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Nik goes back to work. He starts selling the programming book and the IDE in his store. He starts hunting for some competent employees he can delegate a lot of the businessy things to and some who will accept a nondisclosure agreement like Dareni's and work in electronics assembly lines. He buys up some more land and starts working on the internet and broadcasting tech in earnest.
(It helps that you don't actually need to be very smart to work on an assembly line. It will be a nice, steady, reliable, boring job for some uncreative thinker.)
Katherine has been scheming. The food supply is secure, the local plants are mostly cataloged, her knowledge of botany is no longer critical to New Dover's thriving. She starts using her other talent - her sense for arranging people, for gossip, for petty politics, learned as a child in a rich household and a woman in a sexist university culture.
Without holding court, without doing anything to formally arrange people, she smooths frictions between refugees and locals, comforts the lost and frustrated, arranges people jobs that will be good for them. She takes care to accumulate a vague cloud of good will. People know her as the one who always has a kind, wise word when they need to talk. The one who knows people and can point you in the right direction. She has a harder time with this when it comes to Hari locals, they think in very different ways, but she learns. She has tea parties where mages can hear tales of exotic drama and intrigue from a world with wars, of the wonders of technology and machinery, where refugees and mages have fascinating intellectual conversations between their disciplines and the refugees can make their morality sound oh so reasonable, it's just an extension of the laws creating peace, see...
She also manages to start some rumors by carefully mentioning two or more tidbits in the correct ears, knowing that as the juicy bits of gossip spread they will collide and an obvious conclusion will fall out without her appearing to deliberately spread the information. In this way it becomes known that:
1. Her grandmother was 56th in line for the throne. This is close enough that those who miss the subtle grandeur of His Majesty the King can project that onto her if she uses the correct dress and mannerisms, yet far enough that noble-haters don't really care.
2. She was kicked off the seed missions for wanting to give more things to refugees instead of greedily keeping it all for themselves, not for being relatively junior and a woman. That story scores a lot of points with this crowd and her actions since then support it.
3. Her father was a war hero with steel in his soul, leading a heroic defense against the marauding French. She can, when this comes up, play it to emphasize humility, decisiveness and bravery, or familial piety, depending on the audience.
As summer fades into fall and there's some discussion about having a harvest festival, New Dover has a crime. It's a minor (by their standards) crime between two of the refugees, and while they're tempted to pretend it never happened, the de facto leaders (Katherine, Christopher the head of the Order of Mercy, and Nathaniel the priest) discuss it and decide to test how the local justice system works. Katherine volunteers to take care of this, since they both have such important work to be doing.
She tries to figure out who to report a large unpaid bar tab and the fight between the problem guy and the bar's owner to.
