Yeah.

We should sleep, it's another long ride tomorrow. And the day after that. 

Yeah.

Love you.

Love you.

Kib starts screaming a few hours in, but that's nothing to worry about.

Which doesn't stop him. He doesn't wake Kib, though - Kib's said there's no point - and eventually the screaming stops.

And in the morning on they ride.

Well, 'morning'. The shine clock says so. It's as dark as it was all night. When they stop in the evening their escort practices sparring with swords.

It'd be utterly stupid for you to waste time learning this, I think, but you can if you'd like.

I'm disadvantaged in every respect and risking me in a training accident seems idiotic. If I had a humanoid puppet I might try practicing through it but I don't.

Precisely. But if you were going to feel sad being the only person around who couldn't murder things with pointy sticks we could probably make a weapon that worked for you.

Nah. I'll murder things with dinosaurs.

It takes a month and a half to reach the dinosaurs and another month to find, calm and get-sufficiently-close-to-Kib all the ones they want. A few dozen of the pterodactyls with the best wingspan, a fairly exhaustive Triceratops cavalry, a few baby predators which he promises will grow up to be terrifying.

Kib pets dinosaurs and gives them all safety orders and secondary masters.

The safety orders can no longer be 'don't kill people', but yeah. And they start the long ride back.

It can be 'don't kill these people', for now.

"I should have introduced automaton railcarts," Kib mutters.

"How do those work?"

"You put down tracks between point A and point B, with smooth turns so even rapidly cycling wheels will be able to follow them, and then you set carts on wheels that run on automata and you plug the instructions in to go and pull them out to stop."

"Oh, nice. Maybe we can put some down in Endorë, if we can get the metal..."

"Doesn't have to be metal but it'll hold up better to the wear that way."

"And I don't think Endorë has wood."

"Actually, if the Treelight didn't reach it what do people there eat? Do they hug the coast and fish?"

"Great question. I expect we'll learn soon enough. There are probably local Maiar, maybe it's got a sort of oasis setup where you can find food wherever a Maia bothered to make plants grow."

"Wonder if anyone's had luck refracting shines yet."

"Refracting shines, collecting food, figuring out how to preserve food, because in the Outer Lands things rot...magic objects in our style for heat and light, more palantiri - shine-based communication will beat that, too, but we'll need the palantiri first - and ridiculous quantities of magic armor and weaponry. They've probably been busy."

"Humans know things about preserving food," Kib mentions.

"Yeah, I think information about food preservation and preserved food itself are both being imported along with the boat automata...is it going to be economically disastrous when storks stop carrying money, because we're spending it all..."