The maid leaves quietly and makes a whispered report to a man eating lunch downstairs. He pauses, frowns consideringly, and questions her for a few moments, then gives the young maid two shillings and thanks her, and apologizes, but gives her another task.

The maid goes back upstairs. "Excuse me?"

"What?" Waltana snaps. "I'm working."

"I'm sorry to impose, miss, but there's some concern about the company you've been keeping and whether you're entirely safe with her. Do you need a place to stay...?"

She blushes. "-Oh. You mean Kireh? The magic fox person?"

"Y-Yes. If you need help or protection, we can contact the police."

"She hasn't done anything to me. She's hired me."

"Oh, what for?"

"Um." Waltana's eyes narrow in suspicion. "Nothing much. Odds and ends. What's it to you?"

"One woman looking out for another, kid. And that's a pressure cooker, isn't it? Looks right fancy and custom."

"Ye-ees? It wasn't that hard to make. And don't call me kid. I know what I'm doing."

"Right, every teenager ever knew what they were doing."

"If you're just going to poke at me, then leave? Don't need cleaning here. Goodbye."

"Wait, sorry. I'm sorry, that was rude. I just- It seems like you're getting caught up in bad business."

"...You play with the cards you're dealt. This'll be better than the orphanage. It's not like I'm marrying some stranger and moving to America. Have you ever been in an orphanage?"

"I haven't. Hm. I suppose that's that..."

"Ugh. I've lost it... Look, I know you're just concerned, but please leave me alone."

"As you wish, miss. Sorry for intruding."

Waltana sighs as the maid retreats, and makes another report.

Later-

Mr. Cromwell is still in the inn where he agreed to meet back up. He'll walk to his room with her for a private discussion again. "How's your shopping going so far? I've another topic to broach, but that first, please."

"I have spoken to two maid candidates, posted advertisements, looked at a house, commissioned a design for a silent gun, and I may or may not have leads on butlers with connections. Your tasks have been easy to combine with my own, even the house, as I am myself in urgent need of lodging. You owe me ten pence for my time so far.

I can also obtain a regular gun for you; do you want that?

The house is very large and stately, near the crafting district. I would like more than just a single room, ideally the whole basement, a single aboveground room for a workshop, and half the servants' quarters, which would leave you with quarters for your maid, your butler, and two more." This isn't haggling; she's offering a range of deals for different amounts of space at different prices, all of which she would be happy with. "However, the house is for sale, not for rent. If you don't want to buy it, I would be interested in buying it myself and renting space to you."

He flips a shilling through the air. "Consider the rest of that an advance. I'd like to hear more about the candidates and house, I'm not averse to outright buying it if suitable. A silent gun, from the young lady upstairs?" He asks leadingly.

"Okay." She tries to catch this coin, and succeeds.

"No comment on engineers who may or may not be working for me. The young lady in my room has my permission to be there.

I didn't talk with the maids long, just enough to confirm their competence. One's a widow more ready for a long-term commitment; the other is unmarried but very diligent. They both accepted mind-reading, of course. If you decide to survive the cold and leave for a shelter other than mine, will you want to keep the same maid with you?"

She describes the house and its amenities, and gives him the address.

"I'm actually thinking of throwing in with you entirely," he says casually. "If only I could be as sure of you as your mind reading lets you be of me. I'm not as helpless as I made pains to previously appear. And I have plenty of money, it's just sitting there."

"Regrettably, my mind-reading only works in one direction. And I need to be careful of any secrets I may or may not know.

...Although you are more competent at keeping secrets than most mortals. I would want to examine you further, but if you gain a mind-reading ability in the future, I would consider allowing it.

Verifying my ability to keep my word is easy enough, just send me on a difficult mission where you can spy on me. Verifying my Lawfulness of character is harder, since I have so much to gain by pretending now and betraying you later.

Do you count it in my favor that I could have used emotional manipulation magic on you and didn't? For all I know you might have someone observing you with orders to report to the police if you become uncharacteristically friendly toward me. And it's conceivable that someone might be disgusted by emotional manipulation magic, as I am, yet not as honorable overall. If you don't believe I have that magic, I can demonstrate."

