"Oh, the 'peller'd stop that. It stops fu-reaking railgun rounds. Good point, though. I'm a bit twitchy too. Sorry."

"No harm done," replies Cerys, having successfully calmed down quickly. "Is there anything else you need from me? May I watch you work? I'm quite curious about how all this works and if there's something that you'd be willing and able to teach others - both the material and the method of manufacture are new to me, and after all, the last people to fall from the sky brought us metallurgy, so there is excellent precedent."

"Well I am, as I have already said to someone else, not an engineer. This is a specialized fabber from a survival kit. It makes polymers. Pretty much only that. But that can be food or all sorts of useful plastics. I don't know how it works in detail but I could probably poke around the documentation. So I'm making pipes, and I'm going to bury them with little check valves to reduce the pressure drop, and I'm going to run them up to a spigot pump up by the village. You can just push up and down on the pump arm and it creates a vacuum that water rushes up to fill, so you get water without walking down to the river. I don't know if those are a thing elsewhere, but one of those seems the most, eh maintainable and least likely to just randomly break one day and nobody understands how to fix it."

"I have no idea what a polymer, or a plastic, is, so that does sound like an entirely new material. I'm also not an artisan, but some of Liaven have been; if you're going to be working here for a couple of days, I could send for some actual artisans from Seren, if you're happy with them examining what you have. Everything else sounds like something I have at least heard of, although I'm not sure myself how any of them work in detail."

"It's hard to say how long this'll take, but I don't think there's a shortage of stuff to do. I can linger for a few days and wait for some artisans, sure."

Cerys nods. "I'll be back shortly, finding a messenger shouldn't take long." He heads back up to the village, nods to Allegra in passing, and disappears in search of a volunteer to run to Seren for him.

Allegra heads back down towards Lenora. "So. Do I need to chase him off, or are you good for now?"

"I'm good. I'll be hanging out here for at least a few more days if you'll have me. Apparently some sort of artisans are gonna want to drop by, and it is a homey sort of place."

"Thank you - I've worked hard to keep it that way. Let me know if you need anything, and ideally before you wander off somewhere so I don't think we've misplaced you."

Allegra hangs around watching for a bit, and is joined again by Cerys, but they try not to get in the way - or in each other's way, it's clear that they are not in fact very fond of each other.

Others will start to drift back once the wagon excitement is over, sometimes wanting to chat to Cerys - mostly about saying hi to distant family members, but also about how the war is going in various places.

As the day wears on, some people will start showing up with flat bread wrapped around various foodstuffs, or bowls of fruit and nuts, sometimes sharing it round, and will offer Lenora some lunch.

How about this, any briars hanging around who might get in trouble can help with the hammering pipe sections into each other and feeding more deadwood and a bit of dirt and water to the fabber, it'll save her some concentrating-on-two-things-at-once as she carefully (and not quite as neatly as she'd hoped) cuts and lifts sections of dirt for the pipes to go in. She buries them fairly shallow, and only after consulting a civil engineering textbook in her head for a while. Her, have any idea what she's doing? Couldn't be. It must be the supercomputer in her head that they spend 6 class hours a week on learning to run detailed simulations of anything and everything on.

(She's getting tired faster than usual. Well, she did kind of go through massive trauma?)

Oh cool, lunchtime. She'll nom whatever, pretty much, and seem vaguely sad about it but try not to show it too much. (She misses her friends.) During lunch she can let them poke her tablet some more, and challenge someone to arm-wrestling. No impeller, to make it fair.

Allegra wanders off after lunch about her other business; Cerys is still around somewhere, but is mostly distracted by other people getting their fix of news from elsewhere.

She attracts about half a dozen eager unskilled workers who enthusiastically ferry things and hammer things, although if it's possible to mess up the alignment on the pipes they absolutely do so.

There are a couple of makeshift picnic tables overlooking a nice bit of the stream, which she is shown to when she mentions arm wrestling. They are a little bit on the wobbly side but that doesn't stop the surge of curious volunteers, headed up by the strapping briar lad who brought her over to the table.

His right arm is almost entirely coated in rough bark, with some rather vicious looking thorns growing out of it - he offers her choice of arm, waving it with a grin.

