...next time Cam is bored, he is going to try to translate these programs into a real programming language and run them in sandbox and turn on autocommenting.

The sandbox spins its wheels uselessly and the autocommenter has no idea what to make of the situation. All right then.

Does Cam have any mail?

He has mail! A polite, confused, and oddly cagey note from Vanyel. He thanks Cam again for the ride to Haven, confirms that he's been through the care package and instructions Cam left for him, and adds that if it wouldn't be inconvenient he would appreciate Cam letting the Heralds in Haven know what's going on.

Also, if Cam doesn't mind, Vanyel would like an update on the mission that's taken him off to space? And to know whether this is something Valdemar needs to be concerned about? 

Cam will... make an entire fleet of courier drones, actually, this will probably keep coming up. He sends Vanyel a letter explaining that he is not conducting a space mission, he is just advancing Project End Material Scarcity from space. He sends Haven a summary too.

Vanyel doesn't reply right away, but the next time Cam tries checking Leareth's recent written materials, the easily-decrypted ones are some quickly-jotted meeting notes - which seem to be mostly Leareth thinking-in-writing about some spy reports he's just picked up. Reports about miraculous and impossible food deliveries, not just on the Karsite border but all over? 

Leareth has also just heard about Karis' arrival in Haven; his notes contain some quick speculations on whether that could be in any way related. If he has a planned response, though, he hasn't written it down himself for Cam to easily find. 

Hm. Cam makes a little diorama of Leareth at various times of day to see who he hangs out with.

Leareth seems to be spending a LOT of time by himself, actually, either in a plain stone-walled room like the one where Savil demo'd Velgarth magic for him, or else in a different room with a workbench and lots of complicated crystal structures - presumably magical, but that part doesn't show in Cam's diorama and it's impossible to tell what Leareth is doing. 

At one point earlier that day he had a brief meeting with a nondescript man of plausibly-Valdemaran ethnicity. 

This person is his most frequent face to face contact; sometimes she joins him in the stone Work Room or the other magical workshop. 

What is she writing?

Lots of incredibly cryptic notes that seem to be descriptions of some kind of magical Sight! They're really hard to make sense of, though, especially since they're clearly in personal shorthand. There are some drawings, which look vaguely like....bread? Extremely strange bread? 

She has also written several letters today, which seem to be orders to be sent to various other operatives, though it's hard to tell since she doesn't address them by name and, though the letters themselves are just in Valdemaran or Rethwellani rather than code, there are lots of bizarre keyword references which are probably referring to previously discussed contingency plans? Not ones that Leareth ever wrote about in his more easily decryptable notes, though.

However, Cam can piece together that it looks as though Leareth is sending more agents to Valdemar, including to Haven. 

How annoying.

Current locations of these letters? Or last extant, if they were burned.

Two were delivered to spots north of Valdemar's border and then burned. A third went to...somewhere by the western border of Valdemar, near the tiny states of Lineas and Baires? That one doesn't seem to have been burned. The content is about making sure to shut down...something? It's referred to by a sequence of apparently-randomly-chosen words. 

How correct horse battery staple of them. Who was with the burned letters when they burned and what are they doing now? What is the one who is shutting down the battery staple up to?

Inconveniently, the two letters to the north seem to have been delivered to two different very nondescript people, a man and a woman, who are currently...still up north, apparently in their homes, not doing anything visibly interesting. It seems plausible they were just relays, and passed on the contents of the letters to others, verbally or via Mindspeech. 

The recipient of the letter to the west - which must have been Gated directly to the wild almost-Pelagirs land near Lineas, for it to arrive so quickly - is currently in the capital city of Lineas, apparently in the process of obtaining a room in an inn. 

Cam will occasionally check in on Mr. Battery Staple to see what the heck he's about. In the absence of specific identities he will just drop Haven a line that their northerly supervillain is sending agents-of-some-sort to do unclear heavily encoded things and they should watch their opsec.

Mr. Battery Staple locks himself in an inn room and starts frantically writing letters. The first is addressed to King Deveran of Lineas and is requesting a meeting in the Palace as soon as possible; the man folds it up and seals it and then darts outside and pays one of the ambient underfed-looking children playing in the street a silver coin (which in local terms is a truly exorbitant amount of money), apparently in exchange for rapid delivery of said letter, since on the next check the letter is now at the Palace. 

The second letter is longer, and is in some moderately complicated letter-substitution cipher, different from any of the ones Leareth uses in his personal notes, but one that Cam's computers should be able to crack eventually. The agent leaves his room again and hand-delivers it to...a nearby temple? To some goddess called Astera. 

...how odd. What happens to it at the temple?

It's read by a young woman, who looks DEEPLY concerned and immediately heads off the to the library - the temple has a quite extensive book collection, apparently, surprisingly so for a pre-printing-press civilization - and grabs two apparently-random books, which she flips through rapidly while staring at the letter. Possibly the books are some kind of agreed-upon reference for making sense of code words, but without being able to actually read the young woman's mind, it's hard for Cam to tell what inferences she's making here. 

After a little while, she hastily packs, stuffs the letter into a saddlebag, which she puts on a horse taken from the stables behind the temple. Within minutes she's riding hard for the border between Lineas and Baires. 

...Cam's computer eventually chews through the letter-substitution code. It seems like the letter is intended to eventually reach someone important in the Baires leadership, though he's named only as 'V'. The request is for him to stand down and dismantle...some contingency-plan setup? Whatever is being referred to by the randomly-selected words. 

It's very inconvenient for the supervillain to be so cryptic. Cam spends more time with his biology experiments. Works up some gene drives for some nasties, tests them in silico.

This is the point at which the courier drone he sent to Haven, after successfully delivering its message, sends Cam a sudden alert that it's off-course on its return journey. 

And then stops sending any signals at all. 

...what is in that location now and at the time it was knocked off course.

...Nothing in particular? A perfectly ordinary field. 

If Cam looks more closely at the location data, he'll notice that the drone didn't so much get knocked off course as instantaneously teleport half a mile away, immediately before he lost contact with it entirely. 

Okay. What was around it where it landed.

Also. Is "Fetcher" a conjurable parameter.

The drone seems to have landed in an...underground room? Somewhere underneath one of the Palace outbuildings. It's dark and roughly finished. There's nobody there. Fetcher does seem to be a conjurable parameter, but there aren't any of them, either in the field where the drone was grabbed from or the underground room it was very briefly transported to. 

They could be farther away, but then he'd be sifting through a lot of Heralds. All right. Where has the drone wound up.

It's now super far north! Well across the mountains. Its immediate surroundings are...another featureless stone-walled underground room. Pretty far underground, which could be why the drone is not successfully sending any signals now. 

(Also the room is very strongly magically shielded, against basically everything which incidentally includes drone radio communication, but Cam's conjuring won't show this directly.) 

There are some crystals mounted on wall shelving in the room, but no people.