That sounds like a very reasonable procedure and Tanya will proceed to do just that!

The local baron is another bird person, who seems rather exasperated by the whole affair. Of course he wouldn't want to take up too much of an otherworlder and a famous wizard - who invented the world's best flight spell! -'s time. Surely they have more important things to do than linger overmuch in his humble town. It would be really regrettable if there were more misunderstandings or even an incident before they concluded their business and left. Hint hint nudge nudge go be someone else's problem please, couched in the politest possible tones.

And the local branch of the travellers' guild is perfectly willing to fill out a form and issue her a metal plated card with a unique numerical ID on it. It's a reassuringly bureaucratic process, even if the paperwork is just two pages long it's at least woodcut-stamped instead of handwritten.

See, doesn't that feel better?

(Their bureaucracy does not seem adequate to the challenge of random towns sometimes serving as impromptu immigration offices, but that's not Tanya's problem.)

She is apologetic and will do her best not to cause any more misunderstandings now that her own is resolved. And now she is ready to leave. ...does Sinnah propose to leave somewhere far? They can talk on the way if they fly slowly enough that wind isn't a problem, or they can fly at (Tanya's) top speed to whereever they're going.

"I want to learn your magic. I have a small workshop in the City of Glass five hundred and fifty miles away and a large one in the Duchy of Roses two thousand six hundred miles away. What do you want to do?"

"I want to learn whether it's possible for me to go back to my world and what that would take. I want to learn about this world in order to - orient myself to it, figure out what I can or should do once I'm done teaching you what I can and have exhausted avenues for going back, including I assume ways to earn money. I should learn a local language but I won't make much progress in a few days so it can wait until the other questions are more settled. ...I assume I will want more things once I know what there is to want, here."

"I can fly at five hundred miles an hour comfortably, somewhat over six hundred if I push it but it's inefficient. I don't mind spending several hours flying to your farther base if you prefer to stay there for the next while." Hopefully her shiny new ID is still valid there?

"Going back through the rift or trying to reactivate it is a scale of months or years research project. City of Glass is better for orienting you, probably. It's, well, a city. More services, including information services. There's a famous museum and stuff. I don't need the high-end workshop for initial questions and discussion anyway."

Tanya has a perfect excuse for staying off the frontlines until the war is over and all she can think about is how her men will make it without her how little she knows about theoretical magic.

They can be at their destination in seventy minutes.

The land very quickly transitions from jungle to densely cultivated farmland. There are towns. Then they're at the city. It's a premodern city! Bits of urban sprawl attempt to extend past the traditional huge stone walls. Lots of glass is in use in the architecture. Most of the buildings inside are four to six stories high, mostly brick and glass. Near the center of the city is a monument and manor district including a startlingly modern-style all glass exterior tower, twenty four stories and near indistinguishable from a modern skyscraper. There are even a few radio transmissions coming from the city!

Sinnah pauses at low altitude outside the gates, it having been expressed to her earlier by someone who can actually back it up that they'd confiscate her workshop if she too flagrantly flouts air safety.

"Air traffic rules are in effect in the city proper. A max speed restriction of eighty miles per hour. And, see the roof markers every few hundred feet? Blue and red ones? They mark preferred air travel lanes, blue on the left and red on the right. The lanes aren't strictly enforced but they do reduce maneuvering and make decent landmarks."

That's more modern than median Germanian small city! Glass skyscrapers! Radio! Air traffic control!!!

Tania was worried when the local magistrate turned out to be a 'Baron' (she's still not clear on whether and how those two qualities are related) who just, wanted the interplanetary visitor to please go away and stop bothering him (???!), but clearly that was a small rural town the likes of which can, indeed, be found all over even the most modern country.

Tania will be a very diligent student of air traffic rules. ...is there air traffic other than the bird-people? Those didn't seem likely to go much faster than eighty miles per hour anyway.

Well, skyscraper. Singular.

There are a few flying carriages, and some people without wings flying using the same magic signature as Sinnah, and occasionally something slightly more exotic, but mostly it's bird people, yep. Quite a few at the sub 200 foot altitude band. Sinnah stays high, 1000 or so, and heads for a district about halfway to the center from the edge of the city before descending and landing on a garden'd roof.

