"It does, I think."

"Can I meet it?"

"Yeah - can you hide the wings and conjure really realistic fake ears? Not that the oracle will care, I think, but the people between here and there..."

Cam puts on a long coat and a mirror with which to prosthetize his ears convincingly.

"Should work. At least it's the season for a coat like that. I can show you the way there, then?"

"Yes please!"

Up a flight of steps to street level, the hideout exits into a dead-end alley that itself exits into a poor neighborhood. The uneven pavement is cracked and occasionally simply missing in irregular patches. In a couple of places there are huge trenches carved into the ground, with small wooden bridges placed over them that themselves are falling apart and full of gaps. The pavement is entirely for foot traffic; the vehicles fly overhead, just a couple feet below the lowest of the cables stretched across the streets. It's hard to tell which parts of the buildings are artistically uneven and which are just poorly made, but if nothing else the roofs tend to look sloppy. The air smells like some pollutant that isn't a normal byproduct of a gas engine. They pass one of the baron's propaganda stations, which is currently playing a recording of him exhorting everyone to sacrifice for their city, and then head out over the water on an uneven network of boardwalks. A lot of the other pedestrians are walking slowly and looking down.

Their destination is a smallish one-room building over the water. The statue inside has two glowing clear domes in front that might or might not be supposed to suggest eyes. The rest of the room is full of burning candles.

The statue deigns to speak to Cam. "Greetings, visitor," it says. "You are a surprise. I must urge you in the strongest terms to wait and learn until those things which are in progress now have begun. For your patience, I offer you a title and an author." It enunciates the title and author clearly, but they're definitely not in the local language.

Cam resists the temptation to fix infrastructure on the way.

"Hello," Cam says. "I won't be able to read that today, do you have other suggestions for how to get oriented to the situation?"

The oracle does not answer.

"Honestly that's better than most people get," Rit says after a few seconds.

"Most people it won't talk to at all?"

Wobbly gesture. "Not on their first try, anyway. Hey, I don't know if it counts if I don't have to buy it, but just in case can I have a candle to light while I'm here?"

"Uh, sure." Little glass jar of vanilla candle. "What for?"

"It's an offering - the oracle doesn't exactly ask, but people who pray and meditate and make offerings seem happier and less, you know, evil." She lights it from one of the other candles and sets it on the floor.

"What does it do that's oracular?"

"It says mysterious bullshit and seems to see the future or at least see the entire present and be very smart. You're the only person I've ever heard of getting a book recommendation you couldn't get at a library. And it told my mother once to 'embrace solitude and shun the imminent festivities' and she didn't go to a party the next day and the entire section of the city the party was held in was overrun by metal heads and most of the guests died."

"Yikes, okay. I'll, uh, see if I can crack the book, same as the metal head language.." He produces a hard copy and flips through it in case it has useful illustrations.

It has a map of a galaxy with a place marked, a map of a solar system with only two planets, pictures of alien scenery, pictures of metal heads and other creatures, a timeline, and a diagram.

"...gosh," says Cam. "You said this is a twelve planet system, yes?" Do the other creatures look like they might be of a biosphere with the metal heads.

"And that's not the yellow sun or the green one."

Like the metal heads, some of the other things depicted have glassy glowing parts, often but not always the same yellow color as skull gems. Like the metal heads, some of them have metal parts or half-exposed tubes.

"You have two?" Is this the same language as his computer is currently chewing.

No relation to that one at all.

"Arguably. The yellow one's our star."

"And the green one visits on bank holidays? Can I put some more hardware here or should we go back -"

"I figure we can go back whenever but I don't know what kind of hardware you're thinking."

"Same kind I put in the corner of where I popped up."

"It will definitely be noticed and examined and possibly have candles put on it but I don't think there's a rule that says you can't."