"Yep! When you've got everything we'll figure out where to start building and that sort of thing."

"More detailed surveys suitable for actually building things with take longer than Lewis-and-Clark style mapping, of course." He tips his hat and out he goes.

He goes looking for Mahan. He's thought of a story the kid might like.

Mahan is diagramming a spell idea and totally willing to set that aside.

If Nikolas is getting familiar with Hari humans he might recognize this flavor of silently not looking at him as hoping Nikolas wants to talk.

...Not unexpected, given yesterday's offer. Nik is aiming more to be friends with Mahan than anything else, though. (Perhaps he should try and get to know some other people, of other species, but humans are still by far the easiest to read.)

"Hullo, Mahan. I'm leaving again soon, but before I do, I thought of another story you might enjoy. About John Snow, a disease-treater who doesn't have death magic - because none of us do - and his desperate quest to fight disease as best he could even without magic."

"Sounds like fun. You want twelve for it like before?"

"Sure."

The story of John Snow deserves a more serious tone. He starts with his parents recognizing his intelligence and paying for him to be sent to school. He challenged conventional wisdom and asked strange questions. He was one of the brightest in the school and was chosen for a doctor's apprenticeship soon after. But around this time the horrible specter of Cholera swept through the coal-mine slums, when he was not even yet a proper adult, only eighteen - younger than Mahan himself!

Cholera is a horrible and above all disturbingly fast disease. While not always lethal, it appeared utterly random to doctors at the time, and was terrifying. They did not understand bacteria or viruses - it was before modern medical science. John Snow tried all the treatments known to medicine at the time, but could do nothing more than ease the suffering of some of the disease's victims. But he tried his best, even in the waste and death-filled slums, suffering all around him.

The epidemic passed and John Snow moved on to other things... But he would always remember the horror of Cholera, and hate it with all his soul.

He had a promising career in medicine after that, graduating from a prestigious medical school, making breakthroughs with anesthesia, and even treating the Queen of the whole country himself. He was one of the best and brightest of the field.

When John Snow was 35, Cholera returned. John Snow still could not treat the disease any better than the other doctors, but he was determined to end the outbreak. He had an inkling by now, from watching the way things worked, that diseases are spread - but this idea was dismissed as nonsense by other doctors at the time. Still, he raced around London, tracking down relatives of the dead and the doctors who treated them, trying to gather as much information as he could. He saw how people who drank from wells that sewage drained into got sick, and those who drank from clean wells were fine, and came up with the (correct) theory that contaminated waste getting into the water was spreading the disease... But other doctors and the general public still dismissed this as nonsense, and the outbreak ended.

And then, the third devastating outbreak. This time, John Snow would not let Cholera win. Without magic, without enough money or helpers, with only his own cleverness and logic to help him, he was still determined to root out the cause and prevent future outbreaks once and for all. This time, the ravages of the disease were worse than ever. Dozens dead every day, and thousands suffering terribly. He frantically gathered testimony and data, trying to find something, anything that could be a pattern, and basically invented epidemiology overnight, using maps and logical analysis and everything else he could, to find out that... The Broad Street well was causing Cholera. Almost anyone who drank from it fell ill, and those who avoided it were shown remarkable clemency. He raced through the slums, to landlords' houses asking questions about water companies of all things, surely seeming mad, and even into the halls of the government, demanding the records that would show everyone the incontrovertible truth he had uncovered.

After all this time and effort and desperate cleverness, John Snow showed his results to the special committee organized to investigate the outbreak, and they said... 'Huh, I think you're on to something.' They removed the pump from the Broad Street well, and the great outbreak stopped, almost overnight.

John Snow was right all along. Though the medical minds of the time still didn't understand bacteria, exactly, they at least learned the lesson of sanitation. Less than a decade later, at John Snow's urging, the great city London spent tens of millions of rings to start building a proper sewer system. The grim reaper Cholera returned to London only once more, in an area where the sewers were not finished, and was quickly attacked and driven out.

"John Snow was the first. Without magic, without the support of his peers, without any money or thanks, he solved the disease. Some estimates say that John Snow's discoveries and the improvements they led to have saved hundreds of millions of lives. He is counted among the great men of my world. John Snow, Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Jonas Salk, Norman Borlaug, Ronald Ross, Alexander Fleming. I have the highest esteem for experimenters like those, whose drive to understand led to so many good things."

Mahan is speechless for a minute and a lot more solemn than Nikolas has seen him before.

"...Yeah. Knowledge is important," is the first thing he can think of to say.

"Knowledge is important. Knowledge did for us what magic does for you here. For tens of thousands of years we scrabbled in the dirt, fighting pointless petty wars, starving and dying of disease... But once we started to seek knowledge, and share it and apply it, everything became so much better, almost overnight. My tablet, what I was using to read yesterday, may seem like magic, but it's entirely mundane, born solely of knowledge and hard work."

"What's the state of medicine there now?"

He, much more cheerfully, describes antibiotics and antivirals and prosthetics and safe, effective pain drugs and surgeries and psychological healing and cures or treatments for hundreds of different conditions, and not just ones caused by pathogens and parasites, how they've managed a few inheritance tricks without inheritance magic - gene therapy and stem cell infusions and regrowing skin and organs - and chemotherapy and the budding research into anti-aging treatments and everything else the modern medical world has to offer.

That sure is a lot of feelings Mahan is having about all this. Look at this entirely new and different flavor of looking away and being quiet. He tries and fails to come up with any words.

"We're from such different places. I can't really understand why you revere the invincible empire so much. But I'm trying to explain how my world has good things in it."

"You've done a lot, starting from a steep disadvantage. It's... I understand why you would be proud of it."

"I am. Not me myself, of course, I didn't directly contribute much to all that, but I do think I have some manner of kinship with the rest of my world's people."

Mahan can't think of anything to say to that that isn't a hundred times less useful.

So he doesn't say anything.

"Well, I'm glad you liked the story. Maybe when I come back from surveying for Valanda I can show you a medical textbook."

He looks hungry. "How much for how long a look?"

"Maybe get an illusion mage to copy it out? I don't have a printer... What's on the screen will change when I use it for something else, but it should be possible, right? I'll think about it. Not too much probably, there's going to be times I'm not using it so it may as well earn me some money."

"We can have it copied, that's probably a good idea anyway if that's your only copy."

"The tablet is decently sturdy and I think Milliways likes me enough that I'd get to visit and buy a new one if something happened to it... There's a whole library on here, though. I could probably sell books for the rest of my life, eh?" He laughs.

(And I've gotten through to Mahan, ignited the spark of the scientist somewhere inside him! Well, hopefully. It's slightly sleazy to use the fact that he has a crush to get him to listen, but when have I ever worried about that before?)

"I'm off now, though. Be back in a few days."

Mahan goes back to his spell diagram without another word.

Outside it's started snowing, fortunately lightly.

Back to exploring and surveying!

All this untamed wilderness is actually very nice. He could be happy just living out here and occasionally visiting the camp... Except he knows he'd get restless soon enough.

He maps. He stays out for longer this time, going south and south.

Are there any significant dangers besides the cliffs? Predators? Inclination towards nasty weather? Exploding trees? Volcano about to turn active? Natives?

There is at least one wolverine. It doesn't show any signs of being a person. The volcano's still a ways off even for a vampire. No trees explode while he happens to be looking at them but there are the remains of some that probably did. There's a slope that looks like it had a landslide recently.

He notes all these dangers and maps and runs and eats a penguin and runs and maps all the way down to the sea ice and goes back to the camp after four days.

Where Valanda pays him a lot of rings and is thrilled to see him.

"Find anything tasty while you were out?"