"I wouldn't call it common exactly but it's around."

"Around, then. By 2006 it's ubiquitous. I should actually check if they use a kind of outlet here I can use to charge my phone; I've been avoiding using it because it won't last long if I turn it on."

"Hmm. What kind of outlet is that?"

Isabella fishes the charger out of her pocket and displays the prongs.

"I'll keep an eye out. And see if I can't work something out with the Correspondence if they don't."

"Thank you."

When they go to the school again she checks around for outlets, or things plugged into outlets.

There are outlets. They do not match Isabella's charger. Lucy makes an unsatisfied noise and starts scribbling. 

Isabella picks up a book on geography, curious to see how it's taught in a multi-planet system.

The geography book talks about natural features in the general sense rather than referring to specific mountains or river valleys or fjords, and what kind of planets have what things, in general. 

Huh. Is there an atlas?

Yep! It has maps of every planet in the Kalidasa (玄武) system. 

She will look this over to get an idea of what all the planets are and what's on them.

The atlas contains all the information found here and then some. 

Which gets rendered into convenient notes. Isabella hums to herself a bit.

Lucy finds a more detailed book on civics than the social studies textbook she had originally located in order to try to make sense of how one does democracy and how to influence it without metaphorically blowing things up. 

Xander supplements her reading with anecdotes about democracy as practiced on their Earth.

"Politics," she grumbles, "I'm so terrible at being politically gentle...well, I've never been the type to give up before and I won't start now; if what it takes to get done what needs to get done is shutting up and smiling at people and saying nothing with a dozen words I shan't let people get hurt because I couldn't swallow my pride."

"Do you have a plan?"

"No, not yet. I'm brainstorming potential bases for a plan." She frowns, nibbling her lip. "I don't like how they didn't let the Independents go. It's not like the American Civil War where the seceders had slaves or anything."

"No?" Bella leans over from her geography. "Why did they secede?"

"Well, the book says the Independents objected to contributing to a unified society and allowing the sharing of resources between planets and so on, but, uh, this is supposedly the capital planet of the system and this town doesn't have a library, so I am skeptical that the Alliance is doing great on that front."

"Not having a library could just be shipping costs or the town being tiny, I'm more suspicious about the not having a Cortex, or some kind of secondary hookup to a larger off-planet Cortex link thing if it's hardware-intensive to get signal into space. I wish I knew more econ. And was from an interplanetary civilization. Which had written econ books for me. I haven't found any here yet."

"Yeah, I--am hesitant to create anything as implicitly solid as a plan until I have better sources of information."

"Very responsible. Shoulder Bella approves."

"I'm right here!"