[Soldier, not thug. I know how to restrain civilians without hurting them.]

[Oh good. Also, uh, if you make up your mind to telepathy me about it should you run into a problem, that will sometimes, if I'm precogging, let me see it coming in advance so I can warn you, but this only works if you'd actually do it even in cases where it from your perspective has already failed.]

[...Oh that is very useful. I can do that.]

[Oh good. I'll leave it open so you can pick up a connection whenever, please don't abuse it.]

[I won't.]

[Anything else not best left till later?]

[Don't think so.]

[Cool. I'll pay back Jackson and Brian for anything you wind up needing, so don't worry about that.]

[Alright. Thank you.]

The flight time arrives the following morning and Brian drives Sakura there without particular incident. She can't read the major signage in the airport, but she can read some of the fine print translations on the smaller signs that offer more languages.

She notes which language that is and continues on, following directions - she's pretty aggressively sealed away everything but her pens and most innocuous notebook, including her armor and headband, leaving her in just her civilian clothes. Might as well treat it as undercover work.

She analyzes the technology on display - on the ride over, the speed and apparent inertia of the car, the things they pass - in the airport, the ways they scan people getting on, their procedures for screening identity - gets surreptitious glances at assorted identity documents... Implied population density...

Sakura isn't precisely getting a measure of this world's military and economic capabilities, at least not in a way that'll show up as that to mind readers. She's just observing, and, well. She wants to make allies, and her information will help any alliances.

She does get a window seat on the plane, alternating over the flight between gazing out the window as they pass over the countryside - definite agricultural richness - and working on estimating how long a preliminary transport seal will take her whenever they're in the clouds.

She's alert as they deplane, looking for anyone who might be Isabella or someone sent by her. Sakura herself stands out a little bit. Pink hair will do that.

Isabella spots her. [Hey, Sakura, if that's you, look left.]

Left it is! She waves.

Isabella waves back. She has a cane.

She heads over! "Hello!" she says once she's close enough she won't be shouting. "It's nice to meet you properly."

"You too, how was your flight?"

"Interesting! I've never been that far off the ground."

"I'm getting a really patchwork impression of your tech level... This way," she adds, beckoning and setting off with the aid of her cane through the airport.

She follows.

"From what I've seen... Way worse infrastructure, way higher reliance on magic, with major knock-on effects with industry. Also possibly way more political fragmentation and weaker or more inconsistent governments; we meaningfully started having states again within living memory - not in my life, but people old enough to be my great-grandparents would've been kids through young adults during the end of the Warring States Period. Which is only named like that because the daimyo like to pretend they have a firmer claim to their territories than 'warlorded better than anyone else,' there weren't that many states involved - but we had an empire that collapsed a bit after the start of our surviving records. We actually lost a ton of technology when that happened and it's left weird patchwork gaps. Some stuff just broke and then we lost how to make it, some stuff got replaced by cottage industries, sometimes with magic, some stuff got blueprints successfully passed down and we've been trying to remake it..." She shrugs. She's never had to summarize the history of the Elemental Nations before, and while she's extremely widely read, she isn't a historian.

"Huh. What sorts of things do you rely on magic for?"

"Weapons, most centrally, though that had been fading a little. Medicine and mining are almost entirely anchored around magic. Transport and freight over large distances rely on it, too. Irrigation, sometimes, and cheating with where we can establish power generation points. Some manufacturing. Some construction - buildings taller than a few stories are either imperial remnant structures or made with magic." She hums. "Probably some more things on the margins, too..."

"Well, this is going to be an exciting new frontier, then, isn't it, we have totally nonmagical industry in all those and only use magic where we can't do it any other way and it's worth a lot of money - eclipsed are rare and expensive."

"Shinobi are... Rare but in the way artisans are rare, and the other magic traditions are rare in the way nobility or priesthoods are. A lot of the traits that make you learn magic easily are inheritable, and not being able to do magic exterior to your body is considered a disability within a shinobi community - though we've never successfully educated more than a tiny swath of the population, so magical inability might actually be more common than we're estimating."

"Shinobi end up doing a lot of the magical economy stuff, we were originally mercenaries and before the cataclysm usually continued to be... A weird sort of state within the state, where we primarily contracted with citizens of our allied nation, and only served as the military for that nation. Whereas the other two major traditions seem to take pride in doing nothing productive whatsoever. ...Though we also haven't liked them historically, that might be a biased filter on my part."

"What are the other magic traditions?"

"Main ones were samurai and monks. The monks are a religious order and mostly pacifists, they're kind of... They used to be people you had to listen to for politics but they've basically vanished now. The samurai were the ones who did the successful warlording, the daimyo all rose from their ranks, and they controlled the state. They're better at fighting than shinobi and worse at a lot of other things, and they'd been aggressive about trying to limit how many magic users the world had, because nothing threatens the nobility like peasants with fireballs."

"The samurai were basically wiped out in the cataclysm, though, and all the daimyo died. We absorbed the survivors into the Allied Forces, under shinobi command. We suffered some really heavy hits too, of course, everyone did - but the samurai mostly died at the start of the conflict, and we... Sort of stole an alien power that let us resurrect people, but it had a time limit a lot of the samurai ended up outside of, and our remaining leadership decided to triage civilians and shinobi to be resurrected first anyways. And then two of the people who were able to use it died from... Overload, possibly, and couldn't be resurrected, so we had the third stop because we really didn't want to lose him too, partially since he's now our only person able to consistently use any alien powers - I say 'we' but I was in a coma during that decision; I'd been part of the teams healing the wounded and retrieving anyone resurrected into a dangerous situation, and I overstretched myself."

She's... A bit shaken about that mess, still. It's hard to explain it coherently, especially to someone who can't feel the gaping screaming hole in the fabric of their world and society. Even children born after the war sort of just... Are aware of it.