They're circular, so the pipes can be hammered in whichever way! Bark arm, sure why not?

She's not any stronger than an ordinary 16-17 year old on a light training regime with what the 22nd century considers basic healthcare and optimization. So, not actually all that strong without an impeller helping out.

"If you're sure," he grins, and proceeds to get dangerously close to losing because he is being somewhat careful not to stab her arm - it's clear he's going to make it back and beat her unless she puts something more than peak sixteen year old girl strength into it, though... 

Nope. No impeller. That was the deal. She grits her teeth and strains and loses and laughs.

"That was muscle only though!"

"Your glowy blue force thing does arm wrestling too?"

As she lost her first bout, interest dies down a bit, but there are still a couple of others who want to have a go.

"It does force. Lemme show you."

This time she is much much stronger. 

She asks around what kinds of plastic things would be useful. Tarps? Bags? Bowls? She's tired but the fabber can keep going as long as they feed it biomass.

The first few people want fancy plastic drinking cups; a few people ask about washing up bowls; a couple of people ask how easy they are to clean and whether they will stand being on a fire; one guy wants to know if it can do cloaks or a tent if it can do tarps; then someone brings her a mana pan - like a gold panning pan but with runes painted on - and asks if it can do one of these with the runes already there.

"It's Pallas for wealth in the middle, Cavul for purity round the base that you swirl the rocks round to get them clean, and Naeve for hunger that pulls the impure bits off round the rim so they can be washed out," she explains, as if that's meant to actually mean something.

Plastic should be pretty easy to clean but will not really stand going over a fire. It can do raincoats and tents and stuff. It comes in many colors. She fusses around and produces something shaped the same way as the pan but has no idea if it will work.

The pan requester goes to try it out, but comes back with it in a couple of hours. "I think it'll work if I trace over the runes again," she says, "what kind of dye does this take? I could do it with oil paint but that will rub off, it might set the intention in the shapes though. We've got charcoal and grass dyes in the Steading, anything else we'll have to order in."

It's probably getting on for dinner time; most of the audience are drifting off, and Allegra is heading this way again.

She will look that up! Acrylic paint is best, apparently.

"Hello again Allegra. I had a question. Or like, a request for more exposition, I guess. You mentioned some places, Urizen, Druj, earlier? I guess I want a sentence or two on all the neighbors, is my requestion."

"Do you want to head back up into the Steading for dinner? I can happily give you the rundown of the Empire and surrounds, but you might want a seat and something to eat while I'm at it; there's ten nations of the Empire, about that many directly bordering polities, and half a dozen important world powers further out."

"I would love some dinner. Maybe even with plastic cups that seem weird to me because they're common where I'm from. Happy to give out some stuff, by the way, but just so you know plastic doesn't degrade. If you throw it away it'll be around for a while, can become a problem for nature but mostly not unless you halfway build cities out of it."

"If it doesn't degrade, these are all going to be cherished heirlooms until the market is entirely flooded with them - we're pretty good at reusing everything around here. Does it break at all? Can it be patched or... Reforged?"

One of the slightly larger houses has an open door and a small crowd - when they see Allegra and her mysterious sky stranger, bowls of stew are expedited for them. Allegra brings Lenora back to her house to eat: "It's a bit quieter and there's plenty of table, you'll still be sleeping at Brynna's if that's OK."

Allegra's house is all one room, bed over in the far corner, workbenches, shelves and chests of drawers all around the walls, and a table and chairs in the middle with a jug of water and some wooden cups; every surface except the middle table is covered in a layer of papers, pamphlets, spent mana crystals, wood shavings.

"So, summary of the world." She looks around briefly and fetches a map. "This is the Empire in the middle here - ten nations.

We're in Navarr, not actually marked on this one because we're kind of scattered about - Navarr used to be the previous great power Terunael, but screwed up a Spring ritual, created the Vallorn, and now we're all sworn to destroy it, which is looking like a thousand year undertaking.

Nearest neighbours are the Marches, they mostly do farming, very attached to their land and willing to fight for it, tend to be suspicious of outsiders. To the north is Wintermark, bit more into hospitality, drinking, making your own legend, and fighting; they herd mammoths. Then there's the scrap of land that Wintermark gave the Imperial Orcs - orcs were enslaved in the Empire in living memory, but they were freed by Emperor Ahraz and now they're a nation, and somehow on our side, don't know how he managed that one.

