Still standing inside Milliways, Nick says, "I'll need some time to learn to talk again. I'll just go lurk somewhere 'till you're done, I'm good at that. I do think I'll want to hang around you for a while."

He steps through with his big backpack and finds a spot to lurk in nearby, hopefully within vampiric listening range of Valanda and her interviewee.

Nope! There sure is some excellent soundproofing on that building.

A belul and an agerah walk out of another building together, talking about a possible upcoming construction project. Another agerah is lounging in the shade, splitting their attention between watching the waves and watching a nonfiction show about tanning leather.

Figures. And he'd better not actually spy on them. It'd be skirting the rules.

He can absorb large sections of language by listening to conversations, some of them a block or so away, and all the little illusion shows he can hear clearly from here, and rubbing little circles into the Hermes statuette and muttering about being a messenger requiring understanding and eloquence.

The agerah and belul wander around the area. The agerah points out gardens that they don't want to build anything immediately south of.

The other agerah watches three episodes of the show.

The belul on the dock glances furtively at Nikolas as he finishes eating and heads inland.

Eventually Valanda finishes his interview.

Oh, he's not important. Almost magically so. Is there really nobody else outside? Hm. Well, he can get a good head start on learning the language anyway.

A couple of people have business outside but don't talk to anyone, otherwise it's pretty quiet.

"Hey there. Learned any Hari yet?"

"No." Shrug. "Quiet."

"First floor of that building over there," Valanda points, "the imperial government rents a room. They might have a copy of the show I learned Hari from. Ask for Hari Ar Sarag Marsaehu, either it's free or they don't have it."

"Yes."

Off he goes. He can listen for the presence of a talking tablet before even approaching the office's secretary or whatever. Unless everything is soundproofed to hell and back here, too.

Once he's inside the building he can hear that they do have a copy.

The secretary or whatever is two humming birds.

Thwilit, yes. "Hari Ar Sarag Marsaehu," he points at the correct drawer. "Is free?"

"Yes, it's free."

They're very surprised someone actually wants it, if he can read thwilit body language.

He can sorta guess. "Learning." He takes one and gives a jaunty wave as he heads back outside.

The show is not designed to be fun or easy to remember but if he solves that problem with vampirism or willpower it's very informative.

Valanda's waiting for him, gives him a curious look, almost says something but hesitates.

Vampirism is handy like that!

He winks at Valanda as he walks right past him.

He thinks he'll try to find a market or something. Those are always good to get to know a place.

The signs on one of the buildings seem pretty suggestive, might be in there.

Here he is just strolling around sticking to shadows as much as possible and being boring and unobtrusive don't mind him.

There's only so far that'll go as a stranger in a small town, but it's rude to stare anyway.

An agerah is buying fish, some birds are trying to sell honey, a floating erel haggles multilingually with a belul over the price of blood. A sign marks where to find the town doctor, a death mage who claims to know how to cure everything from distemper to mange.

It's not a very big market. But then it's not a very big town.

He has rings, courtesy of bar. None of these people have tea, still a comfort drink - though the honey may be tasty later, he does still need to eat human food - but he doesn't really feel like trying exotic new kinds of blood today.

...He inquires in broken Hari about various sorts of plants and meat and such, playing the harmless stranger, getting a feel for the market. He buys a little honey.

They probably have some of what he asks about! As long as it's edible for beluli or agerah and isn't tropical or arctic or unpopular in this tiny town for no good reason.

"A ring if you'll tell me where you're from?" says the belul selling fish.

"You would not believe me."

"You don't know that. I might."

"I'd bet you ten rings you wouldn't, but you can just decide to believe me and win."

"Worth anything to you to know why I'm interested in the answer?"

"I think I can guess - I'm a weird foreigner who's learning Hari alarmingly fast - but sure, tell me why you want to know and then I'll tell you where I'm from."

"You walked out of a building without walking into it."

"Oh, you're an information mage are you? Or were you just watching that building all day? At any rate, maybe you will believe me. I'm from another world, a space not contiguous with any space one can reach from here, and I arrived via a mysterious magical bar called Milliways."

(A defense against information mages is now called for. Apparently his pre-existing sneakiness is not enough.)

And this is what beluli look like when they're confused and skeptical. "A ring if you'll tell me how to get to Milliways?"

"You wait for a door to lead to Milliways instead of where it's supposed to. The door doesn't like most people. I wouldn't hold your breath."

The belul pays him his ring.

"If you could use a local to ask some questions of..."

"I'll keep you in mind. I actually do have a bunch of questions, mostly about various sorts of magic. I have to figure out what my otherworldly knowledge and magic might be useful for, since I'm not any kind of mage, after all. Most pressingly, a ring if you can point me to an illusion mage that can make an item that can hide me from knowledge magic."

The belul makes an unusual sound. "...Oh, because you're a thirteenth kind, not one of the twelve... that's a funny way to put it, makes you sound like an animal. Haria can make an item like that, he goes for walks in the woods this time of day, you might be able to find him but you'll probably have better luck waiting to catch him coming back."

Hmm. "I can't do magic myself, actually. It's more like I am magic. Though I've got a stock of tools from proper witches." He uses a loanword, there.

He flips a ring into the air towards the belul. "My name's Nikolas, what's yours?"

Yeah that's probably confusing and paradoxical on purpose to make him want to buy a better explanation. He considers it but in the end he doesn't.

"I'm Hanu."

"Nice meeting you. I'll answer a couple questions free if you like, I'm feeling uncommonly generous today as I am now beyond the reach of some old enemies."

What enemies and how sure is he that he's beyond their reach, are the obvious questions to ask but he said a couple and that's probably a distraction to get Hanu to use up his couple of free questions. Hanu is not fooled! Hanu is very careful with his questions.

"What's the thing you know and I don't that it would be most useful to me to know?"

"Good question! I don't know enough about what you know and what you want to know and what you'd find useful to know to know for sure, you know? But I'll guess unless you want to change your question now."

"I'd find it useful to know if anything was going to affect my safety or my ability to earn a living. Your guess will probably be good."

"Hmm. I intend to invent some things we have back home at some point that might affect your ability to earn a living - depending on what exactly it is, I'm still only mostly sure you're an information mage - but new inventions shake things up but leave everyone better off eventually back home, I've found."

"Is there any way I should change my behavior now to prepare for what you're going to do?"

"Not that I can think of right away, to be honest. Maybe get in on the ground floor investing when I have something worthwhile, but I would say that, wouldn't I?"

Aha! Hanu feels very clever right now. He totally called it. This is all part of a scheme to make money!

"Thank you."

Heh. Of course it is, in the background, anyway. It's also just - fun, relieving, to be able to chat about magic without fearing consequences.

"Have a nice day. Computers are going to be fun and profitable if I can get them working here. I advise you look forward to it."

Away he goes. He wanders for a while longer, listening and learning.

A belul is asking when some imported southern fruits will be back in stock fresh. They're available frozen but there's been some kind of problem with the contract with a defense mage to preserve fresh fruit the last leg of the trip north. If she'll pay in advance for fresh fruit sold as-is with no guarantee it won't have suffered in transit...

She won't. She buys some honey instead and sulks all the way home.

So fridges are out, not that he didn't already sort of expect that.

Illusion and information make telegraphs less attractive. Maybe radio. Maybe RADAR, to ease the burden on knowledge mages for air traffic control?

It'll probably have to be computers, though. Annoying. He doesn't know that much about electrolithography and semiconductor patterning, though he's sure he could figure some things out.

...Hmm. He'll have to figure out if knowledge mages can casually stomp all over encrpytion. Selling Nazi-style ENIGMA machines to a weird amoral society would be vaguely ironic. Or something.

More wandering and listening and looking thoughtful.

No one is conveniently making small-talk about how knowledge magic interacts with encryption.

It's pretty quiet. Hanu and people who overheard their conversation glance at Nikolas sometimes, usually carefully giving themselves plausible deniability about it.

There don't seem to be any caralendri or essi around.

