Edie was perusing the latest correspondence from her fork. She still should have been paying enough attention to realize that the door didn't go where it ought before it swung shut and she couldn't sense anyone else anymore, but she wasn't.
After opening and closing the door a couple times to make sure she hadn't just been abducted somehow, she looks around.
Then they will wait for the ambassador to talk with the other people!
The ambassador talks to people and then they can go see engineers.
The engineers have had the basic idea of Trains explained to them and would love to hear more!
Would anyone want to provide a good home to a model train if he made one? Yes? Here is a model train! Isn't it cute and tiny. Installing trains is a little complicated because his matter creation ability is only so cooperative with the underlying terrain but they can totally make it work. Trains can go yea fast and hold yea much stuff. Here is the concept of the shipping container.
The engineers are very excited about this! They need to be brought back on track a few times by a particularly stout one of them when they're at risk of flying off on tangents.
The engineers are all very excited! They also mostly defer to the stout one (Markess Irinha Zavon) when relevant. "When relevant" is usually when someone's about to hare off onto a not immediately important tangent, but also sometimes when he has a suggestion for a way this engineer or that's work would be relevant to some aspect of trains, or when they start arguing, or...
The phrase "herding cats" might be appropriate.
He can imagine how his family would react to something like this. It'd be pretty similar.
Engineers, right?
Eventually it is dinnertime and Markess suggests that everyone should really not forget to eat, again. There are protests. He mandates a dinner break. There is grumbling but general acquiescence.
Markess would like to know if they've had a chance to try Kilaiuossari food, yet, and if not if they would like to have dinner with Markess and his wife.
Excellent!
Markess's wife is a pretty woman with darker skin than most of the Kilaiuossari they've met so far. She has made food! It is delicious. She asks her husband and the foreigners intelligent questions about trains and the foreigners intelligent questions about politics and their country and so on.
All of which he answers as if it were the year before the war started, no point in introducing complications.
Markess's wife is hiding something. He is not sure what and if it is something like 'poison' that seems interesting to know, so he does not press it.
If it's poison, it's a slow-acting enough one that it doesn't make itself known immediately.
And then after dinner there is more excited questions from the engineers.
Which they are happy to entertain. He does quietly observe to Cam in Quenya that Markess's wife is hiding something.
"No but she's better at it than her husband is - might not have been sure I was noticing anything off just her -"
Trains!
Eventually it is late enough for Markess to boss the other engineers into going to bed.
"Maybe. Why don't you come tomorrow and if anything else happens I'll tell you."
"You're very welcome."
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