Cerys nods. "I'm sure Allegra can fill you in. I'm... going to go fetch some militia now, so at least someone recognised will be on hand for the international incident?"

He seems at least half joking about the last bit, but in a way that contains some actual uncertainty.

If not waylaid immediately, Cerys starts jogging off down the road, gradually building speed as he goes.

Deskyl watches him go for a few seconds, and then signs to Allegra again.

    "Master Deskyl has noticed that you seemed to be expecting her to kill anyone who attacks her, ma'am, and she's wondering if it's going to cause any problems or have any cultural implications if she doesn't."

"I mean, killing Imperial citizens usually causes legal problems. If you're capable of not killing them, you should do that; self-defence only applies to the amount of force you actually need to end the imminent threat.

Hmm. Actually, are you capable of restraining someone long term without killing them? Basically the only way we have to do that is to tie them up and guard them carefully - the Unconquered are particularly well known for being able to escape any restraint in five minutes flat if someone isn't essentially entirely engaged in stopping them, which is very tedious. 

Normally if there are people available to do it we'd just march a dangerous criminal off to the nearest magistrate as soon as possible, and if they were blatantly attempting murder they'll probably be executed shortly thereafter. Which does seem a bit of a waste of everyone's time, sometimes."

    "Not straightforwardly, ma'am, or at least not beyond doing something like breaking their arms, though her sensory skills do allow her to notice when someone is trying to escape, even at some distance."

    "She says she'll probably want to talk to the first few and she'll see what she thinks after that."

"Around here, people tend to die if you leave them with broken limbs for too long - or, at least, if they want to kill themselves, they generally can in that situation.

With the Thorns on the way, if you don't need to kill people to be sure of neutralising the threat, I think this is a non problem - with your ability to pay attention to the prisoners, worst case, I get some people to sit guard duty and you poke them if they're getting distracted."

    "She says she does still need to sleep - she can work on refining her skills so that an escape attempt would wake her, once she's more recovered, but she isn't that sensitive to that sort of thing yet - and she won't want to be tied up monitoring prisoners permanently, but yes, this does sound fairly workable."

    "She says hopefully she can just show them they're outmatched and let them go."

"People operating on logic and reason are unlikely to try to assassinate a person with unknown powers in the middle of a Navarr Steading full of excitable Briars.

Highguard is a fair way away, though, and so are the League cities, I don't think we'll have an imminent problem.

...more imminently, I guess I'm going to have to plan for some visitor's quarters.

Ideally, I'd start some housing extending the Steading onto the clearing, and possibly move your tent up closer to the forge, if that's acceptable? The Thorns can camp in the woods, but I'm not quite so vindictive as to make Urizeni researchers do without at least some walls and privacy."

    "She says that's fine, ma'am; she'll want a house eventually but she'd like to see where everyone else settles first."

"Right, then. If there's nothing else for now?"

    "No ma'am. Thank you."

Allegra nods, and heads off, calling various people over as she goes - she's got a lot of building to organise.

"Um," says Ytha, who is still standing nearby. "I don't suppose you can talk me through what was happening, over by the waterwheel? You don't have to, I'm just curious."

    "With the electricity, ma'am?"

"Yes! A lot of people were curious about the wire, and I tried not to give very much away, but some people thought we might be doing something with lightning conduction, which I think is a bit like electricity? I think they thought it was for the dream temple, though."

    "Electricity is the same thing as lightning, yes ma'am, just for most purposes you want less of it at once. It's also not an object, but a process - it's a lot like a stream, that it has to be moving to be what it is, and if you took a bowl of water from a stream the water wouldn't be part of a stream anymore, even though the water itself hasn't changed. In the generator Master Deskyl made, the magnet acts as a pump, moving the electrons in the wire around to make the electricity flow, and that flow traveled through the waxed wire to my battery, where it made chemical changes that will let the battery produce electricity inside me over time."

"And electrons are - little tiny bits of electricity, that are already there in the wire?"

    "More or less, yes ma'am. They're in everything, but the ones in metal are easiest to move."

"So - you said it didn't exactly work like you expected it to?"

    "She says that the electricity part did, ma'am, but your physics is opinionated about it - ours at home isn't smart enough to notice why things are being done, usually, and yours was clearly paying attention to the fact that she was generating electricity to power me rather than for some other purpose; she expects it to interfere in most other cases where someone tries to run a generator."

"...I'm not sure what it even means for physics to be opinionated, I mean maybe that would happen in a Realm? Maybe we should find one of the mages and see if there's magical interference?"

    "She says that sounds like a good idea, yes ma'am."

"I think Juny was hanging around..." Ytha scampers off up to the road, calling, "Juny! You still there? Have a moment?"

Soon, someone calls back, "Ytha!", and another fairly young briar woman comes running into view.

Deskyl waves agreeably and starts heading over to the generator again.

The two briars head over with her.

"Did you see the experiment? They think there might have been something with agency interfering with it, so obviously I thought maybe it was magic..."

"Well, I can cast Detect Magic and see if there are any traces."

    "She says she expects it to be subtle, ma'am, if it's visible to you at all; it most likely won't be something you haven't seen before."