Keep going and you get to Varushka, which is basically full of things that go bump in the night - don't leave the road, don't get caught out after dark. South of that is Dawn, they like castles and elaborate feasts and shouting 'Glory!' while charging the enemy, and competing amongst themselves - Dawnish nobility isn't hereditary, you get it by passing a test like 'go kill me a gryphon'.

South of them is Highguard, who also like castles but prefer brooding dourly in them and being extremely serious about religion. Anvil is in the part of Highguard called Casinea, and the First Empress was Highborn, so sometimes the Empire is called the Casinean Empire by people who want to distinguish Empires.

Then Urizen is down even further south, in the mountains - there's something about the mountains that make magic easier, plus there are a load of old buildings made by something larger than human that are just abandoned, they're called Spires and the Urizen live in them and do much more everyday magic than everyone else, like having animate servant constructs called ushabti. I was born there.

Who have I missed? Oh, the Brass Coast, south of the Marches - they are avid traders and culturally extremely honest, expect to pay for everything but it'll be a fair price. They also have the best magic outside Urizen, but they tend to use it for parties and food.

And the League aren't on this map either, because they're scattered too - but they are city states, basically anywhere there's a really big city the League took over, they like trading favours and keeping track of complex webs of debt between people.

I'm going to actually eat some stew and let you think of questions before I go on to everyone who isn't the Empire."

Okay that all sounds very... Planet of Hats? Presumably because it's a quick gloss, you focus on the highlights.

She thinks and eats for a bit, putting down notes invisibly.

"It depends on the plastic if it can be patched or melted down or whatever. A few specific chemicals will mess it up and it can get brittle eventually. The stuff I've been giving you all just melts, though it can also burn. Dawn sounds fun, and so does the Brass coast. You use, like, gold for currency around here? Which place would be most straightforwardly being menaced by things that aren't people? Varushka?"

"We actually have an Imperial currency, minted in Tassato, that's one of the League cities - look, I've got a few coins here."

She reaches into a pocket of her bag and brings out a few ring and crown pieces. (the coins in the middle of https://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/empire-wiki/File:Coins.jpg)

"They're all just base metals, even the thrones - that's the next one up - that look kind of gold. Sometimes someone does try to make imitations, but they normally get caught out before they can do much.

It's backed by the civil service accepting it for taxes, but it's also just generally what people are used to - even foreign nations generally take Imperial coin because it's been reasonably stable for hundreds of years.

As for where is good for uncomplicated violence - hmm. I don't know if we have an open Vallorn front at the moment - certainly there will be steadings in Broceliande who would be very glad with a hand keeping giant bugs and poisonous plants at bay, you might also end up fighting husks though - they are kind of people, but the people bit is busy watching in horror as the Vallorn puppets their body and they don't speak or act intelligent or anything, and it's a mercy to kill them - then they can go round the Labyrinth rather than being stuck forever.

Varushkan monsters are often a lot more like people than that, and even the ones that aren't are generally tied up in complicated bargains - you could patrol and save people from wolves, and by wolves I don't mean literal wolves but more kind of mindless undead, but other than that it would be complicated and I'd want to consult a local expert first.

If you think you can reliably stay out of bow range and respond to a terrible feeling of hopelessness and despair by getting back out of the area into safety, I'd suggest an aerial tour of the Druj areas - they definitely are people but it will be pretty quickly obvious to you that they are terrible people that at least need their prisoners rescuing from them."

"Man, if I had a metal fabber I could make as many of those as I had gold for." Wait, that's not a helpful observation. "Varushka does sound like frikking mythological Transylvania actually, I'd better avoid it. Killing zombies is probably fine if they're obviously zombie-ish, probably. Broceliande wasn't one of the provinces, is it outside the Empire? Oh, I'll visit the Druj some time I'm sure, but I'm pretty skeeved out by magic damage until I know what it's like and maybe how to defend against it, honestly. I mean, I could fly away but if you keep rolling dice eventually you'll roll snake eyes."