...Perhaps he'd better get started on computing sooner than later. He has a little solar powered tablet with lots of tech books to read on it, but he knows where he needs to start.

He finds a smith and it turns out gold is about as cheap as copper here and easier to work with so he buys some gold and asks if the local smith can make extremely pure element fourteen, or if he'll need a structure mage for that.

Needs a sun mage, he can recommend one.

Turns out silicon is worth its weight in gold.

It's not monocrystal silicon with a thin coating of silicon dioxide, though. Structure mage?

The most easily available structure mage turns out to be that belul who was haggling over the price of blood earlier and is now being drunk from.

If Nikolas can describe the chemical structure he's looking for precisely enough he can have his silicon in that structure.

"A ring to know what you want it for?"

He can be precise enough. And he'll just come back and pay again if it doesn't work right.

"I'm going to use it to make a computer. We had 'em everywhere back home. I think they're great, very handy. It'll probably take a while and a lot of expensive trial and error though."

"Another ring if you'll tell me what they do?"

"Lots of stuff. Mostly math. But you can do amazing things with enough math done fast enough."

"Huh, it'd be interesting to see that. Remember I'm interested when you get it working. I might have a use for something like that."

"Sure. Big cities are bigger markets, but I have a good memory. Also, If I want to make them at any kind of scale I'll need full time structure mages eventually. A lot easier to get pure monocrystal silicon with you guys around."

"Yeah, I bet it is."

The mage looks pretty skeptical and just a bit hopeful.

"I think I'll be off to find Haria and get to work. Nice meeting you."

He goes outside and lurks, watching, and listens to the language tutorial.

Someone with the illusion magic symbol dyed into his fur comes wandering coastward eventually.

Advertising like that is convenient. "Hullo, I'm looking to pay you to make me a privacy item."

"Sure. How hidden do you want to be?"

"Very. And ideally something for my workshop as well, when I get around to making a workshop."

"You want something that'll hide the area around it or something that'll hide the area inside it?"

"Just the first, for now. And I have just the thing." He brings out an amulet with an image carved into it of an eye, but with a line through it. "Made it myself. Felt appropriate."

"And do you just want to hide from knowledge magic? Or do you want to be hidden from ordinary sight, too? Do you want to be audible? How big an area do you want the illusion to cover?"

"Hiding from knowledge magic should be enough." His pre-existing sneakiness will have to do for visual and audio stealth. Feels more correct, that way. "Hmm, five foot radius? Can you make it only on sometimes, say, only if it's touching skin?"

"It'll cost you more and to be honest with you it's possible to circumvent those kinds of designs, always on is safer. This one's for you to wear? Do you have an object you want the spell for your workshop on now or do you want to wait and have me enchant the room?"

He pulls out a second amulet made of a different kind of stone.

"Well, I can always stash it somewhere if I need to be knowledge-magicable, sure, always on. And this is for the workshop. But the workshop will be pretty big."

"How big? And do you want knowledge mages that you've allowed into your workshop to be able to use magic? Or will you be able to take anything out that you want a knowledge mage to look at? And do you want to hide the workshop from ordinary senses?"

"Fifty meters or so, at least eventually. I might find a smaller place before that. Yes. No. No - except for muffling sounds, both leaving and coming in."

"You want to wait and get that done on the walls. Unless you desperately need to start work in a tent somewhere before you can afford a room. If you insist, I'll do it, but I really think you'll regret it."

"Yeah, pass on that. The personal one will cover me just fine for now."

He has to go hunt some creature for blood and read up on computing manufacturing so he's not charging in blind, first. Getting that block of silicon was probably too hasty, though it's not like it was that expensive.

He can get the personal illusion surprisingly cheap, just a few dozen rings. Almost anyone can be hidden any time they want.

"If you like it you can tell people Haria the agerah made it for you." And he wanders townward.

"Sure, why not."

He goes off into the wilderness, looking for a medium-sized carnivore to drink up, and reading about early computing on his tablet.

There's a squirrel. There are birds. The woods give way to farms not too far away. Some of those farms have livestock, mostly sheep.

There are carnivores nearby but not the kind he can drink for free.

He's a vampire, he's fast. He keeps going. There's going to be big patches of wilderness somewhere.

There are farms and farms and farms. There's another small patch of woods. There are more farms. There are lots of livestock. There are lots of people who are culturally pretty chill about the idea of just asking if you can buy some of someone's blood. There are six humans having a picnic.

The nearest nature preserve is ten miles south and there's a fence around it.

Humans, rare but not nonexistent. He sort of wants to lurk and figure out what their culture is, if it's discernable from the general Hari culture at all.

Ten miles is a quick jog. But he probably can't just barge in there, it's a crime, right? This is more annoying than he predicted it would be. There are swathes of mostly untouched nature in America, despite rampant urbanization.

It would be weird to buy blood from a person and not hypnotize the event away. He's too used to keeping up the masquerade.

Sigh.

(And all these farmers are probably doing it inefficiently but that's not his problem.)

He finds a place with recently butchered livestock by smell and offers to buy some livestock blood. Preferably pig, not sheep or cow or whatever.

An entire pigful is available for a relatively reasonable price. The farmer doesn't seem at all confused, it really wouldn't have been a memorable event anyway.

Yay. Nutrition. 

(He doesn't let himself indulge in the thrill of the hunt like a shortsighted hedonist, but he still misses it on some level.)

He finds a lurking spot in a patch of woods and reads his tablet and downs large quantities of pigs' blood. It won't keep without dealing with more other people and he doesn't want to have to do this often.

No one bothers him. Someone visits the woods but doesn't seem interested in going anywhere near him, let alone interacting in any way.

He sleeps in the woods.

He goes back to the tiny village with a slightly better idea of the other exotic chemicals and tools he'll need to buy to make semiconductor chips, and also the idea that he really should start with electromechanical relays and mechanical storage and controls as a sellable proof of concept, instead of semiconductors. Or maybe try and sell radios. Because probably his first dozen attempts at viable semiconductors are going to be useless junk.

He goes shopping for springs and more gold and some basic tools and keeps an eye out for Valanda.

The next day he can find Valanda waiting by the sea for his force mage to come pick him up.

Boo! Nick is here. "That interview go well?"

"Nope, but maybe the next one I interview will be better."

"Out of curiosity, what qualities are you looking for?"

"Death mage, willing to travel to another continent. Able to be on call most of the time. Knows how to recognize and heal distemper, caralendar pox, rabies, tuberculosis, the flu... knows what they can't handle, knows when to admit they need to quarantine a patient and get help. Not afraid to enforce a quarantine, able to tell someone what to do and back it up. Fluent in Hari or Ilan, preferably Hari. Preferably not someone who owns anyone right now. Human would be best, agerah second-best, caralendar third-best. Under sixty, for a human, unless they're really exceptional and willing to teach their successor. Under seventy-two, for an agerah. Under a hundred forty-four for caralendri. Can tolerate being without the conveniences of civilization for a while."

"Bit of a list, yes. At any rate, looks like I won't be skipping quite as many steps towards computers as I had hoped. Turns out semiconductors are hard. I may well be willing to help you do things on your shiny island in exchange for the rights to hunt the fauna."

"What are you offering for how many kills?"

"Eh. I can build stuff. Boats, buildings. Calculator. I'm no force mage but vampires are still strong enough to fell and cut trees barehanded. And I spent years as a civil engineer and then a construction engineer, once. I know how to build very tall buildings with automatic elevators, no force mage required. I can sell the meat and give you tax money on it. I can do paperwork and infrastructure planning. I did a lot of research on obscure topics back home, tracking down lost magic, if you need something researched. I can map the land very quickly, what with the keen senses and excellent memory, if you haven't had some knowledge mage do that already. More questions on the crystal ball, which could land you good people faster now that I think of it. Favors from my other magical artifacts, which are numerous. I could go on."

"Some of those things could be useful. How much do you need to eat?"

"Roughly a pig's worth every two or three days, in addition to some of what humans more traditionally eat. Carnivores are better than omnivores or herbivores. Oceanic mammals are tasty but I can't catch 'em as easy."