(...There's a lot of magic in use here in the city. It's a constant rain of magic signatures. The ratio of magic users must be quite high, or maybe it's just the population density?)

Either they have a much higher ratio of mages than Earth, or many mages have chosen to come here. Maybe this is a university city and the skyscraper is a magic research institute.

Flying carriages are a civilian technology, which is good considering the alternatives. They may have also invented the airplane but that's not useful for transportation in a city, and helicopters are much harder to build and also too noisy.

Tanya does her best to record distinct spell signatures in her orb but she has no idea how to label almost any of them and they're sometimes hard for her orb to tell apart.

She heads to a roof access door and opens it with a physical key and goes down the stairs.

"I have the fourth floor of this building. It's all magic workshops for rent, but they have good grounding, so any miscast effects should be unlikely and very mild. I need to transfer the signature recordings of the rift to permanent storage before we can get started. It's time consuming but not difficult so I can answer questions in the meantime."

"'Miscast chances' don't sound like anything my kind of magic does," Tanya remarks. "I will elaborate later; I don't want to assume we always mean the same thing about magic even when we use the same words."

For now Tanya has a lot of general questions. What are the most important / impactful / load-bearing / recently-growing technologies in this world? This includes both mundane technology and magic (energy, food production, transportation, communications, medicine, key natural resources, etc.) and social technologies (laws, legal entities, property and contracts, politics and governance, economics, businesses and investment). What are the major polities and how important are they compared to more local sub-organizations? What are the biggest dead-weight losses (e.g. war) and what stops them from being resolved? What do most people do for a living, and what do they need to do to survive and lead comfortable and socially encouraged lives? What are the biggest conflicts or controversies or lawful (e.g. political) struggles about?

A world that semi-regularly receives travelers with the technology of other worlds ought to be very advanced, and maybe this one is just in ways that aren't obvious to Tanya.

The thing about Sinnah is that she is very interested in MAGIC and not very interested in other things. But she can share some generalities. The big problem is that there are lots and lots of very dangerous monsters outside of relatively small 'clear zones'. Regular visits from otherworlders do share useful knowledge, both technological and social- There's the printing press otherworlder, the steelmaking otherworlder, the sailing otherworlder, the banking otherworlder, the casino otherworlder- But there are only so many resources available in areas that will not spawn monsters to kill you, and most people don't want to maybe be killed by monsters, so mining or logging outside of well protected zones is not very incentivized even by higher resource costs. Recycling is king, and resource extraction is the biggest pain point.

The Light Gods are working on clearing more land, slowly, it's a magical process that she has some speculations on. Most Tirran magic can't interact with miasma directly but kitsunes can detect it, and she eventually managed to invent a wizardry spell that replicates this sense to an extent, at least to the point of providing a signal when in the presence of severe miasma that can be expressed as an amount of force and push a scale. Here is her miasma-o-meter, she is proud of it. It doesn't measure the - for lack of a better word - activation energy of miasma though. Killing the monsters and having them respawn and killing them again gradually drains the miasma of energy, resulting in fewer respawns, but does not seem to actually clear the miasma. You will keep getting monsters one or two at a time. You need priestesses and people living in the area receiving proper funerary rites for permanent clearance. Something about the Great Wheel of Reincarnation is responsible for efficient miasma clearing, according to her sources, which are annoyingly tight-lipped.

(Saving off the data looks like a lot of fussing with quartz crystals and a device made of quartz crystals linked by silver wires.)

Ugh. Religion. Tanya is going to focus on the actionable parts.

Can Sinnah say more about these monsters? What makes them dangerous, what are the best tactics for dealing with them? What protects the safe zones, is that the same as clearing the miasma and then parking priestesses there? Are the people being buried important or can there just not be any people there apart from the priestesses? Do the priestesses actually do anything or do they just need to be there? What's the bottleneck on ordaining more of them? Where does the miasma come from, if they clear the whole world is the job done or will it come back any time they leave a place without a priestess?

...Can she say more about the reincarnation?

