Lady Katherine does not rush back to Milliways, since that gives off the wrong impression, but she moves quickly, making long strides that seem more elegant and poised than hurried.
"I do believe I should discuss this venture with our governor before getting too excited. Would you terribly mind waiting before we set to work, Nimo?"
The two of them will do that next time there's a church service.
Meanwhile their small army of hired mages will try to get their city built.
Turns out building a city - or a medium-sized town, by the standards of old England - is hard. Even with most of the planning already done and powerful magic helping. A force mage can move ten tons of dirt with a thought, but there's a lot of detail work. The new refugees are motivated to work hard and a cadre of administrators keeps everything in line, but they're not going to hit their overly optimistic two week goal.
They have everything needed to house and support 10000 people in the medium term built - a slightly more permanent temporary hospital, contracts for bulk food delivery, temporary showers and bathrooms, and dozens of rows of heat-maged tents - after two days.
They start to go block-by-block on installing city infrastructure. Sewers and storm drains, then subway tunnels and stations, then fresh water, then electrical wiring, then streets and parks and such, then building foundations, then building frames, then finishing the buildings and letting people move in. (Slightly less planned suburban space is being worked on too, as are special projects like bridges, the airport and seaport, and so on, but slower.)
The old New Dover, while less than a year old, nonetheless has some historical value and is going to be left alone for now but eventually all the shiny infrastructure will be sneakily put in under it.
Liane goes back to New Dover to try and get a replacement arm, but they're all extremely busy and improved prosthetics are a few items down the list - not that literally every ounce of effort is going into the new city, people are doing their own thing or celebrating or relaxing, but still.
So eventually she goes back and tries to find that smith again.
She doesn't really want to leave her prosthetics here while he does it, she kinda needs them to, uh, do things, is that OK? If not, how much extra for a rush job?
She can keep them, but he'll need to get a good look at them and how they work now. If she doesn't have any illusions on he can pastwatch her if he realizes he needs to check something again, but knowledge mages do cost money, he'd rather take good notes and not need that.
She doesn't actually know how they work beyond the obvious, but he can totally look at them and watch her use them and move things half-disassembled and so on.
She has no idea how much these things should cost, she got hers from an engineer who just kind of gave it to her. But, sure, deal, here's the cash.
She finds a spot a bit outside of town and watches her shows while waiting for her shiny new arm and leg. What's The Ring of Twilight actually about?
It's some kind of fantasy series that starts on an island archipelago on a tidally-locked planet orbiting a red dwarf star. The sun is always low in the sky, unmoving. Magic is different in their universe, but of course it exists.
A war leaves an agerah orphaned at less than a year old, so off she goes to try to make her way in the world. A human soldier on the opposing side takes her in. He struggles to give her an adequate explanation for why they're still at war when no one wants to be.
Meanwhile the little agerah's older brother comes back from the war and finds out that their parents are dead. He hires a team of human mercenaries to help get revenge for his parents. But before they can put their plan into action, they hear about a plan by the beluli on another island to exterminate everyone on their island and move into the empty space.
The two factions try to make peace and work together to stop their mutual enemy, but they mistrust each other and the beluli take advantage of that to trick them each into thinking the other side has betrayed them. They nearly lose everything.
The little agerah realizes that she's had family on two sides of this war. She's loyal to the side she was born on, that her parents were on. She's loyal to the side her adoptive parent is on. When she brings this up to her brother and the human, they realize that if they were each other's family then they could trust each other. The little agerah's brother uses his mind-editing magic to make himself think that the human is one of his siblings. The human unwards his own mind for the agerah mind mage to do the same to him.
They fight off the invasion and follow the invaders back to their own island. The beluli try to sue for peace. But how can they be trusted not to try to kill everyone again, given the chance? Their world has no command magic. But there is a way if they'll just let the mind mage change them. The only problem is the beluli have no reason to trust that they won't just be slaughtered afterward anyway. So why shouldn't they just destroy the island and kill everyone? Sure, they'll die, but so will everyone else. At least the beluli won't be the only ones to die, that way.
The human who adopted the little agerah asks the mind mage to make him love their enemies. Then he goes to his knees sobbing, begging for peace.
The beluli accept the deal.
Now that both islands are safe from each other, they realize they could unite all the habitable lands on their planet. The entire ring of twilight.
...It's kind of a long series, she might not want to watch all the rest in one sitting.
Okay, nice message, but the weird mind-twisting magic is kind of intensely creepy.
What other shows did she impulse-buy earlier, anyway?
Two are in Ilan instead of Hari. The last one is called Order and Law in Thervigenia. It seems to be some kind of crime drama set before the empire.
A murder happened under a very extensive illusion. The knowledge mages are stumped! They call in a brilliant detective, a caralendar death mage, who has no special magical advantage so she uses the power of deductive reasoning! They solve the case and the episode ends with the murderer's public execution. It's not a merciful death. Only a minute of it makes it into the episode but the sun is shown a lot lower at the end than the beginning.
It's not that much worse than hanging. They hanged murderers sometimes.
The ones in Ilan are annoying her. She tries to figure out if there's something like the government Hari tutorial, but for Ilan.
The imperial government doesn't seem to have anything like that.
If she catches Valanda just getting back to his office from visiting the mainland, he'll tell her to try Ariu Moves South. It's for the wrong dialect but it should be a start.
"I think I'll just forget it, maybe go complain. You want these shows? Not like I can use them."
"I have this one! But I could buy the other one, I guess, how much do you want for it?"
"Just take it. And if you don't want the other one I'll just drop it on the street or something."
"It's not even that much money? And I'm annoyed more than anything else. Bye for now?"
Back in New Dover, the doctors have caught up with most of the miscellaneous injuries and illnesses their immigrant population brought with them. They have a few structure mages try the nerve repair treatment on a couple of dogs, those being at least mammals and the best analogue currently available. Their nerves weren't damaged in the same way, but it's better than doing no test at all. It doesn't seem to do the dogs any harm.
Would Echan like to try this experimental only kinda tested treatment?
It's got a decent chance of helping, but might do nothing, and might even make it worse (though they don't think so, the science checks out and dogs were fine, but then again they were dogs not humans...)
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