"I've... completely lost track of when the next summit is, but I'm sure someone's got a calendar - they're the solstices and equinoxes. I don't think we were planning to send anyone this coming season, and it's been a while since I was there...

Actually, you might want to go see if you can bother the Imperial Prognosticators. I'm sure they haven't factored you into their calculations, and they're more likely to find you a conjunction if they have. I expect they spend most of the year in the Castle of Thorns, which is all the way over in Dawn, but we've already established you've got some considerable personal transport.

Do you want me to rustle you up an Anvil guide, to meet you there, if you want to fly off to inform the Civil Service of your existence? While I'd love to monopolise you down here helping us build things to fight the Grendel, I should probably let you go to Anvil at least once and hear everyone's pitch. And see if the Gate is feeling cooperative, although that makes it very likely that we would just lose you for good."

"...I wanna think about that tomorrow." Sigh. "The way I got here, from my perspective, is trying an advanced impeller technique they were letting anyone who passed control exercises try and failing in new and exciting ways that popped me out above a Navarr steading- I think is the right words? With massive internal damage from the transit."

"Ouch. They patched you up alright? I'm sure we can rustle up a Physick if you think you've anything hanging around from that. And, uh, do you want me to stop talking at you and find you a room to rest in?"

"I've got something for that integrated, and they helped out too. I probably would've made it through as long as someone fed and watered me, but they had something - so, think a thousand thousand thousand extremely tiny cuts on the inside of someone, the body can heal each individual one but they all bleed slightly and you get too weak and poison yourself - but they did some unpoison magic and after that it was just a couple days' bed rest. Much better than I'd been expecting. I think I should proooobably keep chatting a bit longer? Cool off, space out, bleed off the - everything?"

"Sure, we can do that. Anything in particular you want to cover, or shall I just ramble about Autumn magic or reminisce about Anvil?"

"I guess?

I miss my friends. And teachers and family and- The culture, you know. I miss browsing the internet for funny recordings, like the voice earlier. I miss going to Chinese restaurants and ordering sesame orange chicken and egg drop soup. I miss flying slalom races and playing soccer, and it's kind of creepy whenever I fly there's no communication traffic. Nobody to clear my flight path with, nothing on RADAR. Lonely."

"I have no idea what the 'internet' is, but we absolutely both have a small browsing library and we can send someone out for sesame chicken and egg drop soup, those sound like things I would expect to get at a street vendor in this town somewhere. You might need to describe a bit more what kind of sesame chicken you're after, mostly the kind I'm thinking of would be fried with honey, possibly orange blossom honey from somewhere fancy?"

"Fried with sauces at least, maybe honey would work? Wouldn't be the same probably, anyway. Tell me about Anvil? And Autumn magic? 'Cambion' can imply an inherently evil person, where I'm from- Though the language is extremely weird so I wouldn't lean on that at all."

"I think there's some old superstition in it, yes - Cambion, I mean. These days the superstition is actually that it's lucky to have your contact drawn up by a Cambion, and even better in their blood - but, uh, voluntarily given nowadays... 

Autumn is very linked to contacts and transactional relationships, and some people get upset with autumn heralds because they don't care about anything but the word of the deal - and Cambion are traditionally very politically inclined, very stubborn.

There's, uh, a lot about Anvil. It's the place the First Empress met the first national leaders that would make up the Empire. Do you want a history lesson or how it's used now?"

"Nothing about the glorious wars fought to defend it or anything." She shivers. "What's - beautiful about it?"

"It's lovely at night when all the lightstones light up the camps; the Urizen in particular make a great art of stringing multicoloured lights around their encampment. The Imperial Regio is a wonder in its own right, it reacts to the magic that people are casting in it, which is often a great performance in itself - many of our ritual traditions involve singing, dancing, even short plays. There's art everywhere, great tapestries, portraits hung on tent walls, every kind of toy or trinket someone might want to buy.

