She spins around, abruptly moving backwards five feet as she does. Her hand goes to a dagger on her belt, but doesn't draw it. "Okay. So did Kell or Durant send you, and how'd you manage to sneak up on me?"

"...There seems to be some sort of. Anomaly or misunderstanding or something. I don't know who Kell or Durant are, you summoned me, I'm assuming it was an accident, I appeared in this circle."

"I summoned you? I... wasn't aware that was a thing. I was just diagramming a new spell, I haven't even shaped out the stream for it yet. I'm sorry?"

"Oh, it's... no trouble. Looks like you did it by accident. Ah, where are we?"

"Three miles off a trail six miles off a side road ten miles off of the Opri-Nel mainway. I didn't want anyone spying on my experiment."

"I was more hoping for planet and calendar year. And I have a very good idea, but this situation is as far as I know unprecedented and it might not work, plus I'm not sure I want to go home yet."

"Planet? Why would the planet have a name? Year - 6893 or 1201 depending on who you ask. Telra tried to reset the yearcount, but it didn't catch on in most of the rest of the world."

"I see." Pause. "So, I'm a demon. Demons make things. Do any things need making around here?"

"...We could use a lot of things made in a lot of places. Preferably spread wide enough that no one person or small group controls them, because that would be likely to result in unpleasant political and social consequences. In the short term, I would like you to make proof."

Cam has part of a grilled cheese sandwich left. He holds up his other hand and makes a paper cup of tomato soup. Dip. Bite.

"That is sufficient proof. Do you have access to the bluestream? If you don't, roads and buildings and water pumps and elevators are still physical things, we can just go straight to installing magic instead of needing to build them."

"I don't know what the bluestream is. Perhaps you could tell me."

"Demons can casually add almost anything we want to our bodies. Subtracting's a little harder. None of this bluestream stuff sounds remotely familiar; my magic's costless."

"You're a demon? Either my mythology's wrong or you're awfully benign for one or you're running some sort of con. Any which way you'd terrify Durant, he's a scheming, monopolizing hawk taking advantage of tariffs and market scarcity. Oh, shapers can be made. At least from humans. You sit in one of the stone circles and if you're lucky, you get sensory deprivation and then magic. If you're unlucky, you get intense pain."

"Your mythology is wrong - well, I'm assuming, since you didn't realize I was one or know we could be summoned or that we make things - and I'm pretty benign for a summoned demon."

"My mythology says that demons are empathy-less creatures capable of disguising themselves as anything, who eat magic, enjoy watching suffering, and cannot be killed. And I appreciate it. What kinds of things can you make?"

"I may or may not be able to make anything that is inherently magical - I can't normally do it but it might be that I could if I were copying something. I need surprisingly little but still some information about what I'm trying to make. It can't appear more than about five or six times as far away from me as the sun, can't appear in motion, and must be matter, not energy or antimatter."

"...The Senate likes to ban books. Useful books, even. Can I have a copy of Yero Green's The Art of Healing and Transmuted Medicines?"

"I could conjure it from that description, but I don't know what's in it, so I would have no way to know if you just asked me for a misleadingly titled book on how to make high-yield explosives or something unless I hung onto it and read it first," Cam points out.

"It's a medical treatise by a renowned doctor who supposedly made more progess actually understanding the body's microscopic workings than anyone else. It was banned - well, the ostensible reason was that it's dangerous hogwash, but my friend Link claims it's not, that the Senate doesn't want improved medical care because it might threaten the power structure. I'd treat it with appropriate skepticism and not stick people with strange medicines before testing them on rats and monkeys... And I know how to make explosives already, though I get the sense you wouldn't appreciate a demonstration."

"...It seems, not guaranteed but extremely likely, that I know more about medicine than Yero Green. Also, I am immune to conventional forms of harm and don't actually mind that much if you demonstrate an explosive here with nobody around, presuming you know how to avoid getting yourself killed. What the hell kind of power structure is even plausibly threatened by improved medical care, what, do you do your agriculture with zombies?"

"...No, those are fictional. The kind of power structure where the oligarchs have relatively advanced medical care all to themselves and want to keep it that way, is the idea. Not that I give it much credit. But for the off chance the book is actually useful and actually has some decent medical advances in it, I'm willing to spend a lot of time researching and verifying and testing things on mice. And being very careful and conservative when applying the things that worked on mice to humans, I'm not stupid. Though if you have better medical knowledge than him that is entirely welcome."

"What are some relatively recent medical advances that you know about?"

"Morphine, which we make with magic but is not magic all by itself. Less invasive heart surgeries. A way to repair ruptured blood vessels by careful incremental transmutation, though it doesn't work on capillaries. I don't know how to do these things, I'm not a doctor, but I know of them."

"Okay, so not dismal, but I'm way ahead of you. ...Of course, none of my medical textbooks are in a local language."

"Presumably there exist language textbooks, yes?"

"The languages you speak are completely unrelated to any languages I've encountered before. I got your languages when you summoned me, so I can translate, I could probably even come up with a curriculum, but there are no textbooks aimed at local speakers."

"Where did you come from, anyway, with different medical advances and different magic and so on? And would you mind stepping out of the circle so I can get to work on my sun-eater spell? Oh, it won't eat the sun. It's supposed to let me survive for a long while on nothing but sun and water by turning carbon dioxide and water directly into sugar."

Cam gets out of her way. "This circle should be all used up as far as summoning demons is concerned, but do they usually look like this? I live in a place called Hell, but there are other places, most notably Heaven, Fairyland, and the mortal world."

"Spells are usually more efficient in terms of cost to build their structure if they're circles. Actually marking out the circle is for convenience only, I can do it completely invisibly for magic I have more practice with. Let me know if or when you want to go home. If you can. Because if Kell annoys me enough that I finally snap and run off to the northern fringe or the stone teeth, er, the mountains in the west, you might not be able to find me."