"Some of what you're offering I don't know enough to evaluate yet. How about if for the next couple months you build things and talk with me about infrastructure planning and let me use your crystal ball when I want, and you can kill up to twenty pig-sized animals in that time, and we can decide if that's a satisfactory arrangement after a couple months of trying it? I'll throw in a free ride to my next interview and then back to the other continent."

"I'd honestly prefer more. Thirst isn't fun. Also, not unless we define how much I need to build and meet with you, because if it's much at all and you're not also paying me it's a better deal for me to buy blood from people and try and get a saleable calculator working."

"Maybe you should just work for money and then pay for any animals you kill. There's an established rate for a building minus the materials and enchantments, we can figure out a fee for your consulting services, and so on. I'm copying Ehima's conservation laws, including the pricing."

"I suppose it was the bargain I made that I can't just casually ignore the law, here." Sigh.

"I'll have a look at the conservation laws. It's probably still profitable to sell the meat, no? You may wish to adjust pricing down to attract hunters, or up to keep the wildlife unmolested, depends on what you want with it. Ehh, building... I can possibly collect and process materials for buildings for you, on site, but I'm not sure if that's a vampire's competitive advantage at that point."

"I'm not sure what your comparative advantage is yet, you're the first person like you in this world. And I'm not sure how much to trust what I've read about your abilities and I'm not sure how much to trust what you tell me. I'm sure we can't come up with the best use for you right now without trying anything, no matter what we come up with I bet in three weeks we'll think of something better."

"Well, if I claim to be able to do something and then turns out I can't, I don't get paid."

"That's true. But we can both make mistakes, I can phrase job descriptions badly or you can guess wrong about things you've never tried." Shrug. "What do you think is your comparative advantage in my colony?"

"Otherworldly ideas and technology. Automation and calculation. Doing things quickly. Miscellaneous planning and recording or recalling knowledge - my brain is sharp, like most of the rest of anything vampire. My mystical artifacts, which unfortunately do not always have directly measurable effects. As to technology..."

He digs out his little tablet and opens up a calculator app and does some math. "This is the sort of thing I may be able to make, eventually. With enough effort and construction we can have the internet - sort of like a bulletin board anyone can look at and post to, where you can shop or sell with anyone in the world without having to actually go talk to them all. Imagine a market of a hundred thousand people who you don't need to talk to to know what's on offer. Or being able to see the art that someone makes, or sell your art, to thousands and thousands of people without leaving your room. Or a game where a hundred different things could happen, almost like playing it against a real person, except it's just a machine. The applications are almost endless, really."

"I want that. How long would it take you to have a working calculator and an internet?"

"For a simple calculator, a week-ish, maybe less, and a couple thousand rings of supplies and tools. For real computers, which lead to the internet after that? I don't know yet. Complicated, expensive tools - though structure mages are going to let me skip many steps."

"Would you be able to get the tools and supplies you'll need in the colony?"

"Well, that depends on whether you have a sun and structure mage yet. I have some capital and can stock up fast, in an hour or two, if necessary, and just sell you the end product."

"I have people with those kinds of magic, not people whose careers are in those branches of magic. You can still probably get what you need from them but if you think you'd have better luck doing your shopping here I can meet you back here this afternoon."

"I'll be back then. With a crate, probably. Probably ask your people for some bits and bobs, but not most of it."

"We can carry a crate even if I bring a death mage back with me."

And that's probably his ride flying over the water.

"I'll do my shopping quickly!"

And off he goes.

Tools, various. Materials, also various. If gold wire is cheap he'll have his gold turned to wire, or else he'll just do it himself later.

It's not easy to get fine wire. It's not impossible, if he's determined and willing to pay. And of course if he'd like a gauge of wire suitable for a chainmail hauberk he can have that.

Sure, rough wire, he'll just make a ducting tool later.

Stop being annoyed about this place, he tells himself. You're far far away from meddling witches now.

It's a while before Valanda comes back but he does, with a newly hired human death mage, in a box slightly similar to a wheelless RV being levitated by one of his force mages.

"Good, I didn't miss the flight. Airports are so very badly run sometimes you know." He has a crate.

"Oh, yeah? What're your complaints? Maybe you can make sure mine is better."

There is room for his crate. There's room to get up and walk, if he's careful not to disturb people. There's even a futon-sized cushion for every person on the flight, including him.

"Oh, I don't actually have specific suggestions. Most of the gripes have to do with things that save the airport or transport companies money and have traded off against customer complaints. It's just a broadly accepted thing to complain about back home."

He introduces himself as 'an inventor' to people and settles down and reads on his tablet.

No one on board seems to think striking up a conversation with a stranger is a good idea. No one bothers him. Valanda watches an episode of a soap opera in Ilan.

"Real friendly, this place. Hmph."

And the only other humans on board are weird foreign culture humans. Valanda sort of gets it, but... Early computing technology it is, then. And sketching.

They pick up speed as they get farther from the mainland but it's a long flight, hours and hours. There are nuts on board for snacking. The death mage gets up and exercises.

"Let me know if you think of anything we need to talk about," Valanda says after a while.

"I could go over what I know about policing, and how people avoid it, where I come from? Seems possibly relevant to running a state."

"That could be useful! How do they do it where you're from?"

He explains American law enforcement styles and tricks of interrogation and investigation, the style of which probably makes somewhat less sense in a world with knowledge mages and without the overly elaborate trial system - crimes under illusions might benefit from forensic science though - and also various things criminals do to stay out of suspicion, which is more applicable.

"That sounds really stressful," says Valanda.

"Excuse me," says the death mage, "a ring to know where you're from and what you're talking about?"

"They worked with what they had. How did law enforcement work for your adventurer friend?"

And to the death mage, "Different universe. Law enforcement in said universe under vastly different governments and constraints."

"A ring to know how you got here?" says the death mage, handing over a ring.

"...I don't know how law enforcement works in Hyrule, we talked about what happens to criminals once they're caught but not about how you find them. I sort of thought that thing we don't have here, the one Hari doesn't have a word for, would make it easier."

"You want a bulk rate on the full story? Also, morals make it harder per criminal because the police have to be nice. I don't know how much morals drive down crime rates, though. Probably not none."

"How much for it and how long is the full story?" asks the death mage.

"Probably not that long. I just like confusing people. Milliways - an inter-universal bar that I can't control the door to, but I used to get here when Valanda so kindly allowed me to immigrate away from my old enemies."

He hands over a ring. "I don't believe you but I'll pay for stories of your old home."

"Oh, what genre of stories? Foreign magic? Technology? War stories? I hear you haven't had a proper war in ages here. Adventure and - ah, no word for that - courting? Crime-solving?"

"Yes, war, I bet wars make great stories!"

"Okay! What's your tolerance for blood and gore? Mine's pretty high and my - ah, ability to judge others' tolerance - is somewhat diminished. And how much exactly are you offering?"

"I watch The Law Will Find You for fun, that shouldn't be a problem. How about I decide how much I'm offering when I know how good your stories are?"

"Five rings for the first five minutes."

"Sure."

"Maybe come over here so I don't disturb anyone who's not into violence. Now, my world's magic isn't really good for war. At least, not directly. We have to use fire, pointy sticks, and our brains for that. But we're kind of alarmingly good at it, even in ancient times..."

And he gives a quick overview of ancient warfare, thrown stones and javelins and swords and bloody fists and crude armor, and starts in on a dramatic and graphic rendition of a Roman skirmish with Franks who were wholly unprepared for the invincible, unstoppable force of the Roman formation of shields-and-spears, the clever tactics of the Romans used to herd their foes like animals, pressing them against a cliff, using fire to panic them and keep moving forward until the Franks have nowhere to run, forcing them to surrender or die, the calculating, smug expression on the Roman commander's face as he counts his new slaves...

He hands over five rings. "It was probably like that when Har united the world. Wait, is everyone there human?"

"There are some near-humans, like me, but pretty much yes. Like my style?"

"Yeah, you're pretty good. You're near human? What does that mean, does it mean you're another species like the caralendri?"

