"Oh, I didn't learn anything, they made me put away my textbooks."

"So what happened instead?"

"Uh they were supposed to cover multiplication but everyone already knew it so I suggested mechanical engineering but the teacher said no, division, so I pointed out that was just multiplication by the reciprocal and maybe now could we do mechanical engineering and the teacher said I could sit in the back and listen to music so I did and then at recess I made my classmates whatever they requested unless it was dangerous and told a girl I can resurrect her mother by wintertime and then sat and listened to music more and then it was over."

His escort blinks slowly. "Huh. Must've been an interesting day."

"It was a better use of time than I expected! I do hope we get to mechanical engineering by the end of the week though or I might start getting bored."

"I... don't think kids can learn that..."

"Oh, we can!"

Another blink. Then a shrug.

Epic sings quietly to himself and heads off with his escort.

He is led to an official-looking shiny black car.

...okay. Car!

They start trudging through noon traffic! It is a lot.

He works on his artifact.

It soon transpires they're not going to HQ.

"Uh. Where're we going?"

"Oh we're kidnapping you," says the driver.

" - I don't think that's a very good idea."

"Then you can see it as 'we're showing you what the government's really like.'"

"I get all mail addressed to 'Epic'. Writing me is a much better way of communicating with me and won't get anybody panicked and won't cause people to start fighting. People start fighting over kidnappings. And I know they're a military dictatorship, I just don't know how to get them to stop being that without being something worse like chaos."

"—what?"

" - are you the person in charge of the kidnapping or should I wait for that person so I don't have to explain everything twice."

"I'm not the person in charge of the kidnapping, sorry."

"Can I have an hour uninterrupted, it's not worth working on if I don't get an hour uninterrupted."

"...might take us an hour to get there so sure."

"Are people not going to notice I'm missing by then?"