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...Cam is really curious how you do a parade on a town that is set up like this. So sure why not.
The parade is airborne! Decorative floats literally float, the people participating weave around in wingsuits and gliders or use a sort of one-person balloon when they don't just ride the floats.
It makes a circuit around the top of the island and descends to do it again below, and even goes through a couple of the largest gaps into the interior and out the other side.
And the party that follows after is pretty grand, too. City-wide. The feast is in the streets. People wander around with pots and platters of whatever they made as a sort of gigantic potluck, with everything the royal chefs could come up with after sixteen hours of access to a much wider variety of ingredients lined up under tents in the parks. The somewhat-more-healthy king even makes a big show of pardoning some minor criminals (with legitimate crimes) because it'd be a shame if they couldn't go to the party. Non-citizens from the visiting trade ships (Are there more ships than there were yesterday? A lot more?) are welcomed as well. There's sports and singing and drinking and people yammering about how great everything's going to be.
Cam sticks around for much of the party, handles some last-minute requests, and then goes back up to the space station to see if he has any messages and set up a thing to let him do this without having to physically be there.
He has a message from someone called Dr. Shen that says the first day of gate construction went well, and Lyl Jupiter sent over a heavily redacted list of descriptions-of-star-systems. From infrastructure level to political structure to economic information to language and ethnicity to coordinates. They were very liberal in redacting names.
If any of it looks all that interesting Cam can just unredact the documents, but as a courtesy he doesn't do that before he starts reading them. He sends back a thank-you, sets up the relay so he can communicate with these people from planetside, and reads.
The United Systems is managing things pretty well, from the point of view of these documents. There are some pointless political conflicts and unresolved development issues and the occasional terror attack. But there's no large scale war, mostly because gate endpoints tend to be hold a single political entity the defending party can just turn off the gate that's being attacked. There's a universal bill of human rights that is actually enforced, mostly. There are 3823 connected systems, 639 of which have more than 1 million inhabitants and 18 of which have more than 1 billion.
Till they get the gate running, though, he's got a planet to outfit. Time to play Find A Town.
Two armed-up ships are towing a dead jellywing toward the place.
Let's find out. Shoo, ship. He lands.
He gets shot at on the way down.
"Get the Lost Weapon!"
"It's not fighting back, though."
Two ships cast off and leave as fast as they can.
They may do that. "Lost Weapon?" wonders Cam idly, in case someone will answer him.
"Yet."
"Why'd you shoot at him anyway, Gus? You're supposed to be the lookout not the shootout."
"I saw something scary pop straight through the fog. It's only natural to think of predators when someone acts like that!"
"Fire and thunder, you're- Hey, not-angel, are you hurt?"
"Yeah, well, sorry but next time don't approach a hunting co-op from above?"
Other guy says, "Sorry I shot at you. Never seen anything like you. Wouldn't have shot at a ship." He tries to look contrite.
"Well, I would have brought my ship but it's heavy and seems impolite to land it on people. But no harm done."
More people are showing up. Some holding a variety of weapons (improvised and actual), some just looking curious and worried. This guy seems to be the leader since they calm down once they see him talking to Cam.
"No idea. We've only fired it twelve times. Where'd you get wings? They look like a perfect strike."