That's impressively fast! Tanya's heat spell has enough peak output to drive a really large ship but definitely can't sustain that for hours every day, it's not even close. Do the sorcerers directly magically move something like a screw shaft or do they produce heat or electricity or another form of energy? (Tanya is guessing the former, since steam engines aren't competitive, but it's good to check. Motion is in any case easy to convert to electricity, it's building batteries that's hard.)

Sorcerer salaries being that low (i.e. a small part of the ship's total crew wages) implies reasonable supply elasticity, if only over large periods of time since it takes training and most sorcerers probably work a long-term job on a ship or factory or something. That is also good. 

A lack of patent law is the real problem here. To sell an innovation you must demonstrate it to convince the buyer; radio can be demonstrated without explaining how it works but Tanya will still need some help building it, and the details will be hard to keep secret. Contract law would work but could limit the damages she could recover... Something to consider. There are in any case many avenues she can explore and radio is just one.

Moving on! What do the local laws say about the rights of man people, of citizens vs foreigners, and of workers vs employers? Are there state social services and safety nets, or ones based on private associations, or something else? Are there labor unions and if so are they enshrined in law?

Slavery is illegal in the city of glass! Even debt slavery! They are proud of it! It is not so everywhere else. There is not so much a state social service though. Your extended family is supposed to be that. Wealthy merchants and nobles often patronize promising youths, paying for their education and signing term service contracts that are not slavery because you can break them, you'll just have no career prospects and maybe be banned from most establishments associated with that noble's network. Labor unions are prohibited by law from price fixing or striking or mandating membership and are fairly toothless overall. Mostly they serve as a quality badge and education pipeline.

It sounds like a reasonable balance overall, inasfar as one can get a real impression of an economic system in ten minutes. At the very least there aren't any immediately obvious problems not being handled or failures of governance.

What is the foreign relations and military situation like? Is there or has there recently been any fighting, are any neighboring states hostile to the City of Glass? She noticed a military district on the map, what does it do, is there conscription?

The primary threat is monsters and that external pressure plus the Light Gods' guidance has kept inter-state conflict down to a minimum, the last 'war' was apparently about 20 years ago and consisted of a series of riots and panic over some new policies, and a few skirmishes between private guard forces being tacitly backed by the City of Silk as an 'independent army', which was soundly defeated with less than a thousand casualties total. (They're still in a lowkey simmering conflict with Silk, in that the border is closed, with the primary point of contention being what Glass calls 'debt slavery' and what Silk calls 'restitution work'). There is conscription in case of dire emergencies, of anyone who has ever accepted the free military training. It hasn't been activated in over a century.

Mostly, the army is to stand ready for such shenanigans, or just in case really dangerous monsters appear, or to go out to colonies and help clear out identified hotspots of monsters, and to create a steady pipeline of former soldiers who can be called up again if necessary.

That's about the best possible answer: they (sensibly) have an army but rarely need to use it, conflicts are very small-scale, and when they did have one they won. (It takes a lot for the public line to be that a war was lost, but Tanya has no specific reason to disbelieve them right now.) The constant threat of monsters requires even otherwise very secure states to have standing armies, so it's very important to ensure that it also serves to divert any would-be warmongers to the colonies.

Can she get a bit of scale for all these intuitions? How many people live in the city, its immediate surroundings and the rest of its territory, the colonies...? (Do these capital-C Cities all have a single, economically and politically predominant city, or is it more of a naming convention?)

All in all, a good overview for a starting point. Tanya will come back once she has more useful questions. She needs to organize her thoughts first, before she knows what to ask or what books to look for in a library. List her goals and assets, identify any other potential low-hanging fruit besides her ideas about radio. Sinnah's office is as good a place as any to do that in. ...well, she can't get in before it's time to meet Sinnah, but she can find somewhere to sit down with a notebook.  (She'll need to buy a new, bigger notebook.)