"Plenty more where that came from. I'm a human who was permanently altered by magic. If I had children, they'd be human. Mostly."

"You had inheritance magic done to you? Is that what you mean?"

"Nope. Inheritance magic couldn't make a vampire. But the details of magic back home are probably under the umbrella of 'storytelling', aren't they?"

"I'll pay for the story of how you became a vampire."

Sigh. "I don't like to talk about it. It... Wasn't fun. Not except for more money than you're probably willing to pay."

"How much?"

He does need money. And this guy is... Cute. Like some kind of small furry creature. Well, not cute, exactly, but the innocent enthusiasm reminds him of happier times. So make it something to justify the irritation of laying it all out again, but not absurdly high.

"Oh, let's say a hundred."

"Why not make it a nice round number like ninety-six instead?"

"How is 96 round, anyway? A hundred is ten tens."

"I guess you can call squares round but usually it means a multiple of twelve. If you want a square price nine is three threes so eighty-one is more square than a hundred."

(Valanda laughs at them.)

"Aha. No, no, I've used base-ten all my life. Ten, hundred, thousand. There's a little magic helping me with the language, but that skipped right over my head! Ha. Ninety-six will be fine."

"Sure, that works. I'm curious."

"I really don't like talking about it. But it's all old wounds, and money talks..." Sigh.

"A vampire is created either in a difficult magical ritual, or when a human is drained of most of their blood, and fed the blood of another vampire. There's - something almost like command magic, which is automatic between a creator and a created vampire. They can force you to do things, and while willpower can stop this and it fades with time, it's not pleasant. I had... Returned home from fighting in a war only a few weeks ago when it happened. I wasn't in a good mental place, still jumpy and frightened of everything. When one of my only friends in the world called - technology, don't worry about it - contacted me from a distance and said someone was chasing him. I got my gun - weapon - and went to find him. I found his bloodless corpse in an alley. The vampire who ate him was still there and grinned at me. We... Argued, I shot her with the gun, it didn't do anything. She beat me, broke bones, and taunted me and..." He skips that bit, "Then turned me into a vampire. And kept me for a while."

The death mage is going to remember how to breathe any second now.

"Do you want me to turn her into a statue," says Valanda.

"Oh, a werewolf killed her a few years later, no need for that now."

"Do people do that a lot?" asks the death mage. "Can't your governments do anything about it?"

"Not to vampires, no. Normal murderers get jailed for life or executed whenever they can catch 'em. But vampires are more or less above the law back home, and also a secret from the general public. Magic is rare and most people believe it doesn't exist at all."

The death mage squeaks!

"Most of your world is those, those... animal-people?" Valanda shivers.

"You should've led with that," says the death mage.

"Animal-people? They're still just as smart, within variance. Witches are rare, that's all. What's the big deal?"

"Doesn't it hurt just to think about them existing?" says Valanda.

"...You're a real person, right?" asks the death mage.

"Ah, an age-old argument of philosophy! Just because you can't see the internal experiences of all these other people, you can't know for sure that you're not the only conscious being in the whole world and everyone else is an automaton, you can still take a good guess that since they tell stories, misinterpret things, learn and have desires and goals, so on and so forth, everyone else is probably conscious too, or at least you can safely bet that way and stop thinking about it so hard."

"They're creepy," says the death mage.

"I know they're people, I checked," says Valanda. "I don't have to like it."

"Well, I won't argue with you guys. One cannot help one's reactions, to an extent."

"You don't have to be around animal-people who want to hurt you anymore. Now you're around normal people with normal magic and you have a government powerful enough to keep people from doing things like that."

"Vampires have some psychological changes compared to humans that mean I am pretty much over it now, but, yes, benefits and drawbacks."

"Oh, that reminds me, it wouldn't be anywhere near enough but I can sell you a couple pints of my blood a month, I remember you said you prefer cannibalism."

"Cannibalism is technically inaccurate. And yes, a vampire cannot subsist on just one human at all. Pigs and wild game should do except for the occasional treat, though."

"Oh, you're like an erel?" says the death mage. "But for humans instead of beluli? ...I'm not selling, don't bite me."

"I won't. That's the main drawback of vampirism - high dietary requirements. I still need food that humans need. I can down other kinds of blood but it's disgusting."

"A ring if you'll tell me if this is what you want so many humans for?" he asks Valanda.

"Nah, but maybe I'll get some human immigrants advertising the, uh, job opportunities! What do you think, want to help me lure in more humans?"

"I do have to budget. But if there were enough humans to sell me fresh for all my meals I would be a fairly frequent buyer. Death mage whose name I still don't know, want to get back to storytelling? I have lots of good war stories left. I've barely touched tactics and strategy and haven't mentioned logistics at all."

"I'd love another one. Maybe not for ninety-six rings this time? And I'm Mahan, like the language teacher."

"I'm Nikolas. Or Nick. Ninety-six rings was a special price for bringing up a personal and still slightly painful topic. Let's say eighteen for the tale of the battle of Gate Pah, which pitted the most technologically advanced military in the world at the time against a very clever and brave band of warriors defending their homeland."

"Can it be twelve? Twelve is rounder."

"It can be twelve but I'll tell the story more briefly."

"Sure, let's hear the short version."

The British had the fury of seventeen large cannons, which he does not clarify are not actually magical, on their side. But the Ngatirangi made a fake fortification that, from a distance, looked like the real one and the British wasted all their cannonballs attacking empty dirt mounds. The British outnumbered them seven to one, but the native warriors were masters of confusing their enemies and using fortifications. Even as the British continued to advance, they found it difficult and painful. And when they finally broke through to the center of the enemy camp, the British found it... Empty? No! An ambush! The British, so confidently attacking, were now being attacked from all sides. Their victory evaporates in confusion and panic. Later, the commanders of both armies both compliment the other side's soldiers and agree to stop fighting long enough to tend to wounded and bury the dead. The native soldiers then leave carefully in the middle of the night, calling it a victory, having made the British bleed for little in return.

Yep that is well worth twelve rings. Mahan grins and pays up. "You said you had other kinds of stories too?"

"Sure. Crime stories- committing and solving, adventure and - still no word for it - 'courting' will have to do. Fantasy stories about magic we don't actually have, stories about how technology changes things, thrillers designed to be exciting, drama that wouldn't make much sense because we have very different cultures, maybe westerns - they're about a time when the law, such as it is, was still being established in most of America."

"Let's hear one of the ones you don't have a word for, maybe I'll figure out what word you're looking for."

After a price is agreed he can tell a very flowery (and somewhat lewd) dramatic romance! Youthful desires and hubris and furtive touching and longing hearts and rushing into things and contrived misunderstandings between the characters and authority figures who do not approve of the young couple one bit...

There's a tangle of different relationships and desires. Two men - Carlos (who is powerful and already married) and Raul (a young hard-working craftsman) - wanting the beautiful and rich Josa and competing for her attention, while Helena pines after Raul in the background. There are dramatic expressions of desire, elaborate gifts of jewelry and flowers, a duel between the romantic rivals, Josa's father forbidding her from seeing either of them (but there's no command magic, so she can disobey).

Carlos and Helena try to make it look like Raul betrayed Josa - Carlos so he can win her affection, but Helena because she still wants to be with Raul. But this gets cleared up. There's another duel, this time injuring Carlos.

In the end, it's Josa's choice who she will love. She picks Raul, who loves her with no ulterior motive and makes her laugh and is handsome, instead of the more selfish and scheming Carlos who mostly wants access to her family fortune. Carlos tries to have them arrested, but Josa and Raul flee the country on a boat and marry and go build a new life in America.

(There are pretty clearly social norms Mahan is not aware of and Valanda only dimly so, also 'marriage' is an official legal and usually permanent thing where he's from, not the casual version the most appropriate word he can find refers to here. He does his best to talk around them.)

"...So Carlos is a prostitute and Raul will fuck Josa for free but Carlos is angry his competition is undercutting him?" asks Mahan. "I don't understand any of that story at all."