"Nothing is ever completely certain, so a number of smaller, more reasonable proofs of your sincerity will do. Such as demonstrating that magic you refrained from using without invitation, and - since I think the house is fine, really, and the rooms you request the use of while providing the service of distracting from my presence are fine as well - of taking my money to purchase it without vanishing into the night with a thousand pounds instead. If you do turn out to betray your words lawlessly, I can ensure that causes problems for you, after all. I'd like some sort of veto and a clearly defined role, if I'm to lend my funds and political skill to a prospective shelter of yours. I'll not become a monster to survive. Perhaps a charter that requires a majority agreement of some senior council - composed of myself, you, your friend upstairs, and any other important advisors we accumulate - to enact extreme measures. Something like that, there are many things that would satisfy. I still don't fully understand your minimum requirements but from what I've heard - duties in both directions, and the authority to imprison - it does not sound necessarily incompatible with my scruples. And do feel free to read me again if you want a gauge on how useful I could be so I'm not just wasting my breath."

"Okay, as long as you're refining your estimate of my character based on evidence, not trying to be friends.

Following through on our deal, despite the temptation of stealing a thousand pounds, would have been better evidence if you hadn't threatened me!

Do you want me to demonstrate my emotional manipulation ability - it's called 'Charm Person' - on you now? It lasts a substantial fraction of a day and either I can't dispel it before it runs out naturally, or I'm claiming so to obscure my capabilities.

We should wait until later to talk about how to organize our shelter in detail, as I expect it to be a long conversation, and I need to visit a solicitor, buy the house, do some other business" check on Waltana "and be ready at two o'clock for my work with the police."

"I will verify your usefulness." Marra's Inquisition. "What political skills have you not already revealed to me? How much money do you have? Do you understand that if our shelter's government comprises more than a single immortal individual, the rules for it as a whole to make and keep promises are sacred?"

She's almost certainly going to take his deal, unless he's outright lying or intending to betray her. She would take the deal if all she got was a position on a shelter's ruling council with genuine power. She expects to get that, plus significant input to the founding charter and laws, permission to claim some people as hers, and a hand-picked very Lawful population (since she won't have to focus on earning money and can put more effort into recruiting).

(Waltana isn't her friend but she understands his use of the word to be a vague way to refer to someone she has an unspecified relationship with.)

"Oh dear, I suppose it is a threat as well as a fact."

Mr. Cromwell turns his thoughts towards answering the questions. Yes, he is good at hiding his thoughts, and good at modeling the complicated web of desires and incentives and perceptions in people as he watches. Everything kind of rests on that, on being keenly aware of how a young day-worker feels versus a married engineer versus an aspiring criminal. He's far from perfect, though, maybe twice as good as an average person?

(The thing he's doing does not quite seem to be 'splendor'.)

At least, for kinds of people he's used to, not Kireh who seems to run on entirely different rules; The threat was calibrated against a human upper class politician, as a signal that he's taking this seriously, nothing is really serious without the odd implied threat at the upper levels. He's good at seeing when rules or managers are colliding in stupid, suboptimal ways. For example, giving factory floor workers longer breaks than managers are naturally inclined to usually helps long-term productivity because- And that thought is a tangled mess of five things together that's really hard to parse. Not a magical genius at any of this, he self-assesses, but good.

He's arrogant and prideful on this point, and aware of it, and thinks it's justified. Does he live up to his ancestor's legacy? Well, not yet, and that's an irrelevant thought, back on track. He doesn't actually need her assistance to avoid his relatives. He came to this part of town specifically to scope her out and try to understand her, by talking to her and hiring her and having people watch her, and managed to keep that thought hidden the first time, and is carefully not thinking of the hows or his conclusions even now.

He has immediate access to about twenty-six thousand pounds in ready cash since he's been liquidating businesses ever since he first heard rumors about the frost a year ago. He doesn't think the rest of his holdings will be of much use with only three to five weeks before things fall apart in his estimation. He has about a hundred people he - not trusts, but can predict well and predicts will handle hardship well - who he asked to come to Bristol and find work here for now. They might not be precisely Lawful. He has contacts in the IEC and knows how the Generator construction project is going (somewhat badly, though he directs his thoughts away from specifics). He suspects there are other, non-Generator shelter projects that are successfully being kept secret. He can get plans and secure a more cooperative ear from the IEC. He has contacts with the nobility.

The sanctity of the law may be an issue. Marcus Cromwell understands the law as a network of incentives, mutable over time. Laws have to be this way, lest old Arthurian or Roman rules still be in place today. They change around changing desires, changing economies, changing pressures. The ruler's incentive is to stay in power, and he relies on subordinates. These subordinates only obey the ruler because they earn power through his position, and if a chance to gain more power by removing the ruler comes up? Well, it's a matter of expected gain versus expected risk. Coups happen because of bad rulers and bad laws. But if a charter avoids wishy-washy overly broad promises and takes a few simple rules as steel-clad, perhaps it'll last long enough as a set of rules. The Magna Carta's still in effect, after all, saying that the king and the government are not above their own laws. Murder is murder, even if the king does it. Is he on the right track with that sort of thought?

