It fades into suburbs after a few tiles, then farmland.

This might be a good time for him to try making wings. They don't work on humans, normally, because of strength-to-mass ratio, but thankfully he is made of magic so he can do that. He drops the shirt and spends half an hour growing and tweaking with wing designs until he finds something that will actually be reasonably likely to carry his weight. Then he takes off and flies up.

His initial wing design leaves something to be desired, but is easily corrected.

He figured that'd be the case. After he has managed something stable enough he goes up up up and looks around at the tiles from this new perspective.

...He's not in the controlled air traffic zone is he? That would be a mistake worthy of the bureaucracy's attention.

Nooo not that high he noted how high that high was that first time.

He can work out the terrain types and valid placements fairly easily, even if the nearby area is scarce on certain types of tile, there's an example of all 25 visible.

Large groups of hill or mountain tiles work themselves up into a proper, tall hill or mountain. Each tile seems to add or subtract some height down to the baseline that the ocean tiles sit at. There are some impressive mountain ranges a long way off to the northeast.

Coooool! And pretty! Can he fly fast enough that it'd actually be a waste of his time to use the airship?

Hm... Yeah, probably.

Ooh cool!

...he does not actually know where that city is! He will return to where he was and attempt to find out (airport place? library? world map somewhere? passersby?)

Libraries are closed. Airport place works. They have a gigantic drag-and-drop continent map with snap-in tile markers, remarked as current as of 3-17, about a week ago.

Nice. He can eidetic it and figure out where to go.

Up up and awaaayyyy (not high enough that he's in traffic controlled zones).

The traffic control zones end eight tiles out, anyway. He'll be in the air for a few hours.

To the north is a humongous tree. Skyscraper proportions minimum, with a mini-city in the branches. When he stops getting closer to it he'll be about halfway there.

That is a very pretty tree. He will have to visit it sometime. For now, though, he can fly for hours.

(Of all the mind architecture upgrades he got, being able to do nothing much for hours is much more useful than he'd have expected.)

He'll pass over varied and diverse arrangements of the same 25 pieces of terrain, most of it largely untouched by intelligent life.

The crystal he left for Nils buzzes when he's almost there, at 5 AM or so.

"Hello."

"Hello, Sadde. We're both lucky someone complained about their package, I had to go dispute it or I wouldn't have gotten this."

"Mm, I figured you'd get it eventually. They didn't want to tell me where you'd be."

"As well they shouldn't have. Information advantage is one of the biggest advantages you can have, especially in trade. As it happens though-" he names a shipyard. "For probably two months. I'm doing an extensive reworking, inside and out. I've been looking forward to it. I'll be able to get up to forty, maybe fifty tiles per hour when empty after I'm done. Practically a courier ship!"

"Cool! Good luck. I spent most of my day yesterday singing and dancing with merfolk, it was lots of fun."

"Oh, you managed not to annoy them, good job. Maybe my perspective is skewed, maybe they just don't understand modern commerce, but I've not really gotten along with mer since that incident at Shelling Point."

"Oh? What happened there?"

"A misunderstanding regarding contracts, product quality, and payment." Yeah, he doesn't really want to explain the whole thing.

"Huh. Well they liked me fine when I turned my legs into a tail after one of them accidentally called me 'split-tail' which I gather is a racist slur or something."

"Yes, that's a slur. Fairly mild as they go but still a slur. And you probably weren't demanding money from them."