He hasn't planned this as much as he meant to, but he thinks he can mention the important bits without giving it away. "We went to Kata'shin'a'in. I expect you could've guessed that. We - saw some records there. Including, they have some of Urtho's writings that survived..."

(This is not false, Kata'shin'a'in does have them now, and he thinks it's not absurd that they could have been carried out with the evacuation, even if in practice they weren't.) 

Leareth listens. 

It seems like, perhaps, he even has some emotions about this. 

- and Vanyel wakes up with a start in the middle of the night. 

:'Fandes: 

         :Yes?: 

:Talked to him. Should go over it: 

The next morning, he sleeps in a little, but after that he goes looking for Tarinda. 

Tarinda is having a large breakfast! It appears she likes eggs.

Vanyel joins her. 

"Well, I talked to him last night." 

"What'd he say?"

"That he wants to help and why was that even a question. Also he's suspicious. I guess it sounds like a pretty unbelievable story. I don't think he's suspicious that you're not doing it with magic or come from another world or anything, just that either I'm lying or the person I 'met in the south' is lying." 

"Okay, so, to actually collect the help... what do I do."

"We didn't completely figure out details, it was hard since I was being deliberately very vague about you, but. He'd like a demonstration of your capabilities, or examples of work you'd done in the past - at this point I think he's assuming you live in the far south and have been working on this for at least decades, but less than centuries or he'd have heard of it. He assumed we would want some demonstrations of his goodwill before we'd be willing to trust him with anything important, said he wouldn't offer suggestions there since I would quite reasonably feel safer if something was my own idea and not something he'd chosen so he could cheat at it." 

"That's going to be sort of hard to provide since I have not been working on this for decades."

"I mean, you do have capabilities that you'd have needed decades to invent, if you were really at it on your own in our world. They're not necessarily the kinds of capabilities he'd expect from someone good enough to make a god the magical way, but we might be able to figure out something that'd do as a demonstration of you being smart and exceptional in general?" 

"I'm actually not particularly smart or exceptional but I have Page to fake it, I guess. What kind of thing is he even expecting?"

"I mean, I think his ideas are going to be wrong because I was misleading about what you're actually doing! He suggested an artifact you'd made or maybe a treatise you'd written." 

"I guess I can have Page translate something and write it up but like, on what general topic, should I just pick something you haven't invented yet but might get to in a hundred years?"

"I think that'd work. And - right, ideally for the first step here it wouldn't obviously be something from another world, since - we're still testing if we can trust him enough, too. Although he might somehow guess anyway. He's stupidly good at guessing things that I didn't think I'd given him enough information to."

"Okay. I'll do... the Jacquard loom, it touches on some of the concepts. How will he get it once I have it written out?"

"He suggested I could deliver an item and leave it in a place I know I can specify to him in our next dream. I assume he didn't suggest a list of places because then I'd worry it was a trap. I can think of a few options but it'll need to be a place I can point Savil at, since, er, I can't Gate right now and I still don't know how long it'll take to fix that." 

"I'd rather not actually build a Jacquard loom, so hopefully the paper will do."

"Well, at least it'll be easier to transport." 

"Can I read a local paper on some kind of invention so Page can borrow the conventions?"

"I should be able to get you a short treatise or something, sure." 

She will read a short treatise and then write down Page's translation of an article on the Jacquard loom and trace its provided diagrams. She offers it to Van when she's done to see if it makes sense.

He reads through it. "I think it does. Also, that's really fascinating! Leareth is going to be so impressed." 

"Oh good! How soon before you can get it to him?"

"I can ask Savil today and she can probably deliver it by tomorrow, but I don't have a good way to communicate where it is to him until I get the dream again. I might get it early, though, there's not that much of a pattern to the timing but it tends to happen when I've learned something new that's relevant to him."