Oh, and the Charm Person should wait until they're done here and she's leaving.

Oooh she wants him.

His attitude toward laws is not really Lawful, but he's not Chaotic. She prefers sincere obedience to following incentives, but recognizes that incentives are useful, especially in a larger less-devout population.

He has plenty of vanity.

With enough time, could he be a cleric (disciple?) of Marra?

She was expecting there would be months until the cold? Oh, the society is going to fail earlier than that.

"I don't object to the threat, I just think it was a mistake on your part.

I'm okay with rules changing as long as the process is predictable.

Were you hiding the extent of your ambition from me when we talked before, or had you temporarily half-resigned yourself to a final hedonistic blaze? What are you currently hiding from me? How did you prepare to talk to me, how did you decide what to hide, how did you make sure you'll actually hide it when I read you?

What do you want from me?" (Discipline? Cold-tolerance? Her fame to help recruit? Hoping to gain magic of his own?)

Not exactly Splendid? Hm, set a reminder to investigate abilitystats in this world.

Like the Americans' process of amendments? Let's take those one at a time, he consciously thinks.

His ambition: He deliberately hid it. He wanted to see how she dealt with him while he was being unimpressive.

What he's hiding: Rumors-countermeasures-watchers, a flash of a face- No more of that. He's learned about Waltana's situation and probable special ability and treatment at the hands of the IEC, to make it clear and explicit.

How he prepared to talk to her: He had allowed frustration and depression to rise up in him, distorting his thoughts towards uselessness and fatalism, the first time. (And thought a lot over everything he's heard about her to try and fail to form a model.) Actually, he decides, is this part of judging his usefulness? If she learns useful things from him along this line of questioning without some manner of compensation he'll be significantly annoyed.

How did he decide what to hide: ...Skip

How did he actually do it: Long practice not thinking of things, since they show on your face if you want it or not.

What he wants from Kireh: He wants magic powers. He wants to be the shadow behind the throne. He wants his creature comforts. He wants to enjoy the pride and gratitude and admiration of saving people. He wants security and surety for all of the above.

"I don't know anything about the government of America, and if their process would satisfy me, but yeah let's talk about that later."

His control is amazing.

"Your usefulness depends on you not deceiving me about your overall intent toward me - of course I know we have different values, what's important is that you're not planning to violate our agreements on working together. 

Since I know you can hide things from me, I need to dig deeply. For example, asking how you decided what to hide is likely to make you think about the things you're trying to hide. Even if you prepared an imaginary scene of deciding to hide only things I wouldn't object to, that memory is similar to the real one, and the real one is likely to snag your thoughts.

I know that you learned to control your thoughts in order to control your face. How do you 'remember' to do that, without thinking it? Is there some point where you do something like readying an action and then don't have to think about it anymore?

If I learn anything useful from you I will compensate you, or act as if I don't know it.

I can't guarantee magic powers. I am happy to give you the rest." Wanting to be admired is a disappointingly Good motivation for him, but, for the rest of the shelter's population, having a local hero to adore might mean they get less emotionally entangled with each other. (Two local heroes, if she can recruit Debra.)

He thinks it's amusing that she's experiencing the same uncertainty about him that most people feel all the time. What a terrible fate.

It's sometimes an active process, knowing that he's about to think or is thinking something unhelpful with a heuristic, and deciding to not do that. The 'no more of that' from a moment ago. It's sometimes a habitual one, yes, where he holds an alert pose and tension in his body, and then his thoughts shy away from certain things without much active intervention thanks to all the practice. He also put in a lot of effort to disconnect facts he knows and how confident he is of them from how he learned them- Doing that feels something like this:

Miss Waltana is probably a so-called spark of genius | The spark of genius is real but not well known

Moderate confidence recent time | High confidence, moderate time

And he could stop it here...

Report from an informant just today, people who know I know: Kireh, the waitress, possibly the innkeep, possibly the police chief | Cached expectation from several months ago, people who know I know: (Several people Kireh has never seen), Kireh, possibly others as a general-background-fact.

And he could stop it here...

Lovely lady, if grumpy, he played the concerned bystander to have her go subtly question Waltana, and [this] is his model of what she thinks of him (she's kind of suspicious now but nothing for it really) | He's met several prominent engineers including Nansen, and the ones who come up with baffling breakthroughs all share manic, distractible tendencies. Nansen was an aggravating idiot of a genius.