"I get it," says Valanda. "It's because Josa wants children with someone who'll do things for her, because in other worlds they think parents need to love each other and do nice things for each other so the children can see. Because of that thing Hari doesn't have a word for. She's worried if she has kids with Carlos they'll turn out normal instead of having that thing. Right?"

"Yeah, you both kind of entirely missed the point. Pretty much as I predicted. Valanda's a lot closer though."

"A ring for an explanation?" asks Mahan.

"I'm actually not sure how to explain it to you, but I'll try. In our culture - Love is about wanting another person to be happy. Love is important to us. Also, betrayal is considered worse than assault, sometimes worse than murder, depending on the details. So. Raul loves Josa. He wants Josa to be happy above all else, above his own happiness, and showed this with the gifts and the compliments and dueling Carlos. Carlos did a good impression of wanting Josa to be happy, but actually just wanted money, and when Josa found that out she thought of it as a betrayal, as lies. So now she hates Carlos and loves Raul. Carlos did a lot of things that violate soft rules, moral rules, which have... Reputation consequences, and are supposed to be shameful and make you untrustworthy, but are not actually illegal."

"Oh, the word for that is 'rude', when you do something that's not illegal but everyone expected something different and hates you for it you're being rude."

"No, different thing, it's an alien thing we don't have," says Valanda.

"Is it since if you love someone being around them makes you happy, so they think you owe them for the happiness?" asks Mahan.

Valanda looks at Nikolas, confused.

"...Not exactly. If you love someone, being around them makes you happy if they also love or at least like you. Usually. If someone loves you, they don't automatically owe you anything, or you them, but you want to give things to someone you love, you think that buying them something they want is a better use of money than buying something for yourself sometimes. Love is about happiness, and trust, and safety... There's - all sorts of complicating factors. Love is almost never pure and selfless and mutual between exactly two people, there's pretty much always some other motivation and complicated factors - wanting power, wanting sex, wanting money, wanting to prove something to yourself or someone else... But some of the stories like to make it sound simple and pure, even if simple and pure love is rarer than one might think."

"Oh! Yeah, I feel like that sometimes when I love people, but why do you have whole stories about how rude it is not to?"

"The rude, the immoral thing Carlos did was act like he loved her, lying about it and manipulating her emotions. If he hadn't talked to her at all he would've been fine. 'Playing with her heart', one might call it. And people like talking and thinking about love and marriage, it's a very thrilling topic to a certain kind of person."

Shrug. "I'd still rather have both of them if I were Josa. But I guess she has the better one and she can find more men in America. Well, good to know you're off the table unless I decide you're cuter when you're happy."

"Oh, for children-tracking reasons you're only supposed to love one person in a sex sort of way. It's kind of stupid, but that's the culture. I don't care that much about love, but I'm not into men, sorry."

"Oh, you must not have inheritance magic, guess that explains it. ...How much don't you like men? I have rings."

For some reason, this is hilarious. He laughs. "A fair bit more than I don't like talking about how I became a vampire! By all means, make me an offer some time though."

"Hundred forty-four?"

"Nope."

"Two hundred eighty-eight?"

"Ha. Still no. It's not as mild as 'I don't like eating bananas' you know."

"Maybe when I'm rich."

Valanda is giggling helplessly.

"Being rich does make many things easier, doesn't it? I'm glad we're amusing you, O Glorious Leader."

"I am pretty glorious, aren't I? Thank you. And I'm glad you're glad!"

Giggling.

They don't get the reference at all, but he knows he's being deeply sarcastic.

"How much for one of your westerns?"

"Oh, another twelve will do."

"Sure, that works."

The story of the Tin Star, the Marshall, who is never actually named... He's been appointed as an officer of the law for the sparsely populated Landon County out west. The land is still untamed. Few buildings or roads. He has to ride a horse the whole way there, he'll be more or less the only enforcer of the Law within a hundred and fifty miles, with little chance for backup.

Trouble starts immediately. The Marshall finds a miner and a herder who are at each others throats, holding weapons up and shouting accusations. He does his duty and defuses the tension, questioning each side and determining that both men had been careless and neither was more at fault for the dead calf or thrashed mining gear. He convinced them to apologize and become friends.

The Marshall was the only force of law in the land, and he was put to the test again and again. Facing down a terrifying bear and killing it before anyone could be hurt. Refusing a generous bribe and then destroying a mining company's dam that threatened the whole area with flooding when they would not listen to reason. Tracking down and rooting out a brutal and violent gang dozens strong that would stop at nothing to rob and steal as much money as possible.

Gathering evidence and studying law before having a legal showdown with a fake Marshall that tried to take over the town. Riding out to track down missing people, make peace between settlers and tribes of Indians in the area, a dramatic showdown over a heavy stagecoach loaded with gold (no sun mages, it was worth millions of rings). Meeting, allying with, and defending an exotic Mexican countess and her band of monks.

And finally, uncovering a conspiracy that reached all the way up to the halls of the government, a desperate attempt by powerful business interests to destroy the rail-road being built at any cost because the competition would cost them money. After a pitched battle at a makeshift fortress and a wild train chase, the Marshall marched right back to the big city and arrested the whole family responsible for it all and saw them put to trial and sentenced to death.

The Law came to Landon County... And for a lot of people, this was good. They built homes and businesses and were safe and prospering. But for the Native Americans, this represented the slow, inexorable conquering of their lands by the settlers.

How would it have gone if the Marshall were not such an incorruptible agent of the law? Nobody would have known if he had taken a bribe or two, arranged to 'forget' about a couple of crimes. What if he hadn't made his narrow escape, any one of the dozens of times he was imperiled? What would the fate of Landon County have been instead. Probably poorer and more dangerous, perhaps abandoned entirely when the valuable mines dried up.

There would have been other Marshalls, coming in twos and fours as more people settled out west. But The Marshall was the first, and a shining example of law enforcement in the face of impossible odds for decades to come.

"What a close call, good thing he wanted order more than he wanted those bribes!" says Mahan.

"I guess that's a good use of that thing, you know the thing I mean," says Valanda. "It's good how having that helped them conquer the land."

"Yes, morality was very helpful in that case. It keeps people together, like the Mormon settlement I mentioned. Though I do sort of pity the natives. They weren't bad people. History is written by the victors."

"Yeah, it sounds pretty awful to be them, but they did get conquered eventually. Oh. Wait. Did they get conquered or just killed to make room?"

"Mostly killed or displaced to make room. They were given partitions of land to live on, but those partitions kept getting smaller... And smaller... And smaller. And American soldiers kept finding any excuse to go in and attack them. The Marshall helped them as best he could, even though he was ordered not to by his superiors... The one black mark on his record, and the reason he was fired from the job, though we think it was a noble and brave thing to do today. There are only a few million native Americans today, and most of them are citizens of America and not their old tribes."

"That's really sad what happened to them. At least the ones left are citizens of an empire now."

"Only a few million?" says Mahan. "Only more people than our entire world?"

"The natives numbered about fifty million before the settlers came. Today, America has three hundred and thirty million citizens. The whole world has about seven billion."

"That's a lot of people," says Mahan.

"Don't worry, if they ever figure out how to get here I'll just conquer them all," says Valanda.

"You'll have a hard time of it. America in particular would have unholy fits about liberty and freedom. And they're doing well enough on their own. Not perfect by any means, but well enough that conquering might not improve things."

"I'm not trying to get our worlds in contact! I don't want a war with your people. I'm just saying that if we did meet then I would win the war."

"I'm saying I doubt that. How would you go about winning a war?"

"I would make their soldiers stop doing things forever."

He makes a disbelieving-sounding snort and shakes his head and turns away.

"Why do you think I couldn't do that?"

"I do not actually want to describe the capabilities of the United States Military, lest you find some way around them, O Prospective Conquerer."

"How much don't you want to be sure your enemies won't be able to go through me to get to you?"

"My enemies are not the United States Military. Conquering America would be bad. And probably impossible without a huge army of your very own."

"So if the worlds connect somehow you hope Har falls, got it."

