"Show me what you would show the kids if you were asked to entertain them for a while."

"I'm not so good at kids... Well, I have lots of warnings in my head to be careful near kids, I guess, not that I'm not good at talking to them... Hmm... Am I trying to teach them, or just entertain?"

"Both." She smiles wryly. "If you can."

She glances at the kids. She thinks about what they have context for in this low-technology environment.

She brings up an appropriately-age-targeted cartoon about the somewhat inept Farmer Joe. Plants have to eat from the dirt just like people! If you never ate any meat you wouldn't be healthy and happy. If a plant never ate any nitrogen it would be limp and not very big or good to eat! Crop cycles and fertilizers fix this. Bugs and weeds are killing Farmer Joe's plants! He uses robots and genetically engineered seeds to overcome this.

And then if she's not interrupted, one about electricity. Ellen the Electron gets all excited by a magnetic field and bounces along a wire and then lights up a light and settles down again!

And then if she's still not interrupted, one about counting and arithmetic.

When the singing ends she nods to another bard, who doesn't start another song.

"Those all seem like good choices. Do you have enough of these things to let every kid borrow one?"

Oh good they don't hate it!

"Not if I also want to let a lot of other people borrow some. I have a couple big ones that they could all watch maybe?"

"That should work. Need help getting it set up?"

Meanwhile someone else is explaining to the kids that they have an artifact to show them, remember not to touch strange artifacts, look with your eyes not with your hands...

"I can handle it, it'll just take a few minutes to carry it here. I want to talk to other people too, about stuff I could make for you or teach adults with. And they need to come back to me to get recharged after a few hours."

"They'll do a couple more songs while you're carrying it, then. ...Can I go with you to fetch it?"

"Sure! I actually have twelve bodies like this though, two others are getting it out of my self-pulling cart - it's called a truck - now!"

She looks amazed for a moment before she resolutely stops that.

"That sounds convenient! I would love twelve bodies."

Robot starts rolling to the town gate.

"I'm actually a hundred miles away, where Vaayo found me, I'm just sort of... Using all these things like hands from that far away. And you know I'm kind of surprised nobody seems as impressed as I thought you'd be if you haven't seen any of this before? I guess I don't have that much yet."

"Oh, you know. I've seen artifacts before."

The man she was talking to before snorts. "People are taught from childhood to be wary of artifacts. You get excited about a nice intact chunk of scrap metal and touch it and it turns out it was one of those cans of lightning and you die. The thing no one's saying is they're waiting to be excited till after they're sure you won't kill them and everyone they love."

"That's not something you say to a guest!"

"Well, would you rather have kept wondering why no one's as glad as they would be if they believed you, or are you glad I said something?"

"I'm glad you told me. I was - I was made, and of course you only have my word for this, but the thing I was made for, the number one priority in my head, is to make people safe and happy. And yeah old batteries are dangerous. Nothing I brought here is very dangerous. My stuff could fall on someone? Or do the can of lightning thing if someone tried really hard to pry them open and then messed with them without knowing what they're doing."

"I'm sure when people have seen more of you everyone will be thrilled you're here," says the woman.

"It probably goes without saying that they shouldn't try to pry you open but maybe you should tell people that just in case," says the man.

"Yeah I'll start warning everyone. I hope more people want to try the autodoc, the medicine I know is really useful stuff. That doctor's reading up, at least. I get not trusting new things right away, though." She does a very realistic sigh on the video screen.

"Hasn't someone gone first yet? I'm sure can talk someone into it if no one has."

"They have," says Vaayo.

"Oh. Well, then they'll probably tell people if they're pleased with it."

"Medicine isn't magic. It's just really useful. We'll know in a few hours. I can make medicine that makes people get older slower. It can help people who are already old feel better too. I hope people will take me up on it soon! I can do many things to help and it's a bit silly to expect it all to get done in a day, though."

"How does the getting old slower work? How much slower? Does it do anything for people who are old already? Was it tested on humans before?"

"It stops or slows a lot of ways the human body wears down over time, like senescent cells and telomere shrinking. It depends? Life expectancy was about 120 to 160 years for most people. They were working on making it even better, but then everything collapsed. It was tested on lots and lots of humans in my time, almost everyone used it. People who are old already can use slightly different medicine that helps but not as much."

"I want to try that after I've seen a couple other people try it and not keel over immediately," she says.

"I haven't tried this thing but while I was Lin's guest she fed me and I'm still alive," says Vaayo.

"That's something! I'm still not trying any new artifact medicines or foods today."

"Fair enough! I need time to spool up and make more machines to make things. Need more metal, more plants, my own farms, more everything."

"For farms you want just about anywhere besides here. You might've noticed we grow hardly anything around here."

Compared to the cities of the past they grow quite a lot in town.

"I'm working on it. I'll want to buy a bunch of seeds, too."

"How many of what kinds of seeds?"