"I don't actually anticipate wanting to go home and stay there in your lifetime unless it's to test whether summoning and dismissal work as normal here before collecting other daeva for some large project."

"Actually, if you die - assuming things are working normally - I go straight back to Hell. If I were inclined to run off cackling you'd be unconscious, not squished."

"I can make you wings. They'll even work. If you ever want to take them off again, though, you will have more trouble with that than I would if I wanted rid of mine."

"Morphine is a thing. Magical cutting and cauterizing is a thing. I'd need a doctor, but not a quest across the ocean to the Ancient Shrine of Power or anything."

"Oh, no, that's not the problem, I can make them without nerves in the joints and you can slice them right off without feeling a thing, you'd have to worry about blood loss but it sounds like you have that under control, I was just talking about the scarring and the muscles in non-wing locations you need added on to work them. I can define what is and is not part of my body at any given time and anything that isn't doesn't tend to stick around to wear out its welcome, be it scar tissue or extra layers of pectoral, but you don't have that advantage. If it doesn't bother you I can totally make you wings and the substrate for them, what kind of design do you want?"

"That doesn't sound like any fun," Cam says. "Okay, I can do these - I might have to deviate from your design on the internals here and there to make sure they'll get you in the air, but they'll look like this and handle about how you're expecting. ...Your shirt has a back."

"It can be useful, too. If I'm about to do something I'd regret, I sometimes remember to hover or slightly warm up a cubic mile of rock or something instead. Ah. Yes, it does, and so do my flying leathers. This may have to wait until I find a tailor unless you want to appear clothes for me on top of wings."

"I can get you a new shirt," says Cam. "Specs on the new shirt?"

"Like this one, cut for extra back muscle and wing holes?"

"There are front muscles too," Cam says. "Have to anchor the whole thing. It may affect your balance, too - improved mine, but mine was shit to begin with."

"I can catch myself with magic by changing the next half-foot into a tiny section of road-magic if I fall. A sort of - clip or button to help getting it on and off over the wings would be nice, though. It won't change my overall shape too much, right? No looking like a barrel or anything."

"Nah. I mean, I could do a neater job if I were an angel, but that'd also take a lot longer. You'll maybe need to replace more of your wardrobe but you'll be about the same shape. I was thinking halter top style? Tie it at the small of the back and behind your neck?"

"That'll work. I might need new flying leathers for winter, but that can wait. Thank you, by the way."

"Hey, no problem." He hands her a new shirt and turns his back, whistling.

She walks down the other side of the slope a ways, and is back a couple of minutes later. "Will it hurt at all?"

"Not directly. It'll feel very weird, and if your nocioception is wired atypically it might make you tense up enough to hurt that way. I can sedate you if you're concerned."

"Unless your sedatives can wear off in five minutes, I'll take my chances. I am confused about what you might want as payment, since you could just make a mountain of Silver Circles."

"I usually work for book recommendations, but I do not need any today. I just plan to be here long enough that this amount of work is nothing compared to your ongoing goodwill, you know? Say when."

She closes her eyes. "When."

"Flying might take some work. You can catch yourself if you flub it, I guess."

"But if I catch myself out here I'll get tired and weak, which likely does not make for good flying. I'll wait till there's a road, and I can fly with bluestream if I fuck up doing it with wings. They're very pretty, though, and I'm getting proprioception. Convenient. Thanks again. I've no interest in a tail, though."

"Suit yourself." Wag. "I like mine, but they're not universal even in Hell."

"Recommend me a book," shrugs Cam. "Actually, recommend me a library, more efficient that way."

"Eh. Fiction or non?"

"Do separate libraries have those?"

"A whole library is a lot of books, and I don't want to be responsible for including things you'd be bored by. Alright, try Opri Grande's main library. It's a university for shapers."

"Cool, thanks." Cam makes a bizarre stick-shaped device, which appears in his hand and proceeds to project light in a square beside it.

"That is not a library. That is not a book."

"No, it's my computer. With the library on it on top of everything else usually stored there. Demons can do format conversion just fine even if translation evades our magic."

"I have to assume it's some sort of incomprehensible technology. Are all five thousand-some books written inside that somewhere, ridiculously tiny?"

"It's... more complicated than that. Sort of, though. Five thousand, really? That's an entire library here?"

"Well, it's the school's main library, which is kept pretty tidy generally and doesn't include all the specialties. I was concerned about the size of five thousand books, let alone a hundred thousand. If you want all the books just go grab Capitol Spire's library, archives and all. They'll have five of anything Opri does."

"But now that I've already made the computer I have to make an entire separate object for that," he says, making an entire separate object and wedging it into a space in his computer.

"I did not know computers were a thing. Sue me for wastefulness, you might even win with all the gold you could toss around."

"I'm teasing. Mostly; I do try not to make more things than I have to. Can't get rid of them without setting things on fire or equipment I cannot safely have here."

"Sensible to be careful with space. It's not like you're going to run out of things. If you want to read about the bluestream, try looking for Why Blue? An Overview of Magic's Biggest Questions. A bit rambly and philosophical, but otherwise a good introductory theory text. For fiction I'd recommend the Ace's Tail series. Ace is a wandering adventurer who rights wrongs where he finds them. They're a bit two-dimensional, but I like them."

"Sure. Thanks." Cam prods his computer into coming up with appropriate character encodings for the new alphabets, and then tracks down the first book mentioned.

This is all very interesting. Cam wonders if a circle would even work on him. He can probably get most of the conventional end results that these people use shaping for his own way, but multiplicative possibilities with his tech and making are tantalizing.

