Wait shit she forgot to ask for, like, food.

...Doing good is its own reward? She doesn't say anything. She does follow him out in her thin dress and light coat. Suddenly Clothes sure supports the 'arbitrary material objects' thing though.

The exit is obvious enough, there are just a few rooms to the library and there's a door leading outside. It's not actually that cold out! There's snow on the ground, just not all that much of it. Feels like maybe 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a small town in late 19th century America. There's houses, and a church, and an empty market area with bare wooden stalls. No power poles and only a couple of very old-style trucks.

He looks around thoughtfully. Peers back over his shoulder. "Do you want, like, an actual parka. And pants. And boots."

"...It would be good if I had those things. And food. And firewood."

"Setting wood on fire is also bad for your lungs," he says. The other items appear in a stack so she can put them on herself. (The top item in the pile of food is steaming hot ramen.)

"Is freezing to death good for your lungs? Or, uh, electric stuff?"

Wow, that smells delicious. She carefully puts it aside onto the library's front porch and tugs on the pants, boots, and jacket first, so she maybe shivers a bit less.

...That's good food. There's meat and egg in it! She's now absorbed in eating ramen, trying not to let the wind spill any down the parka.

"Electricity will not harm your lungs. I mean, I could give people lung transplants but they're not fun for anyone involved and it sounds like there are bigger problems." Where is a place he can put a nice li'l generator?

She makes a 'hmm' noise and continues eating ramen. There's people's yards including space around the library and church, and open fields or woods beyond that, and the market square, and what is probably a nice little park when it's not covered in a foot of snow, leafless shrubbery and all.

Cam strolls - slipping only twice on ice - toward the nearest open field and appropriates a little corner of it to make a generator full of swappable battery packs in its charging slots. It sits under a gazebo and has plastic curtains around it for weatherproofing. He then produces his computer and composes an instructional sign.

"I'm not sure people will use this, or even leave it be, if there's no way to explain how it got here. The people who are making the colonies are either - rich industrialists, or the Federal Emergency Commission, F.E.C.? If you label it as an, an aid package or something..."

"I can put the words 'aid package' on it, sure, other tips?"

"Does it need maintenance? Will it run out of... Electricity? How do you use this to get heat? Um, maybe I should go over the phrasing so it doesn't sound... Tesla."

"It doesn't need maintenance soon, this is very stopgap while I figure out how to warm up the whole planet or something. It will run out but I can keep refueling it, again, in the short term. What's wrong with Tesla, anyway?" He turns the computer and she can read: Aid Package: Take gray rectangles and slot into the bottom of one of the red heaters. Turn dial to adjust heat output. Ideal for indoor spaces. Automatically turns off if knocked over for safety reasons; twiddle dial to resume heating. One rectangle good for about 500 hours; expended rectangles may be placed back in the slots here to re-charge. There is a stack of red heaters in the gazebo.

"That looks alright. I might call them 'packs' instead of 'rectangles', it sounds like it was written by an engineer. Which isn't bad actually. Tesla is a mad genius who treats his employees like dogs and whose devices keep accidentally killing people. He had steam dreadnoughts built to head to a shelter up north, but kicked off all the children and cripples when they left for his new city in the north. 'No room for weakness'. It was in the last ever Chicago Times."

"Yikes, I had not heard of this Tesla tendency." Instances of "rectangle" are replaced with "pack". "Any other edits?"

"I think people will use it. I'm going to take one, certainly. Um... 'Delivered via airship'? To explain why nobody saw trucks bringing this in?"

"That would be... false..."

"I suppose it's not that important and if people don't use these wonder devices that's their own fault? Are you incapable of lying or something? Sure, it's a sin, but I thought you were a demon."

"I'm a demon but not, like, in a sin-related way. I'm not incapable, I just don't like it. Do you think many will be put off by the lack of airdrop assertions?"

"Probably they will talk to Father Gunther about it and he'll praise the Lord for instilling charity in the hearts of man and people will mostly listen to him. I'm not sure I know these people as well as I thought I did, though."

"No?" Cam instantiates the sign. Makes it look nice and rustic.

"No. Outsider, see, only lived here a few years and- I feel myself trying to make excuses for my behavior, but no. I deserve the shunning, really."

"...deserve it for... not having lived here long?" Cam creates some news and sticks it in his computer.

"I'm an adulterer. I betrayed my husband."

Rockefeller dead of heart attack, steel mills still running under lower managers! Anti-Hoarding laws passed in the state of Georgia. Jay Gould accused of labor abuses & effective slavery. King Edward VII sells the Crown Jewels to fund the I.E.C. and shelter construction. New advances in Steam Cores allow fully independent automata. Belgian government announces plan to enclose entire polders in heated greenhouses. The Emperor of Japan has closed the country. Agricultural collapse in the Raj leads to mass uprisings!

"...okay, well, that's unfortunate for him but I don't think you ought to freeze or starve over it. Can you tell me what a Steam Core is?"

"Maybe we shouldn't talk about this, then. Something to do with Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, I think? Tesla had big factories that made them."