Monsters most commonly take the form of black blobs of hate that imitate various animal forms and attack without much in the way of tactics. Occasionally crude ambushes or traps. Universally hostile. There are also undead, magical animals which are only hostile as often as animals usually are, and the very rare magically powerful and intelligent black blob type monster. Those are the worst. A smart enemy with unknown abilities is a pain. General tactics mostly involve attacking at range and holing up in defensive strong points with good walls and battlements.

"Or so it is said: When people die on Tirra, their intangible souls linger until given proper rites. Then the Light Gods cleanse them of the world's impurity before allowing them to be reborn in the world as a baby. With meditation, one can recover faint memories of one's past lives. Sense impressions and flickers of episodic memory. Kitsunes remember more, being direct creations of the goddess Tamamo and a slightly different category of being."

That sounds like an enemy Tanya's style of magic is suited to fighting! If they're stopped by walls, does that mean they can't fly and don't have strong ranged attacks or are the walls reinforced with magic? Tanya would very much appreciate it if her sharing magic technology with this world resulted in people outgunning black blobs of hate and reclaiming wildernesses, and not in people outgunning each other. Does this world not tend to have many or large wars?

Are the reincarnated memories... real? If someone remembers details of being a completely unremarkable person on the other side of the world someone could go over there and check if the details are accurate, and eventually you ought to have enough evidence to reach a firm conclusion. 'Or so it is said.'

What is up with kitsunes, being personally (?) reincarnated by a specific Being sounds... fraught.

She's going to start ignoring the questions that aren't directly about magic. Some of the monsters can fly! Some have ranged attacks of their own! Not as well as someone with Sinnah's Fly up, or, apparently, whatever Tanya is doing. What is she doing?

How fast or high up can they fly? At what range can they attack and how? Are they detectably magic when flying or otherwise, can they mask this and/or mask themselves visually with illusions, can they detect other people's magic and target it and at what range and do magic decoys or visual illusions work to confuse them? Tanya has a professional interest in this sort of thing.

Is Sinnah is done with her work, should Tanya start explaining what she does when she flies?

They have birdperson-tier flight and attack with projectiles that are not, technically, but may be usefully modeled as, corrosive projectiles somewhere between a fired arrow and a bullet. They detect people with vision, hearing, smell, and a magical sense that she believes involves sensing emotions; Remaining utterly calm can help you hide.

Yep, she's done saving off all the data that can be saved. Now, M A G I C.

Tanya had a little time during their flight to consider her approach to teaching magic. To put it bluntly, she is in no way qualified, and she states so forthrightly and up-front. She is not a researcher and does not even know the theory behind modern magic applications. She is not an orb engineer or even a qualified technician. The only orbs she has on hand are extremely complicated ones that a novice couldn't use anyway, and incorrect use can damage the orb. She doesn't have access to any of the tools and implements used to evaluate candidate mages or to teach introductory classes on applied magic.

On the other hand, Sinnah is a magic researcher who has studied the magical traditions of multiple worlds. If Tanya presents her with the facts as she knows them, there is at least a nonzero chance Sinnah will be able to derive something useful. So Tanya shouldn't stick to what she remembers of how she was taught magic, and she doesn't have to restrict herself to actually useful applications of magic (let alone military ones). She just needs to give Sinnah a leg up and hope she and the other local researchers will be able to rederive the rest, even if they don't end up with the exact spells in Tanya's orb.

So, with that in mind: a brief overview of magic as Tanya knows it.

Some people (humans) are born mages. It's hereditary but not perfectly so. Mages produce mana; in fact they can't stop themselves from producing mana, which is how you can find mage children and train them. All mages can sense mana; a mage-doctor identifies mage children in a routine physical exam at age seven or eight.

When you have mana, you can mentally use it to produce various effects, and this is called magic. However, magic used natively is both very weak and very difficult to direct in a precise fashion. The useful direct applications of magic are all on the order of heating a cup of tea. That is why people through the ages have tried to find ways to make magic more useful. Various traditions arose over time, some of which eventually led to modern sciences, such as alchemy. Implements and spells were developed which interacted with the actual magic to produce useful physical effects. However, while these approaches could create powerful effects, they were still very difficult to make safe and reproducible. The use of magic depends enormously on the exact physical conditions the spell is being cast in; alchemists could boil a lot of water, but they could not catalyze chemical reactions without exploding or melting their apparatus every two weeks.