Cam wonders what on this planet makes bluestream... but it seems they don't actually know.

"Just water?"

"If you want to make me apple juice or raspberry sourdrops, I'll hardly object. No caffeine or alcohol or anything stronger, please."

She gets apple juice. Sparkling. "There you are. Hey, I want to test a thing. If I make a butterfly can you tell me if it does something to the bluestream like making your wings did?"

She takes a swig of juice. "Ah, carbonation. I'll watch, sure. Appear it a few inches above a hand so I know where to stare."

A couple seconds' pause, then. "That did - something. I was listening and looking both. I heard a faint echo of bass, almost like what healing makes. Your soup was different, almost transmutation-y. And it was like the butterfly - shoved out all the fog that was in its way when it appeared. It has a strange outline, though not as strange as yours. What kind is it?"

"Blue morpho. I promise not to make two of anything until I know what species you natively have in the area. What's my outline look like?"

"Like a person. But a weird person. The features I know to look for to see if you're sick or hungry or hurt just aren't there at all, and you have some weird, almost non-geometric twist to half your patterns. I don't think anybody would notice it unless they looked closely."

"There is a distinct limit to how much I can get sick or hungry or hurt without my own express permission. The twist I have no idea. Can you name a local butterfly species?"

"Tricolor Copperwing, eastern variety. They're local."

So Cam makes a tricolor copperwing, local as can be...

"Okay, there goes one hypothesis on what the heck bluestream is. Well, partially, anyway, maybe the difference would be too small to see or I made the morpho incorrectly."

"What was the hypothesis, exactly?"

"The book mentions there's less bluestream at higher altitudes, and also that living things affect it. I don't have a good way to test the hypothesis 'there's a magic rock at the core of the planet' but I could give a whirl to 'life on this planet has something about it that generates bluestream'."

"Oh, I can make us a little spaceship. Trouble is, then there's a little spaceship, and I'm not confident I want to leave one lying around."

"I mean, I could also slag it. Just trying to be thoughtful. Elevators, water pumps, and all manner of exciting agricultural devices are also available once I know how best to distribute them."

"Hmm. I want to warn you, the balance of power needs upsetting, but if we do it hastily people will be hurt more than they need to. The Telra Senate likes to send in the army when any one city grows too powerful. They call themselves a republic, but... Each city gets one vote. Guess who casts the city's vote? Whoever's been appointed by the Senate to oversee the city. The current system is better than lawless anarchy, but by appearing things you have a good chance to undo it without the tremendously nasty 'civil war' parts in the middle. You'll want proof, of course."

"I do tend to like to know what's going on before I disrupt governments, however dodgy their systems of representation."

"You'll notice I'm not asking you for weapons or anything else government-disrupty. Do you want to try making a few more alive things now, see if I can find a difference, or start hiking back to town since you don't seem to want to make a ship?"

"If somebody sees a ship going up or down what will they think it is?"

"As long as they see it from a fair distance they'll probably think it's someone's magic experiment. It's fairly well-known that abandoned wilderness is the place to do magic experiments. Small chance you'll set off rumors of disaster, unexplained flying objects are signs of calamity to the superstitious."

"That's not so bad. All right. Wanna go to space today?"

"You're immortal, or claim to be. I'm not. It's safe and reliable?"

"Yeah, humans in the mortal world I'm accustomed to do space travel routinely. Some of them live on the moon and others have colonized a second planet."

"In that case, yes. I'd like to try to learn one of your languages at some point, even if there's no translation-dictionary. Seems like it'd be convenient."

"Sure. How do you best learn second languages?" asks Cam, picking a flattish spot to make a little two-seat shuttle.

"I learned Henta by listening to a description of the grammar, learning the alphabet, memorizing a few basic nouns and verbs, then total immersion because I was in the Crownlands."

"And that seemed pretty straightforward to you? All right. So, I speak lots of languages, and my computer can translate serviceably between all of them. You want something similar in structure to one of yours? Something you'll find easy to pronounce? Language with the best vocabulary and most native work?"

"It could have gone better, but I managed." In Henta, "Hard work may not make an adult, but avoiding it makes a child. That's an old proverb, and one I took to heart. A compromise between grammar and most available work, would be nice."

"Okay... do you mind viciously terrible writing systems? Because Chinese is very popular, especially in writing where the dialects don't compete, and it's got deliciously simple grammar, and its characters look like this and there's thousands of them." He shows her a sample on his computer. And opens up his spaceship and motions her in.

Steel pauses to investigate the spaceship. "Does it use the Reaction Law to fly? Tlane is symbolic like that, but honestly Chinese doesn't really appeal if there's thousands of different characters to re-learn. I can tolerate grammar in exchange for a phonetic alphabet like Henta has."

"I don't know of a Reaction Law under that name. I can give you a physics lesson but it'd take a long time. How regular do you need your phonetics?"

"The reaction law states that anything exerting a force has an equal force exerted on it in the opposite direction. Moving things with the stream is thought to push against the entire planet, but this has not been proven. Two or three different pronunciations per letter would be fine, especially if grammar can help tell which to use. A dozen, no."

"The reaction law is involved but not the only thing going on here." He takes off, thinking about languages. "Maybe Italian. How pronounceable does this sound?" He speaks a couple sentences of Italian.

She repeats them and only drops one vowel. "Close enough. What did that mean?"

"This is sentence in Italian. It has a lot of interesting cadence but not that many vowels," translates Cam.

"Ha, we haven't introduced ourselves yet. My name is Jean, but please call me Steel. It's traditional for skilled shapers to take a nickname. By subject-verb-object, do you mean..." She says 'you' 'fly' and 'ship,' which is not a correct sentence in Tlane.