Wow.

(It is a terrible fate! People should trust each other's Lawfulness, as verified by magic or the statement of a superior, and nothing else.)

"I want to regularly check on your intentions toward me, but I'm satisfied for now. Whether or not we form a lasting agreement, I'll go buy the house for you now. Can you recommend a solicitor to verify the ownership of the house in a hurry? And someone to appraise it?"

As long as the benefits from being exposed like that outweigh the costs, very well.

He pulls away from the read and gives two names. "Though I don't know if they'll be available on short notice. Shall we go to the bank for a moment for the thousand pounds?"

"Yes. If we can't verify that the person we give the money to owns the house, and he doesn't, and the police fail to recover the money, can you 'ensure that causes problems' without harming anyone else? Can you find him."

"No, if we can't find any documents for the good man's property, I'll need to talk to some chaps down at City Hall before just giving him a bag of cash."

"Okay.

If you're coming in person for this, do you still need me?"

"I think at this point I'll go handle the details myself, and you can get to your engagement with McAllen and whatever other business. Sensible sort, he is. Feels a bit rushed but we can't dawdle around. I've paid up for your legwork with that shilling earlier, yes?"

He stands and turns for the door. 

"Okay. Yes, and you still have two pence on your tab with me.

Do you want the Charm Person now?"

"Yes, I can see what it's like and take notes."

"Okay.

It will last exactly seven hours and I cannot dismiss it early. I consider that information a strategic secret which you should not use against me, if you are capable of being allied with me." And if I find out that anyone else on this planet learns that, I'll know you leaked, she does not say.

Charm Person.

He feels a break in his thoughts, and then it's obvious that Kireh told him a secret because she's his friend. She seems familiar and reliable, a comforting presence. The reason for his opinion of her isn't apparent, maybe he's keeping the reason separated from the fact like he often does? If he tries to analyze his memories of her, they might not match how he usually interacts with his friends, but that's fine, she's an unusual person after all.

Kireh immediately leaves to check on Waltana.

(Marcus Cromwell pauses, says 'Fascinating', and stays back in his room when she leaves.)

Waltana is in the room! With several pages filled with notes, and actively fiddling with something in the end of the adjustable-arm-set. It seems to have acquired a bunch of wires and strings, and there's a pair of glass jars that she's done something with, with a copper wire from the pressure cooker leading to them.

She turns and glares, then blinks and frowns. "Oh, hi. Where'd I put it..."

She fetches two sheets of paper.

What could you do with access to a flying machine?

Extract power from the winds at height? Coordinate automata signals from distant areas, communication systems I.E. radiotelegraph. Make use of the cold temperatures at heights somehow? Use the difference? Wind is driven by temperature differences. Cold is the OPPOSITE of a problem! Weight is a problem, tradeoffs between range and speed and performance and cost. I don't know how to fly but it may be possible to make an automaton-ship, or at least automaton away SOME of the work.

What could you do with help from a glassblower?

Chemistry equipment! Proper flasks treated to resist acids, with easy ways to clean them. Boiling vessels that won't crack under high heat. Thin-bottom flasks with magnetic mixers? Distillation column I.E. an alcohol still but better, meant for proper chemical work. There are different formulations- Make substitutes for missing material or for strength or insulation? With proper glassware we can make medications, industrial acids, rubber, cleaning chemicals, and more. Perhaps even directly chemically synthesize edible sugars? Plants do it somehow.

What could you do with help from a trained engineer?

What CAN'T I do with help from a trained engineer. They'll take the ideas I have and make them less rickety, more able to actually work. The best engineers are masters of 'scaling up'. Taking a new process or a proof of concept and making it work a thousand times all the same. Someone who knows lots of basic tricks would save me a lot of time- Instead of inventing a way to drill a triangular hole, or rust-proof a piece of steel, or whatever other thing, they know how to do those steps already and I can focus on the more 'impossible' things that sparkiness can do.

Can you make a person better tolerate the cold, or tolerate heavy clothing?

Medicine is tricky business, the body does naturally respond to cold by restricting blood flow to the extremities. But we NEED that blood flow to actually keep working and stay healthy. Possibly inducing high levels of activity? But open blood flow = more circulation = more heat ESCAPES even as more is generated. Direct alteration of the body is something I would not be confident in without the assistance of a medical doctor. To make them tolerate heavy clothing, improve the clothing. I think the issue would be 1, cost, 2, bulky clothes getting in the way, and 3, discomfort. But some discomfort is better than freezing to death. Perhaps a small burner that feeds warm steam into a tube-lined coat, like a building's radiator writ small?

