"Kill the -" says one of the locals -

"Then I wish to request a rescue," Blue Hair Girl says, speaking very quickly, "These people have kidnapped me -"

- In the opinion of the locals she is behaving VERY UNFAIRLY.

"Uh, sure, stand by me, yell if you see anybody aiming a projectile. Anyone else need rescuing?"

Nobody who speaks his language! The village is now looking at him with expressions of outraged betrayal, and some of them are yelling too fast for him to make out exact words but they seem to believe he is engaged in some grave injustice.

"Thank you," she says.

...okay, he's going to create and start a machine translation system on the corpus of that language now, even though it'll take it a while to be ready. He puts it over there behind a tree. "Talk slower?" he asks the nearest coherently-wordy person. "Simpler?"

"[Mermaid? Something like that] is captive, slave! Battle taken from monsters! Her people money owed!"

"Qalmiri?" someone else asks in the language he now speaks fluently but not natively. "Do you speak Qalmiri?"

"Yes, I speak Qalmiri, thank you! She owed you guys money?"

"I certainly did not!" she says. "They kidnapped me for ransom!"

Simultaneously - "She is a prisoner, hostage for the terms her traitorous, lying kinsmen made!"

Meanwhile, the guy in armor who is partially encased in titanium says, also in excellent (if somewhat more flowery) Qalmiri, "This is a nest of thieves and robbers, o excellent one -" this appears to be a stock title of address "- which we were sent to destroy as just punishment for their brutal and unprovoked assaults on the iron road."

Does this look, now that it's less on fire, more like a village village or like a thieves' den.

Cam's not an expert in preindustrial thieves' dens? They've got women and children and animals and crops and old people. The village did have a wooden stockade around it (mostly burned down before Cam arrived), and the swell of the land gives it reasonable concealment? But, you know, there's multiple explanations for not wanting to be found, when being found means people attacking you.

The children really seal the deal. "There are kids here. I don't feel like letting you burn down a bunch of kids' houses. What is the iron road?"

"One of the wonders of Profectus, city of marvels," he declares. "Its iron carriages can bear common* men faster than a horse can gallop from sea to sea without the slightest pause."

(*: lit: "not of royal blood.")

"Okay, so they were doing... what, sabotage? Highway robbery? Train heists?"

He may notice that the phrase "train heist" either uses the word "iron carriage" for train (fancily), or a loanword from a language etymologically unrelated to anything else spoken here!

"All three, as gives them the chance to pillage and steal and scorch the land, taking what better men built like the savages they are."

The local person who is speaking for the locals will spit at the invaders' boasting. "They call us thieves, but their sole work is the theft of the world and all within it! Liars and oathbreakers, who know not the laws of men or gods!"

"Okay, so you're torching the place because they heisted your trains, and you did that because you don't like them. Where does the prisoner here come into it?"

The locals object strongly! "These lands was stolen from us, just as everything the Traveler has he has stolen!"

"I was traveling to Profectus along the iron road," she says (still in Qalmiri), "and they kidnapped me for ransom. I had no quarrel with nor knowledge of them, 'till they did."

"The lands the train tracks are on? I don't currently have an opinion on its ownership, but I can enter into the record that this factored into your stated train heist motives." He will conjure up a little legal pad and jot that down in appearing ink. "Who's the Traveler?"

"The tyrant of Profectus," says the Local Representative. "A monster who seeks to dominate the world with alien sorcery and dark armies."

"Alien... sorcery... and... dark... armies," says Cam, unnecessarily slowly, as he jots that down. "Sounds scary, I can see how you'd get spooked. Is this place where we are standing part of Profectus?"

"Never!" he says, in defiance of the fact that the armies of Profectus have burned his village down.

"It is under its dominion," says Armor Guy.

Blue Hair Girl makes an 'ehhh...' wobbly motion with her hand.

"I'll just write 'disputed territory'. So you guys are Profectus soldiers, and you folks are... and you, rescuee, are..."

"We are the Kina Basar," the representative of 'you folks' says proudly.

"Azlisa Lautopi, citizen* of Laukera."

(*: lit: "prince.")

"Would that I could have made all your acquaintances under better circumstances. Is Laukera yet a third political unit?"

"The Republic* of Laukera is a divine monarchy** that answers to no foreign overlord," she says proudly.

(*: "State in which everyone is a monarch.") (**: "Country ruled by people with magic.")

"Okay. So we've got three political entities here. Profectus builds a train track. Kina Basar doesn't appreciate this, heists trains. Azlisa was on a heisted train on her way from Laukera to Profectus for... business or pleasure? And then Profectus is like, hey, that was our train, and sends an army to torch a Kina Basar village. Have I got that about right?"