"Yes, like that." He makes her a piece of paper with the Roman alphabet and a description of the corresponding sounds in her own and hands it over. "Alphabet, sample sentences on the bottom, sound 'em out."

She rolls through the alphabet a few times, singing the sounds to a little tune, and repeats the sentences with slightly varying pronunciation for a while.

"Except you can use it to fly, right? How fast?"

"This suggests that it still cares about the frame of reference of the planet. Mind going higher?"

"Not at all. But I need to be back in Opri three days from now, so no long journeys, please."

"But it's not falling behind, like we're flying away from it and it can't keep up, it's just disintegrating?"

"Yeah, it's just disintegrating. And adding to the fog in the ship, which is seeping outside the ship. That stuff outside is really thin but it isn't falling behind either."

"Okay. So... close to the planet, magic wants to stay stationary relative to the planet. Farther away from the planet, it wants that harder. Far, far away from the planet, it doesn't realize there is anything to want and sees no reason to behave at all. To anthropomorphize."

"I think it more wants to be stationary relative to the largest or nearest-by clump of physical stuff. Like... It seemed like it was trying to be stationary relative to our ship, but that effect lost to the planet's bigness. Can we land on one of the moons?"

"Sure." He fiddles with the instrument panel, and descends to the largest moon.

"Are you allergic to anything?"

"Hm. Not as far as I know, but I don't know all the things you might put in food to be allergic to."

"Probably safer if you're more specific so I can copy something you've had before, then. I can deal with an allergic reaction but I'm sure you'd rather I didn't have to."

"Indeed. How about a pear shortbread cake, filled with cranberry preserves. Made by 'The Orchard Bakery' at Opri, 382 Echo Street, 4th floor, Suite 3, if you need a specific example."

Pear shortbread cake with cranberry appears, complete with paper plate; he hands it over.

"Paper. Because it's disposable, right?" She takes a bite. "Ah, tastes like it's fresh from the oven. Thanks ever so. Any new hypotheses on the bluestream?"

"Maybe it just likes matter and life separately in different way. Planets and butterflies alike. Moon's smaller than a planet, spaceship is very little compared to either..."

"It seems like it likes sticking to matter, and life makes it. But hey, people have been trying to figure out what the bluestream is for centuries. Even with otherworldly knowledge and a damn spaceship, it's a bit impatient to think you'll figure it out in a day. Incidentally, I'm starting to get tired of not being able to make even little magic things stick around."

"Right, back down we go. I can probably find where we took off from, but you might want to help navigate when we're up closer." Up up and away from this moon.

Some of my stuff is still where we took off. Nothing private. You could land us closer to Opri and let someone else find and use it if you don't mind replacing it. Then again, may as well go get it because anywhere near the city will be harder to hide this thing. Where we took off is a fair bit to the west and a little to the north of where a certain canyon splits into two canyons. I'll point out the specific trail I was following when we get lower."

And Cam lands near the rock. When they have exited the ship, he considers it thoughtfully, then makes a tarp and a layer of sod that blends in with the landscape over it. "That should do for now unless it's obvious in bluestream or something."

Flowers, copied from local incidents. Decorative shrub.

"Will it be conspicuous if I fly?"

"No. You have wings. Fully functional wings are pretty uncommon compared to cosmetic butterfly wings or something, and yours are an unusual design, but they're a known thing. I'm only walking because I don't trust myself to not fall out of the sky yet."

"All right then. Lead on. Have an Italian children's book." He presents her with a book, and then he takes off and takes his computer off his belt loop to read while circling over her.

"Move your wings together. You might want a running start. However good you are at reading while flying, don't do it on day one." He lands; his computer becomes surrounded by a nice-but-battered-looking leather case and goes back on his belt loop. "The important thing is to keep air under you with lots of surface area and glide as much as you can; flapping is tiring and also cuts your surface area for part of the time you're doing it, so only flap if you have to."

"I... can't easily tell by looking when you're using magic for it or not, which doesn't help me give you tips. I can take off from a still start, it's not necessary to be moving, a lot of people just find it helps."

"That's when you stop moving your wings together. Which way do you wanna go? That wing goes down, other one goes up -" He get a bit ahead of her. "Watch." And he smoothly swoops left.

"If I fall out of the sky, appear something squishy below me, please." And stop flapping, get used to gliding for a bit - woah the wind changes, well of course it does - and she dips one wing, raising the other, to slooowly bank left.

"All right." He flies nearby, not close enough for his wingbeats to foul hers.

She ascends some more, and practices sweeping left and right a little more sharply. "I was right. This is thrilling! With the stream you're just pulling yourself along, but this is like - playing soccer against the air or something."

"This metaphor is new to me."

"I don't know. I'm not really thinking about words much right now. Hey, you can see the mainway from here. Opri's over there, shall we head in that direction?" Point.

"Sure."

Fly, fly, fly. She does a shallow dive, but holds off on any more daring tricks. "Say, what're you reading?"

"More advanced theoretical magic stuff."

"Ah. I've probably read half of anything on construction or thermo-kinetics you find. Half of my job as civil service administrator is researching better spells and double-checking everyone's work. Is it giving you any ideas on how to make my employees' jobs redundant? Because that would be pretty great, given how many people are tied up in this. Maybe we can get the compulsory labor repealed if workforce needs drop far enough."

"I mean, maybe, what do your employees do with themselves?"

"Work the water pumps and monitor the water quality. Operate the public elevators. Light up public areas at night. Make and repair buildings, bridges, roads, tunnels. Deal with snow and other inclement weather. Deliver letters and packages. Keep stores of food for emergencies. Keep emergency services ready to respond to fires and injuries. Attempt to predict earthquakes. Maintain the magical infrastructure for all these tasks."