City of Glass has about three quarters of a million people. The whole region probably has on the order of a few million. The whole world, estimated, and assuming no major uncontacted peoples, on the order of 100-200 million people. The five big famous prestigious Cities are the Cities of Glass, Silk, Steel, Gems, and Tea. They are economically, politically, and culturally predominant. Some say that there's a sixth, called the City of Brass or the City of Clockwork, but most agree on just the five in the eastern region.

The politics get weird and layered fast and she doesn't really have the time right now to get a clear picture of it but the big five sort of form the nuclei of ... factions or pseudo-federations or at least aligned interest blocs of the smaller entities, whose level of independence is somewhat of an open question.

Have a lovely day, afar wanderer!

It's impressive that they've achieved as much as they have despite such a small worldwide population! 

Can Tanya unproblematically buy a notebook and find somewhere to sit and think until six?

Aside from it being crowded enough in the little alley park that people regularly pass her, no.

Though she does hear some sort of commotion off in the distance around five. Two people shouting, a crowd, and eventually the sound of breaking glass.

...Tanya will go that way to see if her help is needed, as a responsible citizen person should. She is (in another place) military and supposed to respond to civilian violence if no police are present.

She comes upon a crowd gathered around two stands in a small plaza, holding what look like... A set of glass tools? Crowbar, hammer, a saw, ladder, shovel, more. All made of glass.

The shattered culprit is one of the hammers, having broken off at the neck.

It looks like some sort of exotic contest, given how one of the people on stage is currently boasting about their side's quality.

Oh good, nothing is amiss! They must have some kind of glass-shaping magic, or maybe they prepared all these in advance in which case they're very dedicated craftsmen. Tanya applauds politely and then go back to her note-taking.

Tanya's notes:

- Might be possible to go back or otherwise contact Earth. Others besides Sinnah could be interested in exploring this? Disconnect between academics studying magic and the business community discouraging.

- In which case, Tanya has obligation to report back and for her conduct on Tirrah to reflect well on Germania and not to harm Germania if contact is established. (She isn't planning anything in contravention of this, other than possibly not setting reestablishing contact as her highest priority.)

- No idea how long she can usefully tutor Sinnah or be research / demonstration subject. Neither of them can estimate well, so hard to plan around. Tanya must plan pessimistically.

- Selling radio technology might work. Problem: no patents. Could move somewhere they are, but not while working with Sinnah. (Regardless, if other countries don't respect your patents you're just putting your own country's industry at a disadvantage). Not just Tanya but investors / engineers / mfg. partners can't make profit, because radio is very easy to copy. Can have radio towers under guard with trade secrets inside, can't sell to public. (If only receivers sold, transmitters might stay secret long enough to profit?) Need to consult local businessmen to evaluate.

- Need to come up with other Earth tech / knowledge to sell / invest in. Ruled out: steam engines; bulk propulsion / transport in general. ICE engines still possible. Many things to check still. What does she know well enough to reproduce? Many candidates, she needs to make a list and then vet it with more questions at the info center.

- Other than tech / business ventures, no immediately marketable personal skills squiggle except fighting monsters. Discouraging but hard to expect otherwise. Trade schools require income meanwhile.

- Should learn more but not sure what books to read...

- Expenses: hour's pay from Sinnah ~~ day's food (w. coffee). Check lodgings next. 

There are lots of lodging places available, anywhere from an almost pod hotel type arrangement to a full family apartment to rent, minimum one month. She may want to narrow the search space some.

Tanya isn't going to rent a room for tonight, she only wanted to know the range of prices on offer. She can also rent farther away if that's cheaper, since she can fly quickly. This will presumably take more time than she has before she has to go back to Sinnah, but the costs of capsule hotels (she has no belongings anyway) and small apartments will at least bound the range.

A pod hotel type arrangement - communal bathroom, closet-bed, communal bathing - is four large copper per night. A month's rent at a studio apartment is listed as 1 sol 6 ecu.

