"I will only know what I think best when I know what you want to ward against."

Morg gestures and starts walking, leading them down a hallway.

"It'd be a panic room. Bullets, explosions, and big hunter-killer drones," Morg shrugs. "If they're sending exotic stuff like gas or nanites at us we're fucked either way. Probably want to leave a little hole for wireless signal to get out." She frowns. "Lasers. Can wards stop light that's too bright but let light that's not so bright through?"

"I do not think I can do that. I think I can grant the walls of the panic room infinite tensile strength, compressive strength, and shear strength. If I tried to stop light that's too bright, I think it would not happen that you would be satisfied. I think you would like it if I did a different kind of magic, that is called illusion, but that I cannot do. What are lasers?"

"Lasers are weapons that use strong light in a narrow beam to heat things."

"I can stop heating things!"

"Nice. We can black out the windows and keep the walls from melting then. That's probably damn useful in some kind of industry I'm not thinking of..."

"It's useful in many industries! It is difficult but with very precise knowledge I can make the universe less aged."

"...Negentropy?"

"Are you seriously claiming to violate one of the most fundamental physical laws. The stars will burn away and leave nothing but cold dust, infinitely many years in future."

"I mean, a 'fuck off' field is already a violation."

"But that's just materials science, not entropy. It's always bullshit when the scientists fix it in fiction!"

Oh, good, he was worried his English wasn't up to the task of getting that across.

"Yes."

"Okay, yeah, they're going to- Uh, honestly, you might want to not be very interesting or accessible until some of the dust settles, you're incredibly valuable, ridiculously valuable-"

"How would I not be very interesting or accessible?"

Morg speaks up. "Stay away from Persephone City. Don't use the internet. Convince everyone here to keep mum or at least confuse the narrative enough that you sound like a hoax instead of a priceless opportunity."

"Oh, I can do that," Reynaud snorts. "Maybe my stinking "social media coordinator" experience is actually useful for once."

"...I am willing." Suspicious that they actually just want to keep him for themselves for reasons not best described as moral, sure, but even if they just want power they don't seem omnimalevolent so them winning their war is probably fine.

"Oh, if you want to go where the fighting is, by all means. You'd be useful, probably save lives. We can probably scrape up enough credits to protofab a cheap car. We're not going to keep you."

Morg turns down a hallway. "The aero suites are right through those doors. Either way, it'll probably be decided one way or another in a few days. Persephone City is the only place the matters for controlling the planet, and I keep on top of the feeds. The liberation front has the comms center, they have the technical university, and they have Yang. Only the police complex and the airport are left. Until the reinforcements get here in a year or two and then we're all fucked. Maybe not all, but, yeah. I'd give it even odds they'll promise you your own moon and anything else you want if you ward stuff for ten hours a day, or you'll vanish into a blacksite to be poked and prodded forever."

"I feel like the thing you need is enough information to orient," Reynaud says hesitantly. "We can talk all day about what you ought to do but why even listen, right? Only problem is you can't believe everything you read on the internet. Hardly any of it sometimes."

"I do not want my own moon. I want to open doors." Shrug. "You were kind to me. I want to be kind to you."

Well, here's the saferooms-to-be. They can slightly awkwardly show him around and then let him work. They're nice, fancy hotel rooms, that's for sure.

He actually has lots of questions about the rooms and the appliances and their threat models but once he understands exactly what he's doing he... doesn't do anything visible and then declares himself done.

The rooms are made of high-tech materials and the appliances are mysterious and designed to break if you disassemble them to figure out how they work (they decide it's probably best to mostly leave these untouched after a brief discussion) and the threats are mostly humans with guns (laser or ballistic), or little flying robots, or, uh, orbital bombardment... Computer hacking would also be bad...

They tentatively test out the newly warded rooms but admit they can't really tell how well it will work! And hopefully they'll never need to actually test it. Anyway, how about some dinner. They've tried to make the Economy Food less disgustingly bland and mushy by adding lots of whatever else could be found. It's alright. Aside from Morg and Reynaud and the nurse, other new people present at lunch include: A very pretty, quiet, and sad woman with fox ears and a tail, a small and wiry and hyper person of indeterminate gender who announces they want to be called 'they' and wants to know allllll the technical details about wards, a pair of brothers who say they're stranded delivery drivers and talk in rapid Greek to each other a lot, and a grumpy blonde teenage boy who complains a lot and everyone else treats kind of like a child.