That's during the festivals, of course - outside them there's a different beauty, the Forge standing after all those years, waiting patiently for the Empire to assemble again... when the grass grows high enough they graze sheep there, sheep investigating the Sentinel Gate are strangely adorable..."

"Old things have a mystique to them, a majesty, even when there's nothing special about them. Even if they were ordinary houses, just that old. The vastness of history... There are ancient tombs in Egypt, built some four thousand five hundred years ago. The great arches and stones and canyons of nature are much older than that, but four thousand years of human life all leading up to the here and now... It seems so vast, and yet so small - that's something like two hundred generations. Hardly forever. Not compared to how slow and old nature is, the course of human evolution. They say we had music before we had language.

...I'm kind of rambling. Thanks for - grounding me, I guess. If you have some more food I won't say no."

"Sure, anything you like or don't like?" She turns round and looks for anyone moving between wagons, and shortly an attentive teenager bounds over to see what they want.

"-Oh hell, you probably eat real animals. No meat, if you have something made from soybeans I could probably use protein anyway."

"We do eat real animals, but not all of us -" she turns to the waiting teen, "can we get some vegan chickpea tagine for the visitor, please? If anyone's doing soy beans then a side of those, too."

He scurries off onto the building.

"Thanks. It's hardly an emergency compared to human - sentient slavery, and I've got even less angles on teaching someone how to do vat-grown meat than desalination, but..."

"Yes, I think most sensible people's position on animal welfare is that they'll worry about it when speaking people's welfare is sorted out. The League tend more towards keeping pets and do a bit of pet rescue and so on, and to be honest our farm animals are generally kept in better conditions than, say, the Druj keep most of their people. And there's the whole horse thing, I guess... we used to have great riding animals called horses, as an Empire, and then they were mistreated sufficiently that there are now none left, and that rather focusses the mind on the wellbeing of the other animals we rely on."

The teenager bustles out of the building again with a big clay dish containing chickpea tagine over couscous, which he proudly presents to Lenora. "Compliments of House Ezmara; if Yasmina thinks your presence is enough payment that's good enough for the rest of us."

"We used to have horses too, they became obsolete but there's still a few around, as basically really big pets," Yaaaaawn.

"Thank you? Smells good. I do have some coin, but... I should probably just eat and sleep at this point. The, uh, combat jitters are going away. Though the memories won't..."

"Yes, get some food in you, and then I'm sure Mateo here will show you to a nice guest room."

The teenager nods and commences leaning on one of the wagon supports. Once it's clear conversation is paused, Yasmina will pull a (printed, if somewhat unevenly) newspaper out of a compartment under the table and start reading it.

The guest room has quite a nice bed, soft silken covers, a jug of water and a cup, a basin and some soap; however, the guest bathroom arrangements appear to be a chamber pot.

Eh. She had worse in that first little village. Steading. It was a Steading. Still kind of tempted to incinerate it or something, but... Eh.

...She's gotten more paranoid over time, though, and lightly barricades the door with whatever's available and separates out her SIGINT unit from the Valkyrie Core before desynchronizing, setting it to wake her the hell up if someone comes into the room, in case of assassins or something. It's an irregular box of metal topped with a foot-wide crystal dodecahedron of some sort making a soft humming noise with a few blinking lights, to any observers.

And then: Sleep.

Night passes; the sun rises; if she doesn't wake up shortly after sunrise, her alarms will be set off by a teenage girl sneaking quietly into the room with a replacement chamber pot and a fresh jug of water.

She wakes up when the door first clatters and a BEEP sounds. The door won't yield to just light pressure.

"Just a minute!" She yawns, before reintegrating everything and moving her loose furniture barricade out of the way.

"Sorry!" calls the girl in a worried voice. "I can come back later if it's a bad time?"

"Just- It's fine, I just wanted to-unf-sleep extra secure!" She silences the beeper. "I'm up now though!"

The girl comes in, replaces the water jug, and awkwardly gestures with the chamber pot, attempting to determine if it needs replacing without actually having to communicate; it seems like she finds the whole 'guest is actually awake' situation mortifying.