"I can spruce up your water handling, I can make elevators that don't need a person in them, um, electricity is a thing, I can make buildings and bridges and I can under some constraints make roads and I can produce tunneling-related equipment. I can't control the weather except to add water to the system, which you proooobably don't want me doing on any significant scale, but I can do snowplows and maybe tweak your postal algorithms and supply vehicles to do mail runs in. I can make shelf stable food, although I don't want to screw up your infrastructure for doing that yourselves in any way without knowing lots more about my long-term availability and public reception. Similar with emergency services, although I can do snazzy firefighting gadgets and if I'm satisfied your police aren't evil little tyrants I can do policing gadgets too. I can do medicine, great heaps of it, I'm specially trained. I cannot predict or prevent earthquakes; what I can do is cause them in more or less the same way you might already start small forest fires to prevent accumulating tinder, but it's a risky proposition. I cannot interact with your magical infrastructure at this time."

"Electricity: tame lightning. Runs all the cool future swag. I can probably do some of your water stuff on pure mechanical if you want though."

"Tame lightning. That's a bit of a scary thought. What would be best for the water stuff is things that are low-maintenance or at least low-workforce. Is the general plan here 'improve things and deal with violence or other unpleasantness as it occurs' or something else?"

"My plan is 'implement unambiguous, safe improvements while getting enough of my bearings to make fewer things ambiguous and more things safe'."

"I'm not really... scared of an army? Like, it seems like your magic system all has to play with physics, so I expect my ability to break physics attempting to harm me will remain intact. Also I could just sort of tranquilize them all." He lands where directed. "It could get inconvenient if they did something like hold civilian hostages or invent the deadman switch but I'd still give myself swell odds."

"What's the practical difference?" he inquires, tail slowly drifting left and right.

"Temporary residents are subject to taxes for any money they earn, inside or outside of the city, as long as they're registered as such. They are also permitted to own real estate and enroll in the public schools, if they so desire. And temporary or permanent residents are ineligible for extradition."

"Visitor, please."

Cam writes his nickname phonetically and, finding the W in his surname awkward in this alphabet, just translates it. Male. ...Twenty-two. Not attempted. Tourism and visiting friend. Not applicable. "Do you have a summary somewhere of the local laws and ordinances?"

"Don't harm others except in self-defense or registered and approved duels, don't steal, don't cause a public distrubance, if a guard or member of the police tells you to do something obey, don't harass people, don't interfere with the operations of the government, don't distribute controlled substances without a valid medical license, no public obscenity, which means you'll need a shirt... There's more, but that's the majors covered, I think."

"Ah, right. Here." She hands him the shirt that wasn't there a moment ago.

"Thanks." Cam puts it on. "What are the limits on what guards and police may tell people to do?"

"Okay, I can live with that." Sign.

"I should hope so," the guard mutters. "Wait... You filled out the form incorrectly. You're a shaper, right?"

Steel has half a second of Cam blinking politely to step in before he has to make something up.

"Will do."

After they're away from the guard, "I could have sworn I warned you. Wings make people assume you're a shaper. Shapers can withstand our method of body modification more easily than non-shapers."

"Yes, you told me that. You didn't tell me it meant I'd have to pretend to be one. I can't produce proof of that on demand - can't see the stream, can't transmute things unless I happen to know enough about their chemistry to do it by making and then only in limited ways, etcetera. What about being a shaper helps with the add-ons, anyway?"

"Keep in mind that I'm not a full doctor, I only took a half-load of med courses for three years. Our way of body-modification is a lot less finessed than yours. The going theory is that shapers unconsciously support their add-ons in ways that baseline humans can't. Shapers will grow capillaries in a new appendage all on their own, they generate their own skin and sweat glands, their new bones grow marrow without grafting, their minds more easily learn how to control new muscles, and so on. Non-shapers do none of these things, so it's all manually created, and it's too easy to miss something and end up with a defective body."

"Huh. I don't see what about shaping should do that."

"Me neither, but the evidence speaks for itself. Are you going to find a hotel? I'm not that keen about letting you sleep in my apartment, to be perfectly honest."

"I don't have to sleep. Does the city completely go dead at night? I can just wander around, familiarize myself. Or find some nook to read in."

He follows her. "Aren't they just?"

"I like this layered look. I bet Fairyland has cities like this. Hell can't organize well enough and Heaven does a cave network shtick and humans where I'm from can't fly."

"I think the reason we're vertical like this is so that we end up with almost a cube or sphere of constructed bluestream. It doesn't degrade nearly as quickly when it's in the middle of more bluestream. I wonder if you'd like to see the urban farms later? They're very magic, compared to using fields and natural sunlight."

"I mean, I won't be able to see the magic, but it could be instructive anyway, sure."

"Now people have conflicting stories about whether I'm a shaper," remarks Cam. "Hopefully that doesn't bite me."

"...Oops. Well, Lina isn't very gossipy at least. And they aren't supposed to make you use magic, you can lean on that if anyone confronts you about it."

"Yes, I caught that."

"Not bad for working without electricity. I'm going to guess you don't have hot running water? How's the water pressure, is taking a shower here like getting rained on?"

"We have hot water, heat is easy. But it's usually lukewarm or cold again by the time it gets to whoever's using it. Most showers aren't very strong, especially if the building's water tower isn't close to full."

"Right, so I can definitely improve things. Where are you collecting the water to begin with?"

"Some from the river in the canyon, but the city of Nel kept complaining that we drain the river too much, so I convinced Grind to pay for a drilling operation and now we get most of it from an aquifer about half a mile below ground. This was a couple years ago. The whole thing is chugging along without me, now."

"Aquifers do not have infinite supply. I don't know how big yours is; do you?"

