"To start with, everything he's written in the past week - can you get it in a format where we can search for mentions of weapons or the underground?"

"Do you have computers, want to learn to use computers, or want me to do the searching?"

"They exist. I have one but not much of one. Can you make our kind? They run on eco."

"It seems like I can't make eco. If the file storage doesn't run on eco I can make that, though."

"Don't think so. Can you make one that works like a model I specify and runs on a power source you can make?"

"I cannot naively do power conversion so that would involve a detour into electrical engineering."

"Then I want the files and a new portable computer but the search'll go a lot faster if you do it."

Cam hands him a computer, and loads another chip into his computer, and looks up what the Baron has to say about the requested topics this week.

In a message to the commander of the Krimzon Guard, he wrote:

If we must make the choice, the weapon is a higher priority than the shield wall. The best defense is a good offense! Be prepared to take a stand and die for your city.

In a note to his daughter, he wrote:

Our plans are coming to fruition. The war will be over soon, one way or another. Afterward, I have no intention of continuing any of my sadly necessary wartime policies or prosecuting the rebels. Trust me for another three months. Keep up the good work. I'm proud of you.

In a message to a small handful of high-ranking people, he said:

Why can't we spread a rumor that the Underground is a honeypot? The vermin who flock to them would think twice about that!

Cam is curious about more correspondence with the daughter!

The daughter reported that she did find a buried artifact but wasn't able to move it, here's a picture, and she got attacked by metal heads while she was out, here's a list of the kinds involved. He told her not to bother going back to excavate it properly yet. His note about plans coming to fruition came after this and not in direct response to anything she wrote. She answered:

I'll do whatever I have to.

Do you want to spend the anniversary together?

And he told her when to be at the palace for dinner and which dining room to meet in.

Scale model of the artifact.

Chunk of metal with the seal of the House of Mar on it. It's not obvious that it does anything besides stick firmly in the rock and look pretty.

Maybe there is normally eco stuck to it which didn't come along. What else did he write to the commander of the Guard?

The baron sent him some requirements for the updated version of a patrol schedule and summoned him for some in-person meetings. They discussed how to keep someone called Krew from betraying them and whether it seemed like Krew understood their true aims. If he's conjuring both sides of the correspondence, the commander sent over reports on the numbers of various sorts of crimes reported and the number of criminals apprehended and mentioned that someone had voiced a worry about the eco reserves for the shield wall.

"Krew deals in weapons sometimes," says Torn, reading over his shoulder.

"In, like, a supplying the resistance sort of way, or like an opportunistic black market sort of way, or...?"

"Second one."

"Charming." He shakes his head and goes back to his books. What's the deal with Mar.

It's sort of unclear. Instead of going into too much detail about narrative accounts of Mar's actions, this book comes at it slantwise, looking at his policies and the growth of the city and associated country.

Specific laws and policies attributed to Mar include universal military service for people between twenty-two and twenty-four who couldn't prove health or financial hardship; exile and seizure of assets for rape and murder; the recently-suspended policy that resembles habeas corpus; jury trials, semi-voluntary for the jurors; money and food aid for pregnant people, all children under five, and children between five and ten actively attending school; and the election of an advisory council.

It's possible to infer a lower bound for tax revenue based on the number of person-hours of labor that went into the shield wall and the eco grid, both public works attributed to Mar, and given the amount of time those took to complete and the published tax rates (where those are still available), it's possible to put a lower bound on the mean population despite the lack of a census. That plus other records make it possible to guess the population growth rate, and it's particularly impressive given that they were actively subject to attempted genocide the entire time. Of course, part of it isn't from people being born. By all accounts they put a lot of effort into facilitating migration and trade between different settlements, and Haven City and its associated country seem to have gotten a lot of net immigration.

Another notable thing about Mar's reign is that, while it's remembered extremely fondly now, published works from the time, including newspaper editorials (something that only began to come into existence about halfway through his reign), included a lot of criticism of him and his policies.

It's possible to date the construction of nearly every large statue of or monument to him, and they all post-date his reign, with exactly one exception: his tomb was almost entirely completed in his lifetime.

There are not only no statues of him from during his reign, there are also no reliable contemporary depictions of Mar. Samos has a pet theory that Mar isn't even one person, but several working together under a shared pseudonym. Not just because his face isn't reliably known; also because he handled a lot of governance himself, at the same time as he directed the war against the metal heads, at the same time as he designed and organized the building of the shield wall and the eco grid and the sewer system and the tomb, at the same time as he collected and wrote commentaries on surviving samples of Precursor writing, at the same time as he apparently had a family, at the same time as he wrote an impassioned treatise on the concept of human rights, at the same time as he negotiated peace and mutual protection with the lurkers of Misty Island, at the same time as he wrote half a book on astronomy and two contradictory books on the philosophy of governance. It's also possible there was a Mar, but that other people's achievements ended up attributed to him somehow, whether because he deliberately stole the credit or just because of the unreliability of the historical record.

If this were true, the narrative of Mar as one person who appeared one day and won his victories through his personal valor and strength of character would be thoroughly ungrounded.

It's not a terribly long book.

While he's reading, Rit leaves, and someone stops by to pick up some of the food.

Cam waves distractedly at the food-getter. Checks to see if "Mar" gets a unique conjuration result.

Nope!

Interesting! Author(s) of the attributed texts?

The unfinished astronomy book is by a short man with green hair that fades to yellow and a conventionally pretty woman with callused hands and blue-and-green hair. The treatise on human rights is by that same man, a woman with facial tattoos that look a little like Torn's, a woman with black hair and a missing eye, a yellow-skinned man and a red-skinned man. One of the books on government is by the tattooed woman. The other is by a blue-skinned man, a man with a badly-damaged right ear, and an orange creature with a tail that isn't a lurker.

"Hey, uh, help me out here, is this within normal variation for your species?"

"I do know a guy with green skin. That one," (the orange one) "is an ottsel."