What's the cosplay from?

Wash sighs.

     "The Epic Saga of Leonard Church", Church says.

They leave and head for the train station. With Church handling directions and taking point on buying tickets, Wash starts looking at the news articles that the AI translated for him, skimming headlines first. What's happening in Silver Cross and Surrounding Areas? What's happening in the world?

Current events in Silver Cross:

- upcoming game of Danceboard, a sport where board-game-like tactical conflicts are resolved according to dancefighting between colliding players
- annual goat show
- giveaway day (a once-weekly occasion when people are especially encouraged to put random things they don't want - bread heels, old clothes, everything in between - out for random people to claim)
- bridge out on this road, use alternate route
- student theater production of Winter Rose

World events:

- satellite internet is experiencing difficulties for astronomical reasons
- tariff suspension between Ibra (the country where Silver Cross is) and its neighbor Skayva renewed for another five years
- missing hikers found!
- national dog show
- refugee entry from Jiis has slowed down, pundits debate whether Jiis is behaving better or cracking down harder on exit
- founder of UI consultancy Custom Ease dies at 91; here are ten features you use every day that he helped with!

Huh. Maybe they can get free food from giveaway day? 

"Uh, what's up with Jiis?" 

Good question. Hey internet, what is up with Jiis? 

Jiis has recently had a lot of flooding and it turned out their disaster preparedness department was not very disaster prepared! This isn't the first time this has happened and they're really worried about brain drain and essential services if people keep leaving, but a lot of people don't think they'd actually stop anyone.

That's rough.

Anyone making interesting comments or sending interesting messages to him about the whole supercomputer thing yet? (he uploads a few more translations and the answer to another math problem)

There's a university that wants to examine the supercomputer, where is it?

Can he do translations that fast on living languages?

As long as it doesn't require artwork can he port things to other systems? This game, that text-manipulator, some drawing program.

The supercomputer is currently en route to Silver Cross but is surprisingly portable, want to send someone to check it out there or should he come to them?

He could once he learned the languages in question? He doesn't really have an incredible advantage at translation except for the supercomputer thing.

...Probably, how much are you offering?

(Translation, Translation, Math... He's almost done with the translation.)

He looks up investor / tech company owner profiles and translates them for Wash to read.

It would be ideal if he could bring it to Six Rivers! (Six Rivers is pretty far east of here.)

How long would it take him to teach the supercomputer more languages?

The drawing program has 4,133 purchase pledges for a port to a particular new operating system at price points ranging from §1-250.

The highest profile tech company is called Droplet and they make the most popular web browser and one of the most popular document management systems. Its founder is retired but the successor is his niece.

...Will they pay for transit on the way to Six Rivers?

He learned this one in like an hour but he's multitasking more than he was last night. (How much money is in modern translation work?)

...how much of that money would go to him for making the port vs the original authors of the software?

(What are the owners of tech hardware (CPU, RAM, drives) manufacturers like? Any of them seem like the kind of people who'd be willing to hear them out?)

Wash wants to know how far away Six Rivers is and if it's a train ride or something else.

Wash also wants to know if the train has food, he's starting to get hungry again.

(He's currently trying to get himself up to speed on the language, so he isn't so reliant on Church for translations. Unfortunately for him, he has to trust Church for language-learning material, which means he may or may not be learning curse words in place of politeness markers.)

Six Rivers is a train ride, longer than the one from Goat Track to Silver Cross, which will be over with in an hour. The train to Silver Cross has a little vending machine in his car with three kinds of juice, various snacks, and candy, in addition to bandaids, ibuprofen, little pocket-size packets of tissues, and water.

Translation work varies a lot, of course. With enough volume he can make a lot of money by translating fiction and obscure science papers and so on in exchange for bounties, and there is some reason to think that more bounties will pop up if he undercuts the existing market clearing rate, but it's not, for a human, terribly lucrative per hour, and is normally done by dedicated fans and scientists and suchlike.

The original authors of the software wouldn't get anything, they've declined to serve these customers.

It's sort of hard to get personal information on the CEOs of companies; the norm seems to be having a professional profile that is just about business things and not about their likelihood of believing in time travelers in power armor. The brand account for Arc Technologies, which makes phones and laptops and things of that ilk, at least is sort of trying to project an attitude of being bold and friendly, but who knows if that extends to their executives.

The university can comp their train ticket to Six Rivers for the chance to study the computer!

Church will start rewriting the drawing software for the new OS. He posts progress updates as he does it. (They come in absurdly fast, for a human doing this, but the posts at the beginning sure look like someone who's done basically no coding with these operating systems at all, as well as someone with... rather surprising gaps in their explicit knowledge about how to code in general??? It's confusing, if you know what you're looking at.)  

...Is the university okay with some level of indirection in studying? He's reluctant to provide unrestricted access to the hardware itself for reasons that will be more apparent when they show up, though he'll happily let them use it to crunch numbers to demonstrate (and also if they can supply electricity that would be very nice.)

      Meanwhile, Wash buys some juice, a protein-heavy snack, and a candy bar.

"Juice and candy, Wash? That's a lot of sugar."

      "Oh, fuck off."

