are known to exist you might have to piece together from multiple sources."

That is very prosocial of them and Tanya will definitely donate once she has some actual income!

"Then I'll start with the biggest single index or two. I'm sure there are many esoteric spells, but they must not be very important or they would be mentioned in the standard reference sources. ...by important I mean having a useful effect, not being interesting from a theoretical point of view which I can't appreciate yet."

"No, that's not what I mean, I'm just not sure the compilation's been done from that perspective. There are lists of cleric spells, and lists of spells that are useful in a military context, and lists of spells by school, things like that."

...that makes sense. It's like coming into a library and asking to see a list of the useful applications of electricity. Of course the spells individual wizards like Belmarniss might find useful to learn, or might face in a fight, are only a very small subset of what's out there.

Tanya is tempted to ask for the spells useful in a military context, but that's not her life anymore and it would in any case take her far too long to study the tactics and strategies the locals have adapted around their military spells, many of which are going to be secret anyway.

"How about economically and industrially useful spells? Communications, transportation, manufacture, machinery. That's probably still too broad..." Why does she even want to focus on a list of spells? She should be reading up on entire industries' chains of value, or just the final market prices of goods and services and their raw material, labor and capital inputs. Which will probably take her several weeks to master, at a minimum, although she could discover something useful much sooner than that. This is a library which specializes in magic but it's not a library that only has books about magic. 

The efficient approach would be to consult with a local, but she doesn't know who to approach or trust. Worse, she doesn't know how to overcome that. Ah, immigrating to new different country is truly terrifying.

"Probably, yes. You could maybe get a price sheet from the Abadarans if you're curious what sees the most demand in civilian use?"

"That makes sense. Thank you." What is Belmarniss reading? Does she look set to stay here for a while, with or without Tanya?

Belmarniss is bent over a book about drow with one of the Nethysians corroborating or contradicting bits of it as they skim along.

Correcting the locals' misconceptions is probably valuable cultural sharing!

Tanya has had a lot of time to consider what she should do once they finally arrive in a city and don't have to stick together all of the time for mutual safety.

Her short-term goals are to earn money and to avoid making waves (and certainly avoid making any enemies) until she knows more. Unfortunately, these two goals are in conflict.

She can't start by building radios or steam engines, because even a prototype would take time and money before she can convince any prospective investors or engineering partners. (She might be able to loan enough from Belmarniss, but she doesn't want to lean too much on their relationship.) She hasn't thought of anything that would be easy and cheap to build and yet serve as a good proof of concept. (A crank generating electricity is easy to make, but its value is not obvious.) She is almost certainly missing something, but the fact remains that she can't think of any better options.

She could explain her off-planet origins, show her novel magic as proof, maybe demonstrate an optical microscope or telescope or something, show them illusions of the things she wants to build, and secure some venture capital that way. The problem is that she doesn't know whose attention that might attract (or be sold to). She doesn't yet trust the local laws and authorities to protect her, but even if she did, someone with knowledge of a superior civilization's technology - who also happens to be temporarily poor and friendless - is worth it to the state to 'nationalize', or to an enemy state to kidnap, if they realize her potential. (Tanya isn't sure she'll make a big impact on Golarion, but the potential is undeniably there.) And then she might be well treated, but she'll never be a free private person again.

She could do as the local adventurers do, and take out some bounties. (Assuming she'd be able to claim them without explaining her methods.) This is probably a terrible idea, but they might have a high-paying job that wouldn't be ethically problematic? Tanya doesn't mind killing some easy-to-find, non-person, absurdly tough but not actually 'immune' (!) to fire monster. But she's not sure seriously dangerous unintelligent wildlife exists; all the examples she's read about were no more impressive than the bulette. (This makes sense; no matter how dangerous a predator, intelligent tool-using people can drive it extinct given time.) And for the ones who are people, she doesn't trust the bounties be any better than 'anyone of that race, five gold a head'.

She could quickly fly messages or small parcels to other cities (or bigger things in a bag of holding), but it would take time to create a market in between teleports and sendings on the high end and regular mail on the low end, and time for her to establish herself as trustworthy. And making her fast flight public knowledge might be enough for someone to target her.

One thing that can be explained quickly is math. Unfortunately, Tanya is not a mathematical genius. It's possible that some college-level math from the end of the twentieth century will be novel here, but she has no idea how to monetize that.

She does know how one-time pads work, but she can't reconstruct the proof that only one-time pads can provide perfect security. Also, she has no idea how to generate random keys in practice! (Something to do with black-body radiation, she thinks?) A foreigner selling a novel encryption method will of course be suspected of knowing how to break it, even if there seems to be a proof of its security in an unfamiliar notation.

Tanya doesn't have a good plan with no downsides to execute on. So she needs to gather more intelligence first. Hopefully, something will jog her mind. For today, she'd like to start by finding out:

- What are the prices for food and lodging if she doesn't have Belmarniss with her? Not that she intends to abandon her! But knowing the difference (if any) will be useful, and instructive.

- Is there a stable-ish market price for common civilian-utility spells, like Share Language? (Not that she intends to abandon Belmarniss! But she ought to know how much she costs her in opportunity costs.)

- Is there an... adventurer's center? Bounty board? Assassin's guild? And if so, what kind of requests are outstanding that the normal authorities can't handle? Again, not that she will take any, certainly not without discussing it with Belmarniss in advance, but it's useful information.

- Are there in fact public torturous executions and similar events?

- Does any other technology strike her by its presence or absence? 

- If there are financial institutions (even if they're tied to a church), what is the price of credit enjoyed by trusted locals?

- Are the local police visible and visibly approachable and what are they seen to be doing?

She doesn't want to prejudice herself with the library patrons, so she won't ask them for directions to the local assassin's market or public execution. Tanya isn't a barbarian, she's just justifiably concerned that some local people are.