"Well, a nice peace treaty and some trade would be better for all involved, it sounds like. But if everyone thinks conquering America is the thing to do, they're gonna have a bad time of it, yes."

"How do you have a peace treaty and some trade?"

"Your diplomats meet with the other guy's diplomats and bluster at each other about your military capabilities for a while and then agree not to attack each other? Agreeing on and codifying some international law helps. I mean, we managed it. Mostly. But I'm not a diplomat."

"I guess it makes sense that that could work for a while but eventually you'll disagree about something enough to fight over it, won't you? Didn't you have a war in your lifetime?"

"Well, yes, several actually - America is kind of warlike - and they're kind of terrible, but wars are happening less often lately and many of them ended without any governments falling and without too much widespread damage."

Sigh. "I hope they don't find us."

It'd probably turn out fine. Cultural exposure would give the slave empire a shakeup, possibly for the better. But it's not his problem. "They're not likely to, at any rate."

"Yeah, they can stay in their horrible war-torn world and we can stay here in the Hari Empire! And someday we won't even enslave people who could look after themselves."

Nick will just sigh and go back to reading about electronics now, then.

It's a long flight but it does eventually end.

Their destination is the northern part of a frigid southern hemisphere continent. It's winter. It's near the antarctic circle. A dozen large tents have been set up but not much else yet.

"...Well, I can see why you need buildings, Valanda. Do you have proper maps yet?"

"Yeah, there's one hanging in the tent I'm running the government from. We're not done figuring out where the hazards are yet and we don't really have any idea what most of the continent is like but we have the shape of the coastline."

"I have books on arctic survival in my tablet. The wildlife might not all be the same, but the general principles should be workable. I can also test what sort of crops will grow here, unless you have an interested farmer already doing that. Or perhaps I can show you how to properly use greenhouses, heat mages could pull one off... Fishing might work better. You have to be careful with arctic fisheries but it can work."

"Why do you have to be careful?"

"They're a lot easier to overfish or drive the fish to adaptations you don't want because they usually regrow slowly."

"That's good to know. And how do greenhouses work?"

"You make a building nice and warm and fill it with planters of fertile soil and glass roofs to let sunlight in, or just artificial light that has the same components as real sunlight, and you can grow plants in there. They're probably expensive compared to just plowing some land, but with this kind of weather and this far south a year-round food supply is probably a good thing."

"Ah, yeah, those shouldn't be too hard. We'll have to use illusions for the lights, I guess. Here, come in out of the cold and see the map." Valanda holds open a tent flap as if there's absolutely no chance he'll let the cold in.

"Just remember it has to be sunlight, not just light. Also some plants care about the schedule of the light, use it to figure out when to flower and so on."

He follows.

"I could probably make a snowmobile and other big engines. Get a heat mage to do this, got up a Stirling engine... Hmm. Works best with bigger ones. Is waterborne shipping done around here?"

"Nothing is done around here yet. Or do you mean in the whole empire? It happens, yeah, but flying gets you more places. There's the map."

It's a rag with an illusion on it. Their location is marked. Everything about the map is very approximate.

"A whole new world. Okay. For proper city planning you could use a surveyor's map. Precise and showing elevation lines and flood potentials and so on... I can use some of my gear as survey tools. Back home it takes big teams months or years to survey places, but vampires are fast. And I would also note down interesting resources or dangers. Or I could work on the calculator. Or I could help your force mage dig a foundation and basement for a nice building and show someone how to make concrete - concrete is a great building material - and get you something more permanent and inspiring and comfortable than a bunch of tents.  How much are you charging for hunting rights, exactly?"

"Depends on where! If something wanders into camp you do what you want with it, assuming no one else gets to it first. We're thinking of saving these areas undisturbed." He points them out. "Especially since, here, this orange dot? It's a volcano, we think inactive. ...If you've learned that word I'll be amazed, it's the thing where a mountain spits out hot melted rocks. We think we're a safe distance and we have force mages but still. We could use a more detailed map, especially if you can figure out where will be good places to build things. When we know where they should go we'll start on buildings. Concrete would be great, I heard about it in Milliways, it sounds really useful. Let's see, what materials do you need for a survey that you don't have yet?"

"Ooh, a volcano! I want to go take samples. Maybe set up a - earth shaking monitor - when I get the chance."

He describes a few things that will make good surveying tools. He doesn't have computers and lasers, but the Romans did it with little more than levels and measuring sticks and he can improve on that. Oh, and paper, he'll need a fair bit of paper and ink.

"What kind of samples and monitor? Are they for guessing what it'll do? And I can get you all those things, there's paper here."

"It can predict earthquakes and volcanoes some of the time! I'm not a seismologist, but there's probably a book on it in here, I have a whole freaking library. The samples and chemical analysis - I would use a knowledge mage - can tell you things about the history of the volcano. What level of detail should I survey the local area to? The rest of the place? And how much does this gig pay?"

"I want to know how suitable everywhere in a twelve-mile radius is for building on. I want to know if there are previously uncontacted people somewhere on the continent. I want to know if there are any dangers I'm likely to wander into or that are likely to come find us. I... don't know what else it'll be important to know, I want to know the things I should've asked about and didn't. I don't know how that translates to a level of detail. Does that sound like the kind of thing you'd do for... four thousand six hundred eight rings?"

"So a map with maybe two or three miles resolution for the continent will make me visit enough spots to be sufficiently sure I find any natives or particularly lurking dangers, I'll pick my favorite projection... A proper high-resolution survey of a twelve-mile radius from the camp would still take a very long time, but you don't need that high of a resolution to judge building suitability, only if you're actually about to build something on this particular spot..."

He does some quick mental math.

"If I stick to rough measurements and looking for building suitability for now I can do the camp area survey in two solid days. Twelve miles is big, I'm not that fast. I could cover an eight mile radius in a day. Exploration and a less rough mapping of the continent will take probably four or five days. I could speed that up but it risks missing something. Does four thousand six hundred eight rings for fast and skilled and mathematical work that still takes about a week sound fair to you?"

"It does but I can go higher. How much seems fair to you?"

"If you tried to get this surveying done any other way it would be far, far more expensive. Surveying a continent was a multi-decade project for the American government. But it will be helpful for building up, later. For the continental exploration - 12960 for a three-mile one, 5184 for a six-mile one. Six-mile will still probably find any big dangers or natives. For the construction suitability survey, 3888 for eight mile radius or 7776 for a twelve mile radius. You will get multiple, carefully drawn, highly detailed maps that can be used for all manner of infrastructure planning. I can do only the northern part of the continent, or only a two or three mile radius construction survey, for far less and you can see how you like the results before shelling out that much."

"Of course it would, but it's less than a week's work for you. Can I get you to do the continent exploration for 5040 instead?"

"There's this thing called 'comparative advantage'. Exceptional skills and abilities demand exceptional price. Continental exploration at six-mile resolution for 5040 works fine, pay reduced for the conservation fee of whatever I feed on in that time. If you want to cut that in half and only have me survey the northern bit, say so now?"

"No, I expect if I ask for that it'll turn out the southern coast is home to polar animal-person tribes planning to go to war with us as soon as the weather warms up. The whole continent, please."

"As you say, good sir. I take it my crate of stuff will be guarded here while I'm gone? Will I have to pay a storage fee?"

"Yeah, you should rent some space in a tent, we've got some of them partitioned for that. Talk to Ahgari about it."

"Very well. I'll take the cash infusion but I do want to spend my days tinkering away once I have a nest egg. Two last things, do I get any of my pay up front, and how often and for how much will flights back to the mainland be for now?"

"Flight prices are gonna depend on when you want to leave and how comfortable you want to be, could be anywhere from thirty-two to two hundred eighty-eight. How does half up front sound?"

"Well, that's cheaper than a flight on a jetliner would be. Half up front is fine."

It's convient how he's taken to carrying some grosses and four hundred thirty-twos lately, otherwise this would be much more tedious. "Shall I expect not to see you for a week?"

"Most likely. I might be able to squeeze it down to four, five days."