Can you get energy from the changing seasons?

It's too slow, anything I can think of on this front is impractical and inefficient. The changing seasons barely have any effect on the deeper earth, and the variations along a single day are much more extreme than those of a season-to-season. 

Can you get energy from the ocean?

There must be a lot of energy bound up in the waves and tides; Capturing that mechanically, somehow, like one does with expanding steam, might be feasible. A heavy structure anchored to the seabed with a bob that rises and falls against resistance? I'd need to watch the ocean and try things to be sure. Alternately, things do grow in the ocean. You could perhaps process and burn algae and kelp.

Can you make glass from rocks?

Well, duh. The right sort of rocks at least- Glass is silica or quartz. But what is glass, anyway? It has some fascinating structural properties as far as the crystal formation goes, completely amorphous. I wonder if you could temper metal in such a way, and what properties it would have? 

Each has a few sketches and semi-related rambles under the first couple of lines

"I did the rest too, give me a moment to find them..."

"-Aha, here!"

Can you keep ice from melting?

Yes, with high pressures or simply by preventing it from accumulating heat. Ice is a crystal structure- It may even take up new properties in sufficiently exotic conditions? I'm not sure this would be useful though.

Can you keep water from freezing?

Agitation helps. Contaminants of any kind help lower the temperature freezing occurs at too, salt water is well studied. Perhaps some way to ensure any ice that does form is promptly exposed to heat and melted? Ice floats, so a heat source at the top of a basin?

Can you keep a forest alive without putting it in a hothouse?

All plants that I know of WILL die if the temperature is cold enough; The water in their cells freezes, bursts, and destroys the processes of life. Pine trees resist this with huge amounts of sugar in their sap, using the freezing-point-lowering trick. A hothouse seems the only real way without access to Darwin's research or some other method of making extreme modifications to plants. There may be something of the sort as a possibility... Black colonies of lichen and scum that keep themselves warm with insulation and sunlight?

What could you do with my body? I can heal from most careful surgery.

Extract useful materials like blood or bone or fur, then allow them to heal. Not unlike what we use livestock for, cows live and die to provide us meat and milk and leather. People BREED cows and pigs and all the rest, and there's a science to it... Why can meat be produced only by eating plants? Could a plant GROW meat? Studying your body to see if any clever mechanical solutions exist. Venom channels or skull padding or informative bone structure? Unsure. Modifications and implants: By grafting muscles from one place to another, new ranges of motions can be made possible. Make the tail more flexible and stronger? Make the fingers double-jointed for flexibility? Need an anatomy textbook. It's a dream completely beyond me, but I might like to graft myself enormous bird wings, or a fluffy tail.

What challenges would there be to living deep underground?

It's actually warm underground thanks to the Earth's crust, but there's no light down there, and no way to exchange air with the surface. Oxygen is needed and carbon dioxide must be expelled, meaning large ventilation systems to bring outside air in- These would be vulnerable to freezing, and the air being brought in would be cold. Burning coal to power anything would be impossible as well, the same problem but many times worse. Some non-combustive power source is needed. Radium decay? I don't know enough about that, and where would we get radium. Growing crops underground would require light and power sources as well.

Can you make a flame that only produces light?

That's called a lightbulb. The best lightbulbs still produce a lot of heat, because the radiant emission of hot things is just the way they work. There's other sources of light, chemical fluorescence. I don't know a lot about it, but some sort chemicals release light as they react to each other and produce relatively little heat. You could even make such a thing reusable if there was a way to reverse the reaction? It would only be a flame in the most technical of senses, since flame refers to oxidation. Alternately simply capturing and retaining the heat of a flame may serve? 

Can you reduce the amount of food a person needs?

I still don't know enough about medicine! It's documented that athletes and soldiers need much more food than civilians, and children need less as well. Could I make people smaller, and thus need less, perhaps? Some sort of drug that keeps people slow and inactive? It might make them useless for work, but it would reduce their hunger as well. Or a drug that blocks the body's signals demanding one go eat. It would remove 'hunger', if not actually reduce the need for food. DANGEROUS- You would have people starving themselves to death and never even realizing it. Make them photosynthesize like plants? People aren't BIG enough and are too active for that to help much... Improve the body's furnace somehow? We don't understand how respiration works exactly! Biology may be 'just chemistry' on some level but it's incredibly complicated.