"No, I do not. I just know it's there. I think we're the only city in the prefecture that collects from an aquifer, at least. Nel drains the river, Zalti pays for supply from the east in an aqueduct, and so on. How would you measure the aquifer, anyway?"

"Ways and ways. If I knew how big it was I could refill it; if I try that blind I might pop the sucker. Will Nel mind if I dam the river as long as they get the same amount of total water directed back along the same channel by the time it gets to them? Collecting energy from falling water is one of the best sources of tame lightning. I can also do floating windcatchers and solar panels but you'd want lots of them and they have a little eyesore problem - like, I can do pretty solar panels but you are kind of already using your roofspace more than I'm accustomed to humans doing."

"Nel wouldn't complain, probably, but whoever's upriver from us might. I'd have to look at some maps and do a flyover to tell if anyone's house would become a lake if you put down a dam."

"Well, yeah, one does generally do a survey before these things. I know how."

"And the dam would be to power the new pumps and new everything else you make here?"

"You could get enough juice out of it to power other stuff too unless it's a really puny river. ...The hot running water thing will need to involve installing new plumbing systems in all the plumbed buildings though."

"Many buildings already have hot water plumbing. They use separate tanks on their roofs, they just need to be made hot magically."

"Oh, I may have misunderstood. Is there a separate thing at the faucet to solicit hot water, and it just doesn't work that well?"

"In most buildings, at least, yes. The problem is the tanks that supply hot water don't keep themselves hot, they must be kept hot by someone physically visiting and magicking at them, which is moderately annoying."

"Right, I can fix that, and insulate the pipes, and if that doesn't do it there can be smaller electrical tanks at more points throughout the building so that the water doesn't have to travel so far. Getting electricity from place to place involves wires. I don't have to gut a building to put wires in the walls because I'm a demon, although it will help if I can get enough access to see what I'm doing."

"Sure. What do you grow here?"

"You know, I might be able to get you better higher-yield seeds and kinds of food you don't have, but I likely can't improve on the setup otherwise without spending a lot of time hanging out on farms personally. I'm very impressed."

"Sleep well. I'll go familiarize myself with the city and read things."

He peeps at a restaurant to see if they have a style of disposable cup he can copy so as not to stand out while drinking lots of coffee. He can always go with the more direct caffeination route if necessary, but he does like coffee.

The only disposable cups anyone uses are made of a breadlike substance that doesn't seem to absorb liquids.

A few people passing by give his wings interested or curious looks, but nobody bothers him. After a couple of hours it starts raining.

His computer is waterproof but this will make reading a "book" suspicious. He emerges from his nook to see if anyone here has an umbrella so he can just have an umbrella.

Nobody visible from here has umbrellas. Mostly they are keeping to spots that happen to be semi-enclosed so that no rain blows on them.

Dang. And he hasn't spotted any plastic either, which means no transparent poncho to tuck his "book" under. He makes a bag, with a strap that goes down between his wings comfortably and looks like innocent canvas on the outside. Stashes computer, its discreet case, and fake book cover. Finishes current cup of coffee, nibbles rim of breadcup. Goes back to wandering the streets, not much minding being rained on.

Cam declines both offers of employment. While he is a very pretty demon he does not think the line of work is for him in any quantity. For the stove: "I don't really specialize in kitchen equipment, sorry."

Cam finds a place to sit, sits on it, and resumes surreptitious reading. When nobody's looking he dries out his hair and clothes with puffs of hot dry air.

He can keep surreptitiously reading until morning.

There is a different receptionist this morning. "Hello sir, what business do you have with the Civil Service today?"

"I have some business with Steel."

"I'm sorry, sir, but she hasn't come in yet this morning. You can wait in the lobby if you like, or I can take a message for her."

"Sure." In goes Cam, tail aswish.

"I should probably introduce you to Grind before making any major changes. She's the big boss of civil services. Were you going to fly over the canyon and check for inhabitants?"

"Inhabitants, structures, suspicious geological features that might not benefit from being underwater, yes."

Cam blinks at the... tone of this interaction. "Uh, hi. I was really impressed with the farm I saw," he says. He also liked the vertical layout and the bread cups but maybe those are everywhere in the world.

"I've never been there so I couldn't say."

"So why are you here? What's got Steel so interested in you she gives a damn personal tour? You're not her boyfriend, I can tell that much."

"I am not her boyfriend. Uh, your ostensible motivation was to know who to go after if I break something. I'm not planning to break anything and now you know who I am, why do you care so much about my opinions and personal life?"

"Because Steel wants permission to have you do things to my city."

"Yes. Non-breaking things."

"What a friendly person," remarks Cam.

Shrug. "She gets things done."

"It's probably going to look pretty weird if the detailed plan looks like 'Cam is going to donate a lot of wire he has, don't ask where he's keeping it, and install it in buildings, don't ask how he does it so fast'."

"It would be a lot easier if you were willing to tell her that you have a new kind of magic. We can pretend it's more limited than it actually is, maybe. I don't think she's the kind of person to question strange magic systems. If you said you were doing it the the stream she'd have thousands of questions and demand to see the diagrams. But foreign magic? How does she know what it can and can't do?"

"If you say so. There is separately a question of how high-tech I should make the dam and wiring and things. It's almost a linear tradeoff between features like efficiency and safety versus the ability to easily teach locals to maintain them. I won't be making anything with a manufacturing defect, I have no reason to use flimsy cheap materials, and the high-tech stuff wouldn't want upgrading or replacement nearly as quickly - but if something catches fire or someone goes around deliberately cutting cables you want to be able to patch it yourselves if you can't get ahold of me, I assume."

"I had to train people for three months to use the pumpjacks and filters without constant supervision. Some training is definitely an option. Can you make things - modular? So if the power cable is cut or the primary whatsit breaks you can just pop in a new one. Then they can have a supply of spare parts."