(Reynaud warns Valanda not to let the teenage boy, Xavier, know about anything that's supposed to be secret)

If the person who's... he's guessing transgender but for a nonhuman gender, and trying to feel out if he should ask... is willing to go be out of Xavier's earshot then Valanda will gladly go on about magic for quite a while.

He takes a small amount of the alien food. He can probably open a Milliways door and go home to British/Anavel Sani fusion cuisine eventually. Probably. It would really suck if not.

Alex will totally go out of everyone else's earshot to talk shop!!!! If Valanda has questions of his own they're happy to answer those!!!!

He has questions about the technology here! His technical background is... better than it was when he first discovered Milliways, at least, but he still has only a kind of shaky grasp of twenty-first century tech with occasional islands of deep knowledge of highly specific things, and he's very interested in what the fuck is happening.

(He's keeping an eye out for otherwise-poorly-explained discomfort that might indicate that he does actually need to figure out Alex's gender to interact with them in a way that makes Alex happy.)

Well, the thing is, there's a LOT of highly specialized technical knowledge out there. Like, more than would fit in dozens and dozens of people. But the pillars of modern technology are:

Fabricators and fabricator rights management, which can produce arbitrary objects like structure mages if fed the right materials and given time and energy. A fabricator can build a mining robot and then an ore processor and then another fabricator and then the two fabricators can build TWO mining robots... Repeat forever. Except the patterns for this are all patented and restricted heavily so that the corporations that researched and developed the products and designs can earn their due profit from the sale of said designs. Of course, there are lots of failsafes and obfuscation techniques built in to make it hard to 'crack' a fabber and produce your own stuff, or make unpaid copies of some corporation's products. Copyright law is, of course, extremely on the corporations' sides here, to the point where they can charge whatever they wish for basic necessities and people have to fall in line.

Computers, software, and virtual intelligences, especially the VIs. VIs are computer programs that can 'learn' what to do, and are narrow and restricted enough in the right ways - like not actually having emotions, or having certain kinds of long-term memory, or being able to learn anything outside of what they're specifically designed for - to not actually be people. There are quite a variety, and most people work with a VI in their daily work, guiding or curating or double-checking its work. As a special effects engineer, he would craft specifications for a VI to paint explosions, spaceships, background characters, or other things to insert into shows. Creating full computer-program-people, artificial general intelligences, as slaves was popular for a little while but is currently illegal - and (he sighs wistfully) most of the knowledge of how to do it was deliberately destroyed.

Warp Drive and Korolev-Chandrasekar Gates! These are what granted humanity the stars! Warp drives propel ships across interplanetary distances without the need for excessive amounts of fuel. The KC-gates use portals to connect two points of space around distant stars, dodging the need for long durations of interstellar travel at sub-light speed. How exactly the physics here work is extremely weird and complicated and secret, with the Solarian Navy coming down hard on anyone who fucks with warp drives or particularly the Gates outside of extremely narrow approved bounds. Even the known blueprints for drives are utterly black-boxed: They're so complicated that it's impossible to tell how they actually work, what's necessary for the function and what's just there to make it hard to tamper with.

Biological augmentations and cybernetics are very far from Alex's expertise, but Cernonnus Botanicals has thousands of gene-lines of engineered animals, augments, plants, specialized viruses of all kinds. There's special modifications for spacers living in zero-g, for a cure to aging in humans, advanced medical treatment for any kind of disease or trauma, dozens of different kinds of modifications - like poor Helen the foxgirl - plants adapted to suck up toxic materials or bacteria meant to make an entire planet habitable, custom pets, so much potential and all of it crushingly expensive.

He follows... some of that.

"Is it - uh - if you went far away and farmed your own land, then would you have more food than you have if you pay the fabricator owners?"

"Your own land? Good luck getting anything like that. And buying tools. And buying the right gene-lines of seeds. And paying your taxes. No, farming it not viable and I'm not sure what else you're getting at."

"...Uh, in my country, people... have seeds. For a long time. So if people bought very good food and did not plant for ten years, and then someone who was selling the food, they made it more expensive, then after this people would plant ten year old seeds. Also if someone owned all the land someone else would make more land. I am... afraid I maybe know why that is different here, but the thing I maybe think, I thought it before and I was wrong."