She is slower than the mirror-faced snake, and for some reason it is choosing to chase her, and she is not in dense enough forest to lose it by going up a tree or between a couple too narrowly spaced for it. So it catches her before emergency services can turn up.
And then she is somewhere else, in a not particularly attractive room next to a person who looks sort of off somehow.
"Excuse me," she says, taking a step out of his personal space.
"Then probably if they knew more science they'd destroy the world. Worlds above a certain tech level don't last very long, where I'm from, and we don't even have magic."
"The Radch doesn't lose planets. For everyone else it's just a matter of time, though."
"My magic doesn't work here - I guess it might not there either - so I don't know what kind of detail local magic'll need if they ever figure it out, be thorough."
Cam can show them star charts and his design documents for New Valinor, sure.
"You have to watch everyone, close to all the time. - with computers, I mean, not individually, but no one doing anything more complicated than farming can go through their life unobserved."
"Engineered pathogens. Berkhethet miliantre. Atmospheric flerghenti. Badly built artificial intelligence systems. No, that's not quite true - badly built ones just don't work, nearly-well-built artificial intelligence systems -"
"I will but you had better get me the fancy kind of resurrection that doesn't make me worse at magic."
Newest arrival is paging through lightleaper instructions for Mirelótë. "- hello?"
"Hello. You can keep doing what you're doing, the pharaoh just wished to have someone here to hear about all this firsthand who isn't an interdimensional visitor. - Anaander asserts that advanced worlds destroy themselves all the time," he adds to Mirelótë. "I don't think anyone has a hope of telling whether she's lying but we can make you a copy of her explanations."
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