"Yes, for the wiring that works. I can color-code and standardize everything since I'm starting from scratch. It won't work as well for the dam, which is an enormous architectural thingummy."

"We have people who know architecture and mechanics and water physics pretty well. Whatever technology that makes the electricity, not so much. I should keep learning Italian, maybe I can translate some useful books."

"At its most basic, electricity is generated by shuffling magnets around. It's just convenient to make the water move the things that do the shuffling. I'm thinking I'll make a properly modern dam. Done to demonic engineering standards and in sufficiently robust materials, it should last for at least fifty years, which is enough time to get people who haven't even been born yet trained in how to patch the thing. If it breaks you'll need me, but that only becomes a serious problem if I make hundreds of similar installations and they're scattered on multiple continents."

"That sounds like a plan to me. Time to make it more detailed?"

"Sure. I hope there's a good place to dam it or this will have been a lot of wasted speculation and you'll have to make do with tidecatchers or windcatchers or solar panels."

"We're nowhere near the ocean. Tidecatchers may be impractical, and also be in other cities' territory where they can do what they like to them. Is anything involved in the surveying other than flying over it and making maps, possibly with a telescope or other detecting things?"

"I will have to estimate the capacity and speed of the river. Other than that, that's basically it."

"Nah. I'd have to do something with it after."

"Then I will fly with you and attempt to practice Italian, as long as you don't mind."

"I don't mind," he replies magnanimously in Italian.

Also in Italian, "I, uh, can have a computer? Read books, and not carry books."

"Hmmmm," says Cam, "sure, let me just think." A few minutes later he makes a small black rectangle, which then lights up - "Put your thumb on it so it won't wake up if anyone else touches it, and then I think it should be straightforward from there - just poke whatever it looks like you want it to do or show you, and instead of turning pages you slide your finger from the bottom to the top of the screen and the text moves along with you."

She tries it out. It's pretty intuitive, though all the labels are Italian. She opens a book-reading program, and then opens a book. "Thank you. Is it fine if I ask you 'what does this word mean' some?"

"No problem."

She puts the shiny new computer in a pocket, then knocks over a box with one of her wings while turning around. After hovering it back into place, she heads out the front door and flies. "This way to the river."

Cam follows. He reads things on his computer once they're high up enough.

River. What an interesting river. Cam flies low enough to see if there's anything that shouldn't be underwater in the canyon.

"They don't still use it?"

"Someone might be squatting, but no, not this one. There's another station with real pumps at the top of the canyon a few more minutes up. That's where we get any river water we use these days."

"Okay." Cam makes a note to chase out any squatters in the old water station. "Where's the source of this river?"

"A series of springs forming tributaries in the highlands about two hundred mules north-east. Two cities draw from the springs, Lehr and Knip. Nobody else between Opri and the source draws from the river proper."

"Okay. I'm gonna go up high and get a topology snapshot - don't follow me, I'll be making my own air when it gets thin but it's hard to do that for someone else without tripping them up - and run some programs, see where it'll naturally drain if the river rises and if I need to change that by dynamiting something, etcetera. Forty-five minutes tops."

"I'll determine the presence or absence of our water station squatter, then fly circles around the bridge. See you in a bit."

Cam goes up. He takes pictures and lets his computer assemble them into a topographical map and proposes to a different program that he could put a dam here or there or wherever and plugs in Steel's figures for the water volume. He finds where it's going to drain, overflies the area edge to edge to edge and finds nothing more than wildflowers, and then goes to catch up with Steel - for higher confidence in his software results he needs to know how much it rains around here and upstream, but he's almost ready.

"There are no squatters in the old place. There were a few old files, but nothing important, I burned them. I'd say just let it flood. As to rainfall figures..." She digs through a notebook from her backpack. "Here we go. These are for the local area. Unfortunately I don't have any for prefecture 6, where the springs are."

"Would you expect it to be more than..." He plugs in the figures and his computer spits out results. "...fifteen percent greater per year or thirty in any given month?"

"Probably not... We both get the same weather patterns for the most part, there's no really major geography between here and there to change it up."

"All right, so, probably safe, but we could check, how hard would it be to check?"

"Author and title - is there a standardized title system for rainfall records?"

"In Opri, yes, but not between different cities. It's possible they're in your computer- I believe you appeared it with the entire Senatorial library, including the archives."

"Oh, yeah, good point. Should be all done processing the character sets after it had overnight to do it..." He searches the library archive for the relevant rainfall stats.

It's a bit of pain. The relevant information is in no less than nine different documents. But it turns out that the recorded rainfall in Lehr and Knip and surrounding areas is pretty much the same as in Opri.

"Okay, cool, we're well within tolerances. We could notify Nel as a courtesy, or I could just sit nearby and add water past the dam while it's filling up the canyon so they don't experience any interruption in supply, what do you think?"

"The latter. If you warn or apologize they will feel entitled to reparations and be annoying. If they never notice a problem at all they will not."

"All right. Anything else to investigate before I get started?"

"Yes. Where will you install the wire that goes between the dam and the city? What else is electricity good for than water pumping and heating? Will the things be dangerous by themselves? If tampered with? Whose property will it be?"

"Electricity is good for light, and moving stuff like elevators and kitchen appliances, and once you've all got used to it being everywhere you can attach all kinds of stuff to it - the computers need electricity, they just have some of it stored. I'm gonna make a big insulated wire with a plug on the end in the city - and I'm gonna give it a remote receiver so I can fiddle with its output from miles away - but I'm not gonna turn the turbines on and make it actually start generating anything until I have something for it to power, so there won't be any current. Once there's current, if someone gets through the insulation that's dangerous, but I'll make it real thick and bury most of it in earth and grass so it's not an attractive nuisance. The dam and its output are mine leased at the most generous possible terms to the city of Opri, so I can pay off anyone who decides to be obnoxious without having to counterfeit too much or find specific material goods they individually want; and Opri can buy it off me if they like, and if they really piss me off my lease terms will get less generous."

