"I actually don't feel I'm in burning need of intel right now. I guess I'd like to know what the reception is generally of the electrification and anti-slavery projects?"

"It's a big change and around here change isn't safe. But I hear from some folks that think it's all for the best in the long run. I know a guy who's looking to learn electrical engineering when you're ready to teach it."

"Inconveniently my electrical engineering education was all of the for-demons variety."

"...Please tell me you have a plan for maintenance."

"I mean, I'm sure I can figure out the maintenance requirements from books, I do know how it all works, there just might be an awkward gap where you don't know how to make relevant alloys yourselves and have to have them conjured."

"Now that sounds like a headache for someone smarter than me."

"I think it'll be fine, just a little annoying."

"Hope you're right, cherry."

"Why are you calling me that?"

It's a casual term of not-quite-endearment from a city that fell years ago and didn't leave any survivors who could've traced the etymology. It's a memory.

He shrugs. "'S just how I talk. You don't like it?"

"I wouldn't claim to like it, no. Have a nice day."

He does have a nice day. He has the nicest day he's had in years. He tracks Jak down.

Meanwhile, the most urgent infrastructure problems are dealt with. The number of people enslaved in Haven City shrinks and seems likely to keep shrinking for a while. Ashelin mentions in public once that she's sympathetic to the idea of banning slavery entirely.

Much groundbreaking, very emancipate, wow.

Once the urgent infrastructure projects are handled Cam will announce that he is going to open a school somewhere in between Haven and the new lurker city and open an integrated school for things like summoning, electrical engineering, and suchlike.

A handful of lurkers, a lot of humans, and eventually a whole flock of talking birds want to know how to enroll.

But not any metal heads, or at least not anyone openly admitting to being a metal head. They have a planet for him to terraform and otherwise stop bothering him.

He will teach an accelerated introductory course to anyone who wants to teach, leave them to run less-accelerated courses with the next batch of students, and go on a terraforming trip. Or a.... metalforming trip. Whatever. It will be fun.

It probably will. They want the climate equable and warm, and they're capable of tolerating a lot of carbon dioxide to make it that way. They want spaces that will hold lots of shallow pools of dark eco (they can mine it themselves and have some to start with), surrounded by lush mosses, some of them host to something like mangroves and others empty to await a new batch of eggs. They want pools of bubbling green ooze (they can describe the exact chemical composition) and huge purple flowers that breathe and spiky black shrubs and trees with grey-blue tubing spiraling up their trunks. They want oceans of water mixed with just the right amounts of just the right colors of eco - while they're mining the eco they'll have to start with lakes, but someday - full of drifting organisms somewhere between seaweed and jellyfish that accumulate different colors of eco and glow slightly after they mature.

While he's at it they want an old public library. They can handle most of their infrastructure themselves, but this they want, down to the smallest details of the mural that covers the outside.

They want an entire world of creatures and scenery they thought they'd never see again, and even if Cam can't make every creature it's still more than they've hoped for for hundreds of years.

It is fun, even if the resulting ecosystem is not especially attractive to his sensibilities.

When next he checks his mail, the Precursors have written. They have a lot to say about the dark makers, of course; those are still an impending threat that they'd like Cam's help with. But beyond that - they're more grateful than a letter can really express. They offer to show him how much he's accomplished, someday, after the impending threat is past. And they let him know they'd like him in their world for as long as he'd like to be there.