And off he goes to rent storage space and gather paper and gear, and then set off... North, to the coast. As good a starting place as any.

Fjords! Looks like this planet is in an interglacial period. There are picturesque snowy cliffs to fall off of and die. The ocean isn't frozen this far north, but it's not exactly balmy.

Untouched wilderness, or close enough. Very nice.

He runs along the coast and inland a ways and starts mapping. He roughly sketches the fjords, notes elevation and sandy beaches and paths to the shore and takes occasional soil samples to see about arability and takes notes on flora and wildlife and permafrost and swamps and so on. He works his way east, running and sketching the whole way.

His breath almost sings with the freedom of it. He's no Lewis and Clark, but a whole new world, indeed.

He digs a snow-hole to sleep in a few hours after dark and gets up and does it some more.

Around noon the next day he gets close to the camp again and goes out of his way to deliver the first section of his exploration map to Valanda, covering the northeast. It's a very nice map, all told, detailed compared to the first one and with lots of little color overlays and symbols of points of interest - from 'fresh water/harbor- possibly city site' to 'fertile soil' to 'unusual and interesting animals here'.

"Oh, very nice, I'll have an illusion mage copy it. That coast is so strange, isn't it? We still can't figure out why it's like that."

"What, the fjords? Thick masses of ice millions and millions of years ago make fjords like that. Valleys that got covered up when it all melted and the ocean rose."

"Wow! You know a lot, maybe when you're less busy we should have you teach people geology."

"Product of being ninety six years old and a curious soul and my civilization having figured a lot of stuff out."

"You don't look ninety-six! How do you age so well?"

"...Ah. Be a vampire. We don't age so far as I can tell."

"How do you think becoming a vampire would interact with my command ward?"

"I have no idea, they're two totally separate things. Also I am reluctant to create new vampires willy-nilly."

"Yeah, it's something to worry about. But if you ever change your mind I know of someone who'd pay a lot if you made him and the rest of his species immortal."

"Is this person a human? Because vampirism is also untested on non-human sentients. My species is convenient some ways but really not in a lot of other ways."

"He's not a human, but he already drinks blood, they all do."

"Oh, the Erel, huh? Well, I'll ask the crystal ball about it some time and if there's no dire warnings maybe find a consenting informed volunteer, all that jazz."

"Yeah, probably a good idea to ask it first. You'll also have to learn to understand ereli if you want to make deals with them. Or hire a translator." Shrug. "It might not be the best thing you can do but I thought you'd rather know than not know."

"I'm going to finish your survey commission for now. And then make a calculator. And then I have ideas about heat mages and engines and maybe shipbuilding, that'll be fun. Any critique on the map, by the way?"

"Not unless it turns out it's wrong somehow! I'm happy with it so far."

"Grand. Shall I continue on, then?"

"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?"

"Penguin. Big old flightless bird, about yea high - I have the meat and blubber and skin, actually, frozen nicely, probably going to sell it. There are some wolverines - lone hunters, smaller than most people - I didn't go after one of those because there's not many of them, but plenty of penguins."

He goes over the other notable dangers - landslides, unstable ice and permafrost in places, the extremes of weather that are reasonably likely, the phenomenon of exploding trees - usually just kills the tree but it could kill you if you're undefended and unlucky.

"I'll make sure to warn people about the trees. I guess maybe we'll want to handle forests differently than they do at home. How familiar are you with the kinds of things you found?"

"I'm not extremely familiar with the arctic, but I spent a couple of years in Alaska and Ontario hunting down magic and there are a lot of similarities to what's around here. Exploding trees are only a danger in deep winter."

"Good to know. Oh, I heard you have a medical textbook you want copied, any book-copying can happen at my expense if I can have the copies, I could really use a library for people to study from without having to go back to the mainland."

"I was offering that as a favor to Mahan. I won't be held liable for the absolute accuracy of everything in my library. And if you're going to make a library you can have 'em but I want a contract that says you won't sell the copies without giving me some."

"I don't mean this as a threat but does that mean you don't want any further copying after you die? And what if I sell to someone who resells the copy? And what about renting them?"

"If I die I don't care what happens to the books after that, but I don't plan on doing so. Renting them out I want the same percentage cut as selling them. Let's say fifteen percent. Isn't there a law that can forbid copying? Then again I imported most of these, didn't write 'em. If you want to sell access to a library with these books in it, I'll want... One ring per year per copy per book. That's pretty low, I think. And this can all expire in ten years so it's not hanging over you forever. Oh, and I don't care about resellers, only when you sell them."

"Ten years sounds a lot better than forever for making sure everyone has an incentive to be nice instead of try to kill you. Some states have laws about copying things that aren't published, and this is one of them, but not about things that are. One ring per year each works. I could end up selling copies for different prices depending on if I'm the one covering the cost of copying, seems unfair that if I pay an illusion mage or spend my time hand-copying a book I should have to pay more than if I just sell someone the chance to look at it and they make a copy. And I'm worried you might end up feeling cheated if someone just pays to read and then walks out with a copy without telling me, I wouldn't know to pay you for that."

"Isn't murder illegal? Oh, right, there's no concept of 'copy rights' here. In America there are laws about copying published things, so the person who published them can make money off them and people are encouraged to write and publish more things. Hmm..."

"Of course, doesn't mean it never happens, sometimes people don't realize they'll get caught. So in ten years of having 'copy rights' on these books, how much would you expect to make?"

"Inventions like printing presses and the internet made it incredibly easy to copy things on a large scale and that's about when copyright laws got put in. I'd expect to make... A lot. Especially if some of them get really popular. Accounting for the different market, I really have no idea how much a publisher would expect to make over ten years here."

"I'm not sure either. Back in Thelm Ret the library... might have made more than 3456 rings a year from reading fees, probably not much more? I'm not very confident of that. What fraction of that do you think sounds fair?"

"That's not much at all... You could earn more renting the space to live in than using it as a library. You know what, how about I just charge you per-hour for access to the tablet while you copy things out the first time? Seems simpler, and you can choose what kind of books you want and do whatever you want with them, not my problem anymore."

"Sure, how much per hour?"

"Eh, twenty, but I get to forbid certain books. Some of the science we've discovered can be used to do nasty, nasty stuff and we probably don't want knowledge of it going hither and yon."

If no sun mage has ever killed themselves making plutonium, he'll eat his hat. But it's not a trivial leap from there to bombs and he'd rather keep that whole category secret if he can help it.

"Twenty's fine, do you want to list the books I can read or the ones I can't?"

"I'll do a thing that makes it only list ones I want you to be able to copy, hide the rest. Most non-fiction books have tables of contents at the front to give you an idea what they're about, helpfully enough."

Pause.

"...Oh, damn. My books are all in English."

"At some point I can maybe get someone to translate, knowledge magic can do that. I think. I'm not sure if it works for writing." Sigh. "I might be able to pay for translated versions but you have other things to do right now."

"I bet it works. Though translating is more of a skill than just literally copying words with new meanings, you get crappy nonsensical translations that way. I could do better. Maybe later. Oh well, it was a good idea until we realized it was impossible."

"It really was. Maybe if we find Milliways, we can do it in there. Well, what now?"

"Unless you want me to plan a building for you or show sun and structure mages concrete, I go build a calculator."

"I'll probably regret not asking for that right now but go work on your calculator for now and tell me if you think of anything else you could do."

"Right. Quick question. Why do you use imperatives so much?"

"Just to be clear those aren't orders as your governor, you can retire to a quiet life as a penguin farmer if you want, you don't have to make a calculator."

"Figured as much. But phrasing it in ways that they might be inflames the red hot Texan blood running through my veins with the spirit of liberty and rebellion." He says this completely deadpan and heads for the door.

"Anyway, see ya."

Valanda says nothing at all to that.

Nick collects his crate from the storage tent and says hi to Mahan and tries to find the heat mage.

The heat mage is a tired hundred-forty-year-old caralendar woman sitting on a rock outside. Her breath doesn't start clouding till it's a couple inches away from her face.