"Sounds good. You owning the thing will help reduce the amount of obnoxiousness you face, at least once you demonstrate its usefulness."

"Nobody claims to own this canyon or that field over there or anything, right?"

"If they do, they aren't using them for anything. Any complaints won't be very enforceable."

"It's one thing to see a shirt or gadget appear from nothingness... You could build mountains. You could build moons. I'm starting to wish I was a demon instead of a shaper."

"I could build stars!" says Cam cheerfully, stepping onto his new dam, wings spread and tail twitching for balance. "I haven't personally but it's been done. Shaping is great too, don't get me wrong, and I spent years on my engineering curriculum - and these software tools I used to help aren't parlor tricks either, just being a demon won't get you casual hydroelectric generators just like that. But yes demons are super."

"Can you redo the pipes to the new water level and install electricity in our pumping plant a little ways upriver? Having something useful actively using the power will be more convincing. And it won't count as doing things to the city in Grind's head- This is the countryside, not the city."

"Sure, I'll make a separate cable for it." He takes off; as he flies, a cable appears along the edge of the canyon, still filling up. When they arrive at the plant, he inspects what they've got and then says, "It'd be easier to torch the whole building and replace it."

"Well, let me clear out the workers first. I'll tell a few of them to come back tomorrow morning ready for lessons on how to use another new set of equipment, and tell the rest they can have a day or two off."

"Sure."

"Are you having fun toying with the laws of physics? And can you attempt to put rooms and corridors in roughly the same place they were before? We can reuse streambuilt paths to move around with, even if you're going to handle heat and light and pumping with electricity."

"Would there be a floorplan you'd want me to follow?"

"Nevermind on the paths thing, I'll defer to your floorplan. We can always redo them and you know more about how this stuff works than me. We'll want about a million gallons per day capacity, which we probably won't use all of, a few offices, and classrooms to give lessons about all this fancy new technology in, and the actual pumps and valves and pipe hookups."

"I'm gonna give you twice that and just not turn on half of the intake for now in case, oh, being the first wired city anywhere causes you to suddenly double in size or something." He pulls out his computer and designs the place - it takes about twenty minutes - and then it comes into existence, hooked up to the same outflow as the original, already on. "This won't require as much staff as the original - uh, is that a problem, are they going to be unhappily unemployed?"

"They're civil service workers. Most people choose to work in the civil service for a few years to pay their debt to the city's public services. The alternative to the civil service is a rather severe tax. I think I'll arrange for other sections to take them. In particular the roads-and-lifts division always wants more shapers."

"Cool. So this... can basically run unmanned except when you want to step the intake up and down or if something breaks, which, like the dam, should take at least fifty years."

"Can you identify some books aimed at electricity and engineering? I would like very much to understand exactly what these places are doing."

"Um... Start with 'Engineering for Summoners', but ask me when you don't understand stuff."

"I'll read that later, then. I'm thinking about how to control this place... We'll have to set up a signal tower or send runners so the city's tanks don't overfill if we turn it up too high. Or maybe just build spillways."

"Oh, it can be controlled remotely, you just need a person doing it. And it's button pressing."

"...How, exactly, is that done?"

"On your phone poke the button that looks like a stylized house - box with a triangle on top - to get out of your library, then poke the water droplet."

"No, I mean... This thing can communicate at a distance?"

"Yes. That's actually the function it's named after, although after a while they did enough different things that plenty of people never use theirs to talk to other phones. Right now it can only talk to the water pump and the range isn't great, I'll need to put in some satellites to get good coverage, but from here to Opri it'll be fine all by itself as long as you aren't underground or behind a lead wall or something."

"Communication is yet another thing you can do much more effectively than us. We are limited to physical mail, couriers, or for particularly important messages, coded sequences of light shined from one tower to the next and then the next until it reaches its destination and is decoded. Can you see yourself selling electric mail delivery?"

"Sure, once the place is wired up and you can charge the things. Modern battery life is great but it won't last forever all by itself. Maybe you could get along with shared induction chargers in public places while the change rolls out to individual residences."

"Conveniently enough for that idea, public places are where Grind and company have the most influence. Speaking of Grind, do you want to write up some summaries for her while I read Engineering for Summoners?"

"You'd know better than I what'll go over well."

"Don't lie or embellish about the new stuff's capabilities. She'll like concise descriptions of what the things you can make are, what they can do, any drawbacks or limitations they have stated up front, how they are not particularly dangerous unless mistreated. A description of how you can make things with whatever arbitrary limits you want to make up to discourage immediate attempted exploitation of you. Repetition of the very generous lease terms. Emphasize how great the city will be with all this new stuff, but don't go overboard with the rhetoric."

"Very impressive. If she believes you at all, which she almost certainly will after a tour of the new water plant, she'll be all over it. This will probably end up turning the civil service on its head, since electricity will take over something like half of what we do. But she's not the type to shy away from positive changes just because they're new and scary."

"Well, that's good."

"Shall we head back to town, then?"

Steel follows, a bit slowly. "I'm going to need a nice big lunch. Flying burns calories like nothing else. And hey, it's probably a good idea to stop the cable about half a mile of the city walls, at least for now. Kell would make a stink if you encroached on the defenses built into the stream without his permission."

"All right. I can leave the rest of it coiled up or just leave the end unfinished or put some sort of cap on it, I guess."

Cam leaves the wire unfinished, under some turf to keep it hidden that will be easy to dig up later.