The first computation orb was invented just a century ago and it revolutionized the field of applied magic. Computation orbs are casting implements in the 'orb and scepter' tradition which, in addition to being orbs, contain mechanical calculators (miniature clockwork) which can perform rapid calculations to adjust the spell being cast. This allows casting enormously complex spells (such as flight) whose formulae would take humans whole minutes to recalculate mentally for each passing moment.

Casting a spell using a computation orb involves manipulating the orb's structure with magic to make it produce the desired physical effect (such as thrust), and learning how to manipulate the flow of magic - in a way that does not always directly map to physical qualities - to achieve the desired results (such as thrust applied to a particular object in a particular direction). And then, practicing with that particular orb and spell until it becomes completely second nature, on the level of muscle reflexes, so that you consciously think not of spells but of flying. And then doing that for another twenty or thirty spells, and learning to cast many of them simultaneously while keeping track of everything around you, on a chaotic aerial battlefield where enemy mages will kill you if you make the slightest error.

Luckily, Sinnah will not be training with the orb today! She will instead practice with the 'scepter' implement, namely, Tanya's rifle. (It is technically a semi-automatic submachine gun but the term persists.) The rifle incorporates a linear casting implement which can apply one of several predetermined effects to a bullet just as it's being fired. Because the effects only need to vary alone one or two dimensions each (for example, a timed fuse) and a rifle's barrel is a fairly static environment, this casting implement does not itself need to perform computations; the mage performs auxiliary computations using the orb to produce just one or two numbers which can be (mentally) fed into the spell being cast via the rifle. 

The important part is that these spells are designed to be safe to use on the rifle without a bullet! (You wouldn't want it to break because you didn't notice you ran out of ammunition.) Sinnah can try to feed her mana into it to trigger the fairly simple preset spell and Tanya can tell her what she's doing wrong. And then, hopefully, Sinnah will have the concept of casting through implements to produce much bigger and more complex physical effects, and they can try building from there.

This is really interesting and Sinnah would like to point a lot of different magical instruments at Tanya and then at herself while attempting the same mental motions. When questions about how it actually works don't reveal a keen understanding of the underlying mechanics, just how to use various tools, she starts muttering about what shape of underlying reality produces this set of constraints and not some other one...

Sinnah doesn't pick up manipulating her mana, if she can, within two hours; She's reasonably sure she ought to be able to, because she learned all the local types of magic, but she did not learn any of them in two hours. 

A mechanical alarm clock goes off at that time.

"-Oh. I was planning to go recharge around now. That's what the alarm is for. I forgot about that because of new magic. Does it seem reasonable to spend two hours of effort on the rift problem in exchange for the two hours of foreign magic study that just passed? You might want to talk to a priestess about the rifts, I'm fairly sure the assistance of one or more gods would make it a lot easier. You'll need spending money, I'll also pay you for foreign magic study and slash or as an interest free loan. I mostly consider money as a means to an end: Learning interesting magic."

Tanya can also try to teach her to boil a cup of water without an implement, but this is traditionally considered much harder to learn; casting implements are meant to make the correct mental motion obvious, you just need to correctly target the thing you're trying to affect, whereas if you target a cup of water there are many things you could potentially do to it, and most will be too weak to notice.

The one-to-one trade sounds reasonable except that Sinnah thinks the rift problem is likely to take years and Tanya does not expect to be able to usefully teach her magic for years, or even months. Is there a way for Tanya to interest Sinnah in the problem for its own sake? If Sinnah succeeds in contacting Earth, Tanya can introduce her to bona fide magic theorists and engineers who definitely know a lot more than Tanya does! She will also be able to buy various kinds of casting implements and schematics for some of them, and some spell formulae, and possibly rent the use of some of those which are trade secrets.

"I don't know anything about these priestesses except that they're needed to make the miasma go away." And that they're priestesses, which is its own kind of metaphorical miasma. "In fact I'm not clear if you understand yourself how that works? Regardless, how would they be able to help, are the rifts related to the miasma in some way? And how could I interest them in helping? Besides money." Tanya is very grateful for the interest-free loan but will of course not spend any significant sums before she has figured out her own future earning potential.