I could also just tell you, she points out.

True! But then I don't get to see what's going on!

If you would like to look over my shoulder while I sell mushrooms you can have a camera.

Eeeee.

And he teleports into the sky well above, invisible, and puts a tiny camera in an alcove of a roof facing her, and teleports back, and searches for good islands to put people on.

There are some islands. They are various sizes and not all of them are inhabited already, although some of them show signs of being occasional stops for boats.

That wouldn't be a problem, might even help with the population-not-dependent-on-them thing. He wants a big temperate island so he can put Valian plants in, any candidates there?

Well, there's nothing huge, and only very small islands have no plants on them already. One of the volcanic chains with a dock and a suspicious concentration of edible plants and animals is pretty good-sized all put together though, if you don't mind the volcanoes.

He can probably throw a geology modeling program at the age of the volcanoes and likelihood they're still active?

They are... somewhat likely to be active! For one thing there are lava flows over there. They're pretty.

That's super pretty but maybe not good for humans. He should probably find some other island. Maybe he can expand a small one without too much sea level disruption.

There are plenty of small islands about.

...now this one'll be just a little bit bigger, without messing with the sea floor much at all, he's just raising a near-sea-level underwater segment of it to sea level. Cam would know whether this was likely to cause any problems but it doesn't seem very likely to.

There is some wave activity but it doesn't arc up and swallow a continent or anything.

Good. He gives the new bit Valian soil and then plants even if the original bit already has plants.

Now he has an interestingly patchy island.

That'll do for now. He goes home to check on Ayabel's mushroom-selling through the feed.

She hasn't sold them all, but she's down to a fraction of what she had.

Cool! Shimmery-mushrooms, speckled mushrooms, laquered-looking mushrooms, cloudy mushrooms, coppery mushrooms, enough for now and then he has another try at a program to do it.

Businesses in the square start packing up for the evening. She sells her last four mushrooms as the sun sets and then is one of the last to leave; she finds somewhere unobtrusive to teleport home.

"Hi! Found an island. Do we have a lot of money?"

"We have a month's rent for a little shop. People love the designs, I think a quarter of the sales were for knicknack purposes more than practical ones."

"Cool. I'm trying to teach the computer how to do variants that are just as pretty so it can put up tiles of designs and I can batch 'em."

"How's that coming?"

"Okay. I'll have it by tomorrow, probably."

"How long does it take to learn how to do that sort of thing?"