:...Vanyel spoke to the Star-Eyed, once: 

After another long pause: 

:- he, er, doesn't remember most of it - do your remember what you heard...?: 

"...yes, I transcribed the whole conversation."

:- Huh. I guess you're not just a normal mortal human, maybe talking to gods is easier for you: 

"She thought I might feel tired afterwards but I don't. Maybe it's like that." Shrug.

:Maybe: 

"Anyway. I'm gonna, uh, go. Have Van write me if you guys need anything."

:I, er, I'll tell him, we'll definitely do that: 

"Thanks."

Cam goes and gets in his shuttle and flies up into a geostationary orbit.

Operating from up here is annoying in a lot of ways but if anything is, say, literally on fire right now, he can probably put that out.

He cannot see any obvious literal fires from up here. 

If he points any cameras north of the mountain range which is itself north of Valdemar, he'll be able to pick out a few signs of habitation, vaguely barracks-like. 

That seems consistent! He will leave that area Alone.

He puts up a space station, docks, goes to a nice spacious room to do some forensics on the guy the Star-Eyed described. How old is he, where is he from, what does he currently look like, that sort of thing.

He looks like this.

He was born just over 1800 years ago, around - here. (The place indicated on the map is near the shore of the enormous, almost-perfectly-round lake that Valdemar calls 'Lake Evendim'.) 

Cam hangs a series of little model Velgarths from a pole across the room to get a timeline of things like when that lake happened. Or the other weirdly round geography.

The suspiciously-round lake also appears roughly 1800 years ago.

As does an equally round plain, many hundreds of miles south. A little under 1000 miles, if he checks more precisely.

Before its appearance, the little Velgarth globe shows that this region has signs of advanced civilization. Including ones big enough to be visible from orbit (if anyone had been in orbit at the time.) 

...yup, looks like a cataclysm. Weird that they haven't recovered though? Did they use up all their fossil fuels and magic's too rare to pinch-hit? How is Velgarth's supply of coal and oil doing.

...It looks like Velgarth's underground reserves of coal and oil have sat there, mostly untouched, through the Cataclysm and the following two millennia. 

There are a few signs of mines and depletion that show up, hundreds of miles directly east of where Valdemar currently lies. The mining seems to date to sometime between 1000 and 1500 years earlier. 

Okay, that's weird and he doesn't know what's up with it. Maybe the Great Man theory of history is right and there have not been enough Great Mans around to kickstart things.

Anyway. Time to aim a very powerful telescope at this place and look for good spots to drop relief packages that he hasn't already covered.

If the indicators he's looking for are visible-from-orbit signs of local droughts or otherwise blighted plant life, it sure looks like one of the worst regions on this continent right now is the strip along the border between Valdemar and Karse. There are a few other patches further south and east that look pretty bad. (The plant life north of the Valdemaran border also looks like it's not managing that well, but there aren't many signs of human habitation either.) 

The second continent on this planet, if Cam checks it out, looks drier overall, but most of the signs of civilization are scattered around the coasts and they seem to be doing all right. Well. As well as any quasi-medieval tech level civilization can expect. 

He will sprinkle a small judicious amount of rain on some droughted spots (he does check their historical rainfall patterns to make sure it's droughts and not just outright deserts), but he doesn't overdo it, there aren't angels handy to get rid of excess water. When he runs out of arbitrary water budget he starts researching local forms of malaria and the other usual suspects.

There isn't anything biologically identical to malaria locally, but he can definitely find a blood-borne and mosquito-transmitted disease that causes high fevers and other malaria-like symptoms. There are also a number of other waterborne gastrointestinal illnesses, bacterial and viral and some parasites, especially in the tropical areas. 

Cool. Time to start himself a bio lab with basement dwellers sampled from the local population and see if they react okay to penicillin and if that kills what it ought to kill and other first-pass ideas like that. Once his experiments are running he gets his computer started on all the other languages on the planet so he can read more things. When that's running he idly spies on what Leareth has been writing lately.

Leareth writes a lot, or has over the last decade. (Under a variety of names). Most of this writing isn't in any of the languages that Cam has existing samples of.

The parts that are seem to be mostly - messages about logistics? Mages and supplies are mentioned frequently. The overall impression leans toward this being a military project, but it's not that clear; there are also many random mentions of...obscure magic research, probably? 

Well that's no fun. Why aren't you more fun, bodysnatching supervillain? Cam sets machine learning to the weird alphabets, probably some kind of cipher, and crosses his fingers that they're often-enough used that the software can get a grip on it, and goes back to Science!!!! and also Care Packages!!!! at intervals.

Leareth’s encrypted personal notes are nontrivial to decrypt, but there are quite a lot of them, and with some persistence Cam can eventually get about 80% of the content. 

...Which is still mostly pretty boring and also confusing? A significant portion of it seems to just be describing his schedule and the agendas for various meetings - which, taken out of context, are hard to make sense of.

Some of these notes do mention plans which are, at the very least, ethically questionable. At one point there's a hand-drawn spreadsheet that seems to be a cost-benefit analysis around - kidnapping Gifted children? 

There are also a LOT of notes which are half in math notation, and...almost programming? Except that this world doesn't have computer tech. 

What, pray tell, are the costs and benefits of kidnapping Gifted children. Also what would these programs... do.

Not all of the labels on the rows and columns of the makeshift spreadsheet make sense to Cam even after the translation - it's clearly something written for personal use, in shorthand, not meant to be generally accessible. Some of the recognized costs are the obvious ones: physical and emotional trauma for the children and the parents. No country names are mentioned. The benefits are, roughly, additional magical troops for Leareth. 

There's a footnote under one of the columns, the one that notes how this would result in fewer available defences to - some political entity? No country names are mentioned. It seems as though this is mostly a benefit to Leareth's aims, but also potentially concerning? 

It's pretty hard to tell what the programs would do; they're very abstract.