"Har is really bad. I guess if you were free it wouldn't be so bad." Shrug. "Have you really never been to the same place twice?"

"Well, yes, being a slave is awful. But there are slaves here too, you just haven't seen any. I've been to Jubilee maybe half a dozen times, Jubilee's nice. Most of the others aren't super memorable but I've probably been to some of the big towns two, three, four times each."

"What's Jubilee like?"

"They do this thing with stained glass and dye and fabrics and light-colored wood everywhere and lots and lots of cleaning. The whole city is bright and colorful. And it's very neatly laid out and clean. And they had this sort of - acoustic layout - where singing and music in a big amphitheater in the center would radiate out and be heard on a few of main streets and there was singing and music most of the day. I don't really know what the government was like, but the place was very, very pretty."

"It'd be nice to get to see it. But maybe all the towns are nice and it wouldn't be better to keep moving around."

"Not all towns are nice. I want to scout around a bit when we land, and if the first town we find is awful or unstable or has an evil government, move on. They wouldn't use you properly. That sound okay with you?"

"Yeah, that sounds smart. How good do you think we should hold out for?"

"I think 'would respond well to suddenly being richer' is probably a good heuristic. I can probably judge that alright."

"Sounds good."

...He finishes his tea and gets back to flying the ship. Valanda could bug him for lessons some more, or just... Relax. Maybe read one of his books (he gave permission).

He looks at the books, trying to decide which one seems most useful to read right now.

There's a bunch of books! Maybe thirty or so, mostly hand-written. Books on weather, on engines, on plants, on something called 'game theory', on using weapons, on science. There's also some fairly fantastical tales and stories, novels, which are fiction but he might not be able to tell as much.

This place has fundamentally different, and less controlled, nature. He'll read about the weather.

Firestorms! You can get caught in an updraft and go up and up and up and up until you're in the part of the sky where there's mostly hydrogen and suffocate before you burn to death.

Toxic ash upwells! The nasty sulfurous stuff from the surface can get spewed high into the sky sometimes. Volcanoes or something? They're not sure. But it sure isn't fun for anyone who has to live inside an ash cloud for a couple of weeks.

There's also more mundane weather, rain, wind, and so on. The book goes into a lot of detail on how to make decent guesses without too much calculation or fancy tools.

Better to find out about all that now than when he's desperately trying to make breathable air faster than the wind blows.

He might be useful turning ash into air, but he's not about to ask Nick to go looking for any to practice on.

If he still has time to kill he'll read about the local plants.

Plants are like so! There's a bunch of kinds! The book on what they're useful for doesn't much distinguish between local and Earthly, tarrus root is listed right next to carrots, but the scientific botany book talks a lot about what structures and traits the plants have and their evolutionary history and so on, and how you can tell whether something is Earthly or not.

He thinks he likes plants.

After a while he goes to see what Nick's up to.

Nick is still flying the ship, and eyeing a big colony of the orange-and-red spiky things nervously. "Fireflowers... Those things are dangerous, best to give them a wide berth."

"How far do you have to stay? Will they try to attack us?"

"The further the safer. They won't hunt us or anything they just like to blow up and burn, keeps most things from trying to eat them, and explosions and fire will be exceedingly bad for my precious ship."

"Yeah, it seems like it would be. Can towns avoid them like this or do they have to chase them away?"

"I think they have to chase them away. Or, like, use a bow-and-arrow to kill them from a distance? There's these things that hunt fireflowers, they can shoot spines and feast after the explosion, they just can't hunt much else because they're sorta specialized for it."

"...And you can't fireproof anything, can you?"

"Nope. Some materials are less flammable than others - my ship uses a floatstone outer hull, and I painted it with a suppressant - but fire is a real and constant danger."

"I wonder if we can do anything about that now."