And Cam's shuttle closes its door behind him and lifts off into the air.

He gets over the empty desert.

And he sees how high up he can pilot this thing before it panics and crashes.

It's going to start experiencing glitches... pretty fast, really, its sensors have no idea how to interpret some of their readings, but they aren't much of a problem until he starts to leave the atmosphere, at which point his autopilot abruptly goes completely mad, vis-a-vis its beliefs about exactly how many different objects there are in the system and what size they are.

And switching to manual just fixes this? Which sensors are going nuts, can he extract specific batshit recordings?

Unfortunately, his manual controls still go through his chiplock, and his ship computer is having real trouble listening to anything it says.

His shuttle plummets.

(While it's plummeting, it will inform him that there's between zero and six planets beneath him, of between no and Literally Infinite mass; some of his sensors inform him that he is attempting to fly his shuttle into a sun, others into a black hole. The temperature outside his ship might be absolute zero or might be enough the ship is starting melting. The shuttle is also picking up quite a lot of radio signals, most seemingly pure noise loud enough to jam the rest, just in case he is enough energy to listen to the radio while he's falling.)

Oh, that's disappointing. Maybe later he'll try this in something with the video game style controls. Can he collect the shuttle again when he descends into the atmosphere or does it want to keep crashing?

It can eventually be persuaded to stop!

Cool.

He makes an altimeter, has the shuttle hover, steps out, and flies up past the zone of concern (identified by having his computer light up while he is actively telling it to do so).

This will take him A While, since space is big, but he can do it!

To his eyes, there's nothing weird about it; no magic barrier, just air getting thinner and thinner until it is more accurate to call it space.

But at what altitude does his computer get confused and stop lighting up?

Partway into the mesosphere, thirty-five miles or so up.

Good to know. He dives back to the shuttle and consults his map.

And installs a new alphabet and conjures a complete corpus of all published works in Qalmiri.

What's first in the automatic ordering his computer produces without further guidance?

Collection of poetry! They're very pretty (though his Qalmiri is clearly a different dialect than the strict, formal one they're written in), all on one of a small number of predefined themes, such as a woman's lament that her lover has left her and now she's lonely, or a man talking about how beautiful the countryside is, or a speaker of unknown gender praising the romanticized, pastoral lives of farmers. They're pretty good poetry, if you like art that is polished instead of innovative.

He is bored by poem four. Next.

Writ written by a provincial governor and sent to various district officials warning them that an important visitor will be coming through and they'd better be on their best behavior and make everything comfortable for the important man from the capital.

Cool. Thus lightly triangulated as to the scope of the reading material, can he find:

- school curricula
- things mentioning Profectus
- things published by the Traveler
- any publications from Rinara or Azlisa, though neither seemed to be writery types

- Nope, no published school curricula. There's books referencing or listing the appropriate skills a gentleman should know (ranging from horseback riding and swordsmanship to grace, tact and a knack for improvising poetry) but no published curricula.

- Yes, though practically all of it is published inside it; with some work he can discover that people who are not friends of the Traveler don't use his preferred name for it, calling it anything from Shirmana to Stullen or Mitpu Nakaram. People who aren't from it tend to refer to it as an overjumped city-state that either should be put back in its place or is not worth any particular attention, though there are the occasional foaming tracts written by authors who speak formal Qalmiri even worse than Cam does about how it is (allowing for some cultural translation) the Antichrist and needs to be annihilated pronto.

- He has written very little, mostly either angry decrees about how people need to stop bribing magistrates and taking bribes and destroying security cameras and pillaging and running away and committing highway robbery and enslaving their neighbors RIGHT NOW on pain of pain, or technical manuals. He's translated a really astonishing number of books on a really astonishing number of topics, though given the sheer quantity that may be mostly machine translation, including metallurgy, crop rotation, plow design and how to build a printing press with very limited materials. The translations are really, really good, as are the quality of the books he didn't write.

- Rinara has published a few schedules talking about where she will be enchanting the crops when, and also some decrees as CEO of the Pantai Merah Company of Laukera abolishing slavery and handing over the city of Alabas over to the Baroness of Kalinti, whatever's up with that. Azlisa hasn't published anything yet.

...what can he find on Alabas and the Baroness of Kalinti?

Quite a lot! The contract by which the Pantai Merah Company of Laukera leased a stretch of land along the coast of Kalinti for 101 years sixty-eight years ago from the local rulers (in Qalmiri), the city charter to establish a colony named Alabas at the mouth of an appropriate river (in Laukerol), lots of writing about the city that emphasizes its nature as a trade hub, discussions of how the company is making lots of money buying slaves there and reselling them elsewhere in exchange for imported goods, and then recently there's some discussion of an evacuation and requests for additional manpower to be sent to reinforce the garrison, since the Karakrali government has made ludicrous demands. After that it's just Rinara's decree terminating the contract a few months back.

He'll have some trouble with the Baroness of Kalinti, since while she definitely exists or existed almost everything about her is in a language he doesn't know. The exceptions seem to be a few casual mentions of her as a minor general on the losing side in some foreign translations of histories of a recent Karakrali civil war, and a decree by her allowing the Pantai Merah Company rights of residence, free trade, extraterritoriality, and so forth and so on for thirty-three years, translated into three languages, two of which (Qalmiri and Laukerol) he speaks.

He'll get underway on machine translations for the corpuses of every other language he encounters mention of while he browses. Can he figure out how Rinara became the CEO?

The notes from the meeting where she was made CEO say that she got a large fraction of the total shares, assembled a voting majority, issued a bunch of decrees and then resigned the next day. If he checks the records for share transactions he can note that she bought a large fraction of company stock at fire-sale prices the day she became CEO, and then resold most of them the day after (before her retirement) for slightly more. She's still on the books as having a 17% interest.

Once translated, Karakrali epic poems talk about the Yirtici clan conquering Kalinti (among other places) by the sword and chronicle the heroic (in the morally-ambivalent sense) exploits of members of this family, some of whom bear the title of Baroness of Kalinti, and Karakrali feudal contracts and formal decrees detail the responsibilities of the Baroness to the Triple Queen (or Triple King, occasionally), and some chronicles mention Kalinti having a baroness, though they usually don't get up to much. Most of the territory has since been lost in a variety of civil wars and secessions, but the most recent contract confirms one Aysel Yirtici as Baroness of Kalinti. (It was updated about ten years ago with the loss of some of her other titles and the payment of a very large fee in exchange for the government generously overlooking her backing a usurper.)

This place is weird. He needs his own equivalent of Rinara.

The sanest person he has met was from Laukera. What's he got on Laukera?

It's a country! Specifically a republic, with a citizen class that is not the entire population of their empire. They speak Laukerol (which he speaks fluently), which is in the same general language family as Qalmiri, but isn't otherwise closely related. Their written language has a Braille-esque variant. People tend to be pale-skinned (and dark-haired, but so are most of the rest of the ethnicities on the continent). They have invented fractional-reserve banking and the joint-stock company and all their neighbors stereotype them as greedy, corrupt merchants and moneylenders; their favored type of fiction appears to resemble regency romances except that all the leads, male and female, are daring merchants or proud servants of the nation or successful businessmen- and -women. Maps of their empire suggest that they own a lot of islands and tiny coastal bases and they reference a thing called the Seaheart a lot.

... Laukera City appears to be underwater.

Eh, he doesn't need to breathe. Though it will complicate talking. Do they have a sign language or can they just talk underwater?

They can talk underwater. They also have a sign language, but it doesn't look as though most people speak it.

Does he?