"So, if I call you back in fifteen minutes will you have conclusively decided whether you want to work with me on this?"

"Can you gimme a couple hours?"

"Sure." He can use it to run further investigation into the 'demons: terrifying infohazard?' question.

"Thanks. And, hey, thanks for letting me talk, I've never caught an ungagged before, it's refreshing."

"You're welcome! Is it just 'Cam' for the circle, or -?"

"Oh, no, full name, Campbell Mark Swan -" He spells it.

"See you in a couple of hours." He dismisses him.

Cam goes home.

He sets up machine learning on the entire written corpus of the planet so it'll be searchable. He makes a miniplanet. He investigates a cross-section of the mountains.

That sure is a planet with a population not too far shy of a billion that discovered the printing press about half a century ago!

The majority of written material is in Eivarne, but there are three or four other well-represented languages and a few dozen more with only a handful of recent books each. The major modern languages mostly all share the same alphabet, or can be made to with a little creativity; but Avashin and the two dialects of Hialene each have their own competing runic script, and Satni's alternative writing system is something complicated and mostly logographic that's at least six times as old as the Eivarne alphabet and is going to take significantly more than two hours to chew through.

The miniplanet has one continent. Something horrible appears to have happened to the south end; everything south of the Godscrest Mountains is a barren wasteland, and the coastline looks like it's had some bites taken out of it. Either the people who designed this place had a very creative art team, or somebody had a very nasty fight there a good long while ago from which the landscape has yet to fully recover.

The interior of the mountains is very solid, except for the occasional cave and so forth. They certainly aren't cleverly engineered to look solid without collapsing under their own weight. Somebody just piled up enormous quantities of rock and told it to stay put, convincingly enough that it obeyed them over the laws of physics.

...also, the inexplicably empty lake high in the Godscrest Mountains with two inexplicably empty rivers failing to flow out of it might be related to Sindri's report of a river that ran with gold.

He leaves the machine learning chewing on its linguistic gum. He can conjure its progress later if he can convince Sindri it's useful. He gets a list of mages and sets up a genome project for them too just in case. He separates out published works, searches for anything referencing torture.

Published works referencing torture: a whole lot of fiction, a whole lot of furtive pamphlets, a handful of respectable nonfiction sources. It doesn't seem to be a point of contention that the Emperor tortures people; you're just not supposed to mention it in polite company, and criticizing him for it carries a high risk of arrest.

...okay. What does he do it for? Also how does magic work.

Reading between the lines a little, the Emperor tortures people basically for the hell of it! Many of them are political prisoners, but it looks more like 'the Emperor wants to torture people, and arresting them for sedition gives him a good excuse and deters them from saying mean things about him' than like 'the Emperor has all these political prisoners lying around, and torturing them seems to be the done thing'.

Magic: sometimes people are mages! You're born with it but you don't manifest until sometime between the ages of twelve and twenty, at which point you get your basic elemental shaping power and start accruing extra powers from within your element's domain or domains. A god is a type of mage, created by merging together three mages of the three basic elemental flavours; the local calendar dates from the end of the last divine war, which sunk the southern continent and took all those bites out of the coast, and in the subsequent sixteen hundred years there have been no signs that any gods survived it. People are understandably not super keen on gods these days.

Jesus. Okay. Model of castle?

Stunningly beautiful palace perched on inexplicably waterless lakeshore! The stone in the outer walls is arranged so that the blocks form a subtle gradient, pinkish stone in the west facing the city and bluish in the east facing the water.

Contents?

Medieval fantasy luxuries, an occasional mysterious gap which might signal an object too magical to conjure, one entire wing of the palace with only one person living in it, extensive dungeons in which several people are being tortured...

And it's the only polity so there's no diplomatic record - how did the Emperor get to be Emperor -

Brutal civil war against his father followed by the reconquest of all the outlying territories that were enjoying a brief independence at the time!

Damn. How long has he been Empering?

Thirteen years. It's 1685 and he had his father assassinated in 1672.

There's a prince, Fareine Korovai, who lives in the empty wing of the palace and has had almost nothing publicly written about him since his birth announcement. He was six when his father overthrew his grandfather.

What has been published?

Pre-usurpation: a few accounts of princely birthday parties, at which it is generally agreed he was a solemn boy who didn't say much but did occasionally smile.

Post-usurpation: a few people speculating about why the prince is almost never seen outside the palace. One account of the prince being seen outside the palace. (He was out hunting with his father. He looked inscrutable but did not appear to be discernibly enjoying the outing.)

Is he being summoned yet or does he have time to read a little more -

Not quite yet. Getting close to time, though.