Church smirks. "So do you think we should go to the university right away, or try our luck with the government in Silver Cross first?"

      Wash stops to think about this for a bit. "An 8 hour train ride? We'd be getting to Six Rivers pretty late... Can we book a room somewhere without ID?"

"Gooood question." Church checks online to see if this is possible.

Hotels do not seem to require ID, just money.

The university is not trying to hire the computer, they want to study it.

"Okay, so I've been thinking-"

     "Oh Shit! Don't strain yourself, dude, I know that's not your strong suit-"

"Shut the fuck up. Anyways, I think we should stay in Silver Cross for at least a day. If you can find a hotel near the train station and book us a room, we can buy something cheap that plugs into the wall on the way there, and when we get in I'll take it apart and we can charge the suit up a bit. Then I want to get out of this thing, take a shower, eat an actual meal, and have a bit of a nap in an actual bed. Then we can go talk to a Real Government Person. You'll be done with that software port by then, which should give us a fair bit of spending money. Any objections?"

     "Well, I object to the framing of the money as ours. I'm doing all the work, dude! I'm just buying you stuff out of the goodness of my cold mechanical heart."

Wash bows, extremely sarcastically. "Your generosity is un-fuckin-paralleled." 

     Church snickers. "Yeah, that's fine. I'm actually almost finished with the port, I think? Probably? Hard to tell. But I should be able to get us a nice place to stay and a good meal for you on the way there. Because I'm so generous." His hologram salutes sarcastically and disappears, and Wash assumes the conversation is over.

...but after a few seconds, he pops back out. "...Wash, did you know programming is actually kinda fun? It's sorta like being in command, but the only person you have to boss around is the computer, and it does exactly what you tell it to! Also it's so fast. There's no waiting around for shit to happen! Which is great, because I've done un-fucking-believable amounts of waiting for shit to happen."

      ...Awww. Wash smiles inside his helmet. "Whatever, nerd."

"Oh, fuck you. You're just jealous of my leet skillz."

      Wash snorts, then goes back to studying the translation guides.

Church responds to the university, telling them that intensive study of the supercomputer is not something they can grant unconditionally, but he's happy to head over to Six Rivers (on his own dime) and discuss the issue with them further in a few days, if that's acceptable?

He does a quick sweep of his incoming messages and comments on his threads. Anything interesting? If not, he'll go back to working on the port, and posting occasional blog updates about it.

The interested CS professor at Six Rivers University is up for setting up a meeting in a few days, sure.

Nothing very interesting, no.

Cool, they look forward to meeting him.

Church finishes up the port of the drawing program as the train is approaching Silver Cross. He finds a site where he can sell his new program at a price that matches what the median user pledged they'd buy it for. The site has a system for setting a lower price that is more inconvenient to select, which seems kinda silly, but whatever, he tries it out. §50 by default, minimum §35. 

He posts the link in his threads and messages the people who asked him for the port directly! He basks in the glory of a task completed with no major fuck-ups, and then starts looking for a hotel near the train station, as well as a place where they can buy a charging cable and a meal to go. Hopefully this shouldn't be too hard?

A handful of people download it, and then by the time they're in Silver Cross more of them have started doing so in response to confirmations that it seems to open and run fine.

There are a couple of hotels by the train station in Silver Cross; he probably wants the cheaper one. The train station has a convenience store where they can get a sandwich and a cable.

...Well, what's the difference between the cheap and the nice ones? He might want to splurge.

(He guides Wash to the convenience store while checking out hotels.)

The cheap one doesn't do housekeeping during your stay, just between, and doesn't allow animals unless they're particularly well-certified for conduct, and has slightly worse wifi and food. The nicer one has a decent café as its first floor and you can get housekeeping during your stay if you flip the doorknob sign and they have a lower standard of animal training and the reviews prefer the vibe in general.

Hmmm, most of that doesn't matter and Church cares a lot about better Wifi, actually. Can they easily afford a night at the fancy one?

     Wash looks around the convenience store for a cheap wall charger with a decent length of wire, loose-fitting clothes, a fresh meal, some carb-heavy snack foods, and a bag to carry it all in.

With the money from the port coming in, yes, they can afford a night at the fancy one.

The convenience store has long loose unisex shirt-dress-things the adult size of which will go down to Wash's ankles unless he buttons it higher, apparently for throwing on if you have spilled something all over your outfit or something; they come in black and white. The longest available wall charger is about three feet long. The convenience store doesn't have anything hot but there's a stand over that way with dumplings that does; at the convenience store it's sandwiches and snacks. The convenience store will sell him a shoulder bag or a backpack, again in black or white (the backpack is also available in green with black piping, and sky-blue with white).

Wash will buy: the 3 foot charger, a shirt-dress in black, a sandwich and some carb-y snacks, and a shoulder bag, also in black. He'll also grab some dumplings from the stand, pointing at the things he wants to buy rather than having Chuch translate when possible to avoid drawing even more attention than his armor is already drawing.

      Church gets them a room at the fancy hotel and guides Wash there, providing translation via HUD along the way. 

Wash looks around along the walk. What's this part of Silver Cross like?