An elf, huh. (She's not an elf, don't let that bias you, they probably have few if any elf-like qualities that will translate from your cultural zeitgeist.)

"Hi. How much to make a metal disk permanently as hot as a fire and another one permanently almost as cold as ice?"

"Twenty-four rings each. What kind of fire? How close to ice cold?"

He names some measurements for temperature. Stove fire, not firestorm, and less than a degree above freezing. And counts out rings and presents his disks and puts on gloves. (What a bargain for infinite free energy!)

"I take it your gloves are warded, last chance to change your mind about holding something as hot as a fire in your hand."

And if he doesn't object he can have his burning and almost-freezing whatever-they're-for.

"Not exactly, but it'll be fine."

Off he goes, carrying them away from camp along with his big crate of other tinker's toys, humming cheerfully.

He comes back into camp to ask a structure mage to do something random and strange that evening, and the next day he goes shopping for a little blood and chats with Mahan, trying to see how much exactly he knows about medicine already.

"Do I get to see the textbook now?"

"Ah, sorry, I totally forgot - it's in my language, English. I'll probably get around to translating... Soonish. Maybe when I finish my calculator. And Valanda is thinking of hiring a knowledge and illusion mage to take copies of my books, though knowledge mage translation is probably going to be iffy."

"I hear writing's tricky to translate. Well, how long will I be waiting if I have to wait for you to finish your calculator? Maybe you could translate the medical textbook first?" Mahan fingers his rings.

"I'm a few days away still, but I feel bad about this." Strange, but true. Mahan doesn't deserve to be jerked around too much.

"Tell you what, I'll translate the first couple of chapters before getting back to work on the calculator and you can read those while I finish. Textbooks can be kind of dense but I can try to translate around that, I have a little magic helping with that but it's not so good at being direct. I was going to let you read it off my tablet for fifteen, maybe twenty, rings an hour, but since I have to actually translate it... Hmm."

"Ninety-six rings for an hour of it?"

"Sure! And vampire brains run hot, I'll get a lot more translating done per hour than a human would. You have to buy the paper and ink though."

Mahan snorts. "Fine, fine, you can use some of mine." He packed a lot of it, mostly for spell planning.

He finds a corner and pulls up An Introduction To Medical Science on his trusty solar powered tablet and gets to work, short pauses as he thinks, then bursts of speed, his hands moving so quickly they're blurry. He leaves blank spots for the diagrams - an illusion mage can fill them in later.

Mahan spends the whole time thinking about uses for that kind of speed. Ground transport? Polishing metal? Friction heating?

"What was your job before you came here?" he asks when Nikolas is done.

"I've had many jobs in my many years. I have had recently good work as a... Researcher and courier, I suppose one could say." This is code for stealing and fencing while looking for magical items. Not that Mahan needs to know that, law-abiding as he is.

"If you run as fast as you write you could be really useful. Especially if you can carry a passenger. Getting people in small towns to doctors is hard, what we have for that on the mainland isn't good enough."

"I can carry someone but it might be a bumpy ride. Not ideal if you're already sick or injured. A worthy cause, but I think I'd rather solve that by inventing something. Have you tried bringing the doctors to the people?"

"Yeah, we have, we do that, the imperial government pays for it. It's not enough, it still takes them time to get anywhere, and we're not sure what they'll decide to do about us down here. The force mages could fly me but they have jobs and we're expecting we'll end up with fewer of all the useful kinds of mage, including force mages."

"Well. I may have something for that in the works... A way of getting around quickly without a force mage. But it's a secret for now." He must think he's terribly clever to smile like that, though.

Mahan also smiles. "Let me know if you need investors."

"I certainly will. I need to make tools and use those tools to make more tools and then I can use those tools to get to work properly."

"When do you expect to see some return on your investment?"

"Hard to tell. I'm not going to be making new tablets like this one for a while. The calculators are going to be fairly popular, though. I know Valanda wants one."

"Mmm. Do you have the instructions for the things you want to build in your handheld library?"

"I'll be leaning on it a lot, yes. But it's very hard and also I know a lot of this stuff inside and out already."

"So the hard part's not figuring it out. Hm. If you knew when you'd be able to pay it back I'd offer to lend you a few hundred-forty-fours of rings or so."

"I should be good for capital for a month or two. I'll keep it in mind if I need more. Probably will at some point. Oh, say, you know anyone who'd buy some penguin meat or sell blood?"

"Selar would probably sell blood. I might like penguin meat, what's a penguin and how much do you have for sale?"

"Penguins're big old flightless birds that live far down south. Twenty pounds or so, cut up and frozen by the weather."

"How small did you cut your chunks, can I get half a pound?"

"Yeah, sure. Be right back."

And in ten seconds, there's about half a pound of bird meat, frozen. "I'm looking to offload all of it on someone if possible. I'll shop around, I guess."

"Frozen like that it'll keep even if you don't sell it all today. What do you want for that much?"

"Cold-frozen meat eventually degrades. Maybe I'll pay our vaunted defense mage to preserve it. Eh, 24 rings a pound sounds good to me, so that's 12."

He pays. "I assume neither of the agerah wanted it or you wouldn't need to ask me. Shy about new meats, are they?"

"Oh, haven't asked them. I saw you first thing when I got back. I should go do that, since I've got two chapters done for you. And find blood."

"In that case I'd try Ahgari first, he eats a lot."

"Off I go, then. Enjoy your modern medical knowledge."

And off he goes. Ahgari, do you want some penguin? Selar, selling any blood? Valanda offered too, but the budding governor puts him off slightly.

Ahgari would love an entire penguin. Selar offers a pint of human blood for seventy-two rings.

Penguins and other wildlife are cheaper, after the conservation fee. But he'd have to hunt one down, anyway, and Selar is right here, and human is really that much better than wildlife.

"Price go down any if I have an invention that makes it mostly painless and quick to heal? Needle and pump and sterile bag."

"Sixty rings if I decide afterward that it really was as easy as you make it out to be."

"Got it." He hands over all seventy-two in good faith.

He has a professional-quality blood drawing kit, antiseptic swabs and all, and pint bags, knows exactly how to use them.

Selar hands him back twelve rings afterward. "That wasn't terrible. I hear it's a bad idea to sell blood too often but if you want more in a month or two I can sell you more then."

"A pint every eight weeks is the rule of thumb for what's definitely safe where I'm from. I'll probably end up subsisting mostly on wildlife, but human's nice. Species thing."

"Must be pretty awful to have to live off the wrong food."

"You could technically survive and get all the nutrients you need for this balanced breakfast on unflavored rice and soybeans, it'd be cheaper, but it wouldn't be tasty."

"Well, come find me again in eight weeks if you want food with flavor."

"Gotcha. And I imagine there'll be more immigrants sooner or later."

Anything else to do around here before he goes back to work?

He could offer to help the force mages who are digging (it's not much harder for them to dig when the ground is frozen) in preparation for laying down pipes. Or meet people.

No one seems to be looking for him, though.

Back to work, then. After paying Mahan to sterilize his blood-drawing gear. "You'll see stuff like this in chapter... I think it was 12."

"Can't wait, let me know when you're interested in translating more."

"So much to do, so much to see... I certainly will."

And now back to work for real.

He builds a little igloo to protect his expanding inventory of tools.

Anything interesting happen in the next two days?

Not that he'd need to leave his work for. There's argument and an explosion and Selar rants for half an hour but none of it gets in Nick's way if he doesn't want to get involved.

Oh, but now he's curious, sounds like a fun time. What happened?

Someone came up with a brilliant idea for water heating that was supposed to work better and faster than the standard way with no need for any defense magic on the plumbing. Selar thinks Saraisan the heat mage should have caught the flaws and refused to help and wants her replaced. Saraisan insists she was giving a demonstration of why the idea was so bad, to make sure they didn't go with it and have a mess like this after all their pipes were buried and ready for use.

Valanda settles it before it gets any worse.

Nick forms an opinion on the water heating idea: Yep, that gets you explosions. Have they heard of blowoff valves? They could use some blowoff valves. And maybe pressure joints.