He thinks about that for a moment.

"Might be fine. Conjure me some extra concealer?" His tattoos are unique and he's wanted.

Makeup appears over the tats. Cam holds up a mirror.

"Nice."

He can zoom to the Shadow, then, with the drone.

Cam watches through the drone camera while trying to piece out the metatimeline of the Shadow's time traveling habits.

Torn heads into another, slightly nicer, city section and knocks on a door. Samos invites him in and offers him tea.

Samos has the fungal updo at the earliest time he existed, when he appeared before the time of Mar, and by the end of his time back then he'd ditched it in favor of just wrapping his hair around a log and calling it done. During his continuous block of decades of singular existence up till a couple years ago he went from being a baby to being a child to being an adult.

Okay, so Cam knows a version who has been in normal time his whole life, and he is - somehow going to - go back in time and live for a kinda weird amount of time and get thrown in jail - when did he get thrown in jail?

Not very long after he arrived in this general era.

Torn declines the tea and tells the not-in-prison Samos that Cam sent him to bring over the drone.

"Hi!" says the drone. "You might wish to know that you are apparently slated to time travel at some point! Your future self goes back a long ways and is still kicking but he's in jail and has sent me some letters."

"We'll just have to fix that. And I'll have to pack, how far back was it?"

"Pre-time-of-Mar."

"The amenities are going to be terrible, aren't they. Well, we'll have to get the other me out and ask him what's going on. That dovetails nicely with the next steps we need to take to bring down the baron - Torn disagrees with me because he's wrong - so how about if we talk about it after I'm done visiting the plants and see if we can have a plan ready to go by tomorrow."

"Visiting the plants?"

"They have feelings too, you know! And besides, if you get in the habit of not going to the forest as long as there's anything more urgent, you'll never go, and then you'll turn into a sour cynic who hates everyone and wants to turn tail and run even though we're winning." He gives Torn a pointed look.

"I wouldn't say I do know that plants have feelings but I suppose if that's how you feel about it perhaps your future self will understand."

"It's not like you don't have recon to do first. Can I use this... alien communicator... to contact you in a quarter of an hour?"

"Sure, I can leave the mic live, just don't do anything loud."

The Shadow heads out to the forest, which isn't far, to quietly try (and fail) to meditate, until he isn't too horrified to face this mission the way he'd face any other. The ambient forest sounds are peaceful and not loud at all: a distant waterfall, a quiet chirping bird, a soft wind disturbing the trees.

Torn meanwhile heads back to the hideout. He takes a call while he's on the stairs on the way in and starts swearing by the time he's properly inside the room. He hangs up. "We have new problems - probably nothing worth wasting time on but maybe important, can you find where one of my men was ten minutes ago? His name's Jak and he's probably with the ottsel I told you about."

Jak's surroundings ten minutes ago.

Ten minutes ago, Jak, a teenager with a rifle who looks like one of the authors of Mar's half-finished astronomy book, was standing on what looks like the palace roof judging by the nearby series of merlons and spires. He did have an ottsel on his shoulder.

Ten minutes ago, Jak, the tiny Heir of Mar, was perched on the back of someone's badly worn-out sofa.

"Why am I surprised anymore," Torn mutters.

...Cam checks real quick if "exists twice right now" is a conjurable parameter but it is not.

"That's probably the palace. Can you figure out how he got in? We can assume the baron'll notice and patch the gap so we'll have to do this some other way - I'm going to skin those two alive, they've probably just made everything twice as messy as it has to be."

"I hope you have a volcano to drop all these models in," says Cam, but he pans back to find the point at which he entered.

"Yeah, just north of here. That elevator, huh - we can work around that."

Which is when the Shadow pipes up via the drone, "We shouldn't need to use one anyway. Just stage a trap for him outside the palace. - The plants have had enough of my company, I'll meet you in a few minutes."

"See you in a bit, try not to fall in a time travel portal en route."

They talk over their plans and then put them into action. The biggest delay is feeding Praxis the right information to lure him out; he's very prepared to defend himself against threats he's ever heard of before, but demons aren't one of those. Torn tips Ashelin off in advance; within ten minutes all the propaganda stations in the city are playing her announcing the change of leadership and a mass pardon for everyone still alive in the fortress and everyone charged exclusively with supporting the Underground.

As soon as the older Samos has access to a communicator he calls Torn and tells him to send someone to bring something back for him from the sacred site in dead town. And once he's done that, he writes a letter to Cam, burns it, and goes to the forest to commune with the trees.