Sinnah comes in for a landing right in front of the building they exited from at six minutes before sixth bell. Her hair is styled differently now.

"See anything interesting while you were out?"

Eight hours a day of tutoring Sinnah at an hourly rate of 4 ecu 480 gives a daily income of 3840. Lodging costs 40 a night in a capsule hotel, or 104 a night in a rented apartment if she pays for a month in advance. Food costs 100 a day (less if she cooks) and the same again for coffee. A month's work will pay for a little over a year of renting and eating well. That's an excellent ratio! The only question is whether she can in fact provide Sinnah with enough information to last for even a month. (Also, Sinnah presumably has other things to do, so Tanya should cut her daily earning projections by a factor of two or three after the next few days...)

"I was very pleased to learn that this world has coffee!!"

"And I talked to the info-point people. I'm considering introducing radio technology. Nonmagical remote communications based on electromagnetic waves - does that translate?"

"I know about radio. There was a Cryptid using it to control his mechanical soldiers before we blew everything up. That was a tough fight, Vee and Weiss both nearly died and Amarillis, a mercenary, did die. Not a bad idea if you have the technical ability for it."

"I don't fully understand radio but I think I can reproduce enough of it from what I learned in school, including working but impractical radios, to enable more qualified scientists and engineers do the rest of the work. My orb also contains a radio, for talking to air traffic control, and I can't take it apart but it might help with testing another."

"A cryptid built remote-controlled robot soldiers? I was under the impression cryptids were born of miasma like other monsters, except they were intelligent. ...I was obviously wrong to assume they would immediately attack people instead of using their intelligence to build an industrial base first. Is there a - cryptid civilization?"

"It was born out of the miasma around an old Tirran nuclear missile silo. It was trying unsuccessfully to reactivate them. They tend to be intelligent, and malevolent, and not really build civilizations."

"Why. And how. Do you have old nuclear missile silos. Which might be reactivated by random monsters, and have not been safely decommissioned." Tanya is really very proud of her steady voice here.

Also, the old (?) nuclear missile silos (?!) apparently contain bonus military robots (???) but that is not really the biggest concern here!

"Well, we don't exactly have a list of all the old Tirran empire's black sites, and also all of them tend to be full of monsters because the chaos that catalyzed the fall of the empire involved despair, hate, and pain going through a sort of propagating phase change. Which became the miasma, curses, and monsters. And then a war between Gods. And then a major asteroid strike on the planet. This was around three thousand two hundred years ago. I wasn't around personally for that."

Sinnah sounds utterly unconcerned, as if reading off cheese making history trivia.

Tanya can tolerate a lot of absurdities in a religious creation myth, but leaving actual possibly-working nuclear missiles around (and knowledge of what they are!) breaks even her suspension of disbelief. 

An ancient empire whose fall created (?) emotion-powered magical miasma (??) and monsters. And whose missiles might still be functional after more than three thousand years. (Maybe they were really good engineers.) The fissile material will certainly still be there. In fact it's better for it to be there rather than leak into the environment, but that relies on the government knowing where 'there' is!!!

"So... there was an ancient, technologically advanced civilization. Which fell, somehow, and rendered most of the world uninhabitable. And for over two thousand years, you have not succeeded in either recovering or recreating its scientific knowledge, such as would allow for radio?" This would sound so ridiculous if Tanya didn't know it also happened after the fall of the Roman Empire, if perhaps on a smaller scale. However, that involved centuries during which Europeans were uninterested in continuing to use Roman technology, time when the textbooks and the trained professionals were still available but there was nobody to hire them! How does one simply give up on radio?

"Back when I was human things were incredibly shitty. I lived in a mud and stick hut and went spear fishing with my mom, who later died of an infection. My dad was killed by a zombie. There were no roads. There were no steel tools... I discovered magic on my own but it was over a decade before it was in any way useful and four or so more before Tamamo turned me into a kitsune.

... I don't like remembering that. Really, things have only truly kicked off in the last two, three hundred years."