"We're just going north along the Highroad. Er, do you want this?" he asks, offering Theo the phone.

"Uh, yeah, it'd probably be useful for this?" He takes it. "Thanks."

"This is a fantastic invention. Anyway, see you soon."

And off they go, to Auron's... complete lack of reaction, really.

Theo explains some more to the guy! The phone is a useful aid.

The guy is a historian. He has questions about every five minutes of history from the dawn of man to present day.

Theo is not going to have enough time to do all of that! He can find a good timeline for the guy to copy down, continue giving brief details of a bunch of major events and cultures, and then it's probably been long enough that he should go.

That's a shame, he had about five hundred seventy-four more questions about the rice farms in Japan. Some other time, then.

Yeah, maybe.

Hopefully the others aren't too hard to spot?

The Highroad is very long but very straight, it is pretty much impossible to miss them and oh look they're fighting fiends.

Oh wonderful.

He'll try turning the ground to liquid again and drop down nearby.

Unfortunately this time two of the fiends attacking are floating balls of solid magma on fire, so those can't really sink.

Lulu casts an ice spell around one, and it grows bigger when she does.

Can he, like, wet one? With a small quantity of water in case that just makes it bigger?

He can, and it does.

Lulu finally notices him. "Don't use water, it just turns to steam, use ice!"

"It growing bigger was a good thing?"

"No, if it grows too big it'll explode, we need to kill it before that happens."

Kimahri uses an ice spell on one of them, too.

He can't really produce and freeze water quickly enough for it to be a large quantity, not dropping it on the creature, but if it's repelled from ice on the ground he can do that or he can grab up a chunk of earth, turn it into cloud fluff, and fly up then drop it down as ice from above?

That helps! One of the fiends tries to set him on fire.

He can get rid of fires quite effectively! While it wouldn't harm him too badly it still would be painful!

He drops more ice on them. He's had practice flying for his whole life, it's not hard to repeatedly fetch and make more ammunition.

They will successfully prevent any explosions.

"Thank you. I'd expected you to spend longer than this with the scholar."

"He was asking a lot of small details," responds Theo. "So I gave him just the broad overview, a few details, and then decided that it'd be better to just tell people in some more organized manner at some future point."

"Organised like what?" he asks after slashing through a wolf fiend and dispatching it.

"Like, finding some place in a town or a historians' guild, broadcasting I'm from another world, having them mention topics on a timeline they'd be interested in, putting together a slightly longer summary for each one, compiling it into a neat document on my phone, adding more details as they ask for them and then later handing that out, neatly organized in some manner off my phone at some future point, to interested parties. Instead of on a road without having dedicated any thinking to the process before."

"There aren't really any historians' guilds."