The town's on fire!

(It's not his fault.)

Where he is contains multiple interesting features!

- As previously mentioned, it is on fire.

- As also previously mentioned, it is a town. The houses are single-story, made badly, of wood.

- It's in a dry, scrubby area, somewhere with the not-a-desert-but-not-that-far-off feel of, say, Morocco, or the lest deserty bits of Rajasthan; there were fields (they are currently on fire) fed by canals (not on fire, given that water is hard to burn).

- His binding is really fantastically loose, probably because the circle is mostly a matter of where ash happened to fall from a tree (on fire) and partly a matter of his summoner's foot turning it from a circular thing into a Summoning Circle (tm).

- The two people nearest him are  a bruised teenage girl with blue-black hair (it looks grown-out, not dyed), pale skin with features that are distinctly not European or African or East Asian at all, and a dress that looks like it's out of a costume drama that used demons for period-accurate costuming, taking cover on the ground,

- and a teenage boy, undernourished, of a different but also unfamiliar ethnicity, wearing hand-sewn clothes made out of hand-sewn cloth and armor made of sewn-together squares of hard leather. He has a bow, and arrows, and is currently shooting the arrows at things,

- The things in question appear to be some mixture of (a) people, wearing unfamiliar and badly machine-sewn military uniforms (complete with wide-brimmed hats) and carrying extremely unfamiliar bayonet-equipped gun-type weapons that fire zappy bolts of energy that punch through things and set them on fire...

- (b), one of what is either a person or a remarkably humanoid robot, skin completely covered in metal, head looking like a steel bull's face, with a similar weapon,

- And (c) various definitely robots or drones, mostly dog-sized, some of them flying around and some of them walking around on five spidery legs, also shooting zappy energy...

- There's various other people running around in a panic and/or trying to kill soldier-attackers and drones with swords and axes and polearms and bows, dressed and armored like the teenage boy near him.

- The fight is really, really not going well for the people without the tech edge. Really not at all.

WOW what the fuck.

Okay. First of all, it's raining. Buckets. He will apologize to the ecosystem later.

Second of all, let's start tying some legs together on the Torching A Village side of things, starting with the drones and the dude who stands out the most in case he's important, following up with the rank and file if that doesn't confuse them enough to make them stop slinging fire.

Third of all, let's blunt some sharps, he can replace them later but he can't fix dead.

The rain will put out existing fires and make it harder for everyone to see!

The rope will not be hugely effective against the dude who stands out the most. The drones with legs will get all tied up and fall over and go clunk and then try futilely to aim their blasty cannons at things, but will not have much success there, but the dude who stands out the most falls over slightly, catches himself on two spur of metal that grows from his back, shreds the ropes with blades abruptly growing out of his armor before forming back into it, and starts looking for whoever's responsible.

Nobody will notice their pointy objects are now dull because they are too busy.

... Is any of this obviously related to Cam?

Well, he's going to redo the rope on the standing-out dude with titanium and see if that helps!

It helps, in that standing-out dude will turn the bayonet-y thing on his rifle into an axe and smash it before blasting Cam with his death blasty gun thingy!

... which causes about as much damage to Cam as anything else does to daeva, that is None.

Well, it makes him fall over and he has to sit up again before encasing the bayonet-y thing in more titanium and redoing the legs thing.

... Can he still shoot Cam with the blaster on the rifle?

Does it shoot through titanium?

Yes, actually!

Then yeah, he can! How about iridium? Does it shoot through that?

It explodes when he tries. He is unharmed; various other people are scratched by flying shrapnel.

Okay, he's just going to start interpolating the explody things. One first to make sure that doesn't also create shrapnel and then the rest of them as fast as he can look at them.

It doesn't create shrapnel, it just falls to pieces.

... As soon as they notice their weapons are being disintegrated, the uniformed soldiers flee like mad. The people with pointy objects pursue wielding these pointy objects! (The flying robots continue death-ray-ing the people with pointy objects.)

Oh, right, flying robots. Those are going to be netted with very heavy nets and grounded. This situation is weird enough that he doesn't wanna find out that he killed somebody's pet favorite death robot puppy.

This doesn't stop the horrible death robots from shooting, but it does stop them from aiming, so they don't do it much.

The people with pointy (but blunted) weapons are discovering that their weapons may be dull, but they are still effective at bludgeoning and/or very crudely stabbing people who are wearing uniforms for the sake of causing them serious injury!

Cam sighs. He interpolates those too.

Is anyone STILL making trouble.

Yeah, one of the leather armor people is, while screaming and crying, and trying to strangle a uniform guy to death.

That is few enough problems that Cam can get up off the ground and take off and glide over there to see if he can solve this by getting up close.

Nope! Screaming guy is not amenable to deterrence from physical proximity.

(Other people are giving Cam worried looks or backing off or looking for cover.)

He may note that he... does not speak the language Screaming Guy is screaming at all well? He has rudimentary knowledge of a few basic words in it and can probably understand if spoken slowly and carefully, and similar knowledge of a few other related languages, and then two new languages (one native, one fluent) in the same family but not closely related to each other, which seems totally unrelated to any Earth language.

...oh, that's inconvenient, he was super expecting to be able to talk to the screaming guy. He wasn't super confident this would work, but he did think he'd be able to try it!

He will drug the screaming guy instead, catch him rather than let him fall on the ground, and drag him over to the nearest allied individual. Can he say 'still alive' in the screamed language? Or "just asleep" or something like that?

Yes he can.

"They killed his brother," says one bitterly furious Person On Screaming Guy's Team. "They kill everyone's brother."

"Yeah. Probably they also have brother. Everybody stop now." Everybody stop now, right?? If anybody is not stop now he is going to be peeved.

Everyone stops now, with some grumbling.

Blue Hair Girl will walk up to him and say, in the language he now speaks natively, "Thank you. Is this a paid rescue?"

"Nah. What do you get for the guy who has everything? An opportunity to stop some folks from torching a village."

"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?"

"Business," she says.

Oh, the Kina Basar have a lot more to add about the stuff Profectus has done. They've burned other villages and attacked other tribes, they seized grazing lands for the train track, they're poisoning the air and the water, they're spoiling crops, they ended all normal trade through the desert, and they've hired the savage Tafnoi as mercenaries to go around butchering people.

... But nobody denies any of what Cam said.

"Okay. So, what does everybody think of my plan where I give the Kina Basar here a bunch of food and water and put back up some of their lost buildings, and then Azlisa and the soldiers and I all go to Profectus, where I will look into whether there is an appropriate receptacle for these grievances to hand?"

"That might suggest that kidnapping attempts on foreign citizens would be considered not a thing to object to," says Azlisa carefully, "and also that the deaths of eight of every ten passengers would be forgotten. I believe there were more hostages, as well, though they may have killed them by now."

"Oh, I object to absolutely every event that has gone down around here that I have heard of so far without exception, I'm just trying to focus on what things look like next week and not who owes who what barbaric punishment for last week. Have you guys got more hostages alive?" Cam asks the locals.

They indignantly deny that they took any hostages other than her! "She is a thief and a liar from an empire of thieves and liars!"

Total population of the surrounding, hm, three miles, less previously observed soldiers and villagers?

Oh yeah definitely, there's some beaten up people who mostly don't look to have the same ethnicity or clothing style as the Kina Basar.

(Also some more villagers who found somewhere to hide good enough that Cam can't see them.)

Alrighty. And now he will make a lil snowglobe model of where each of the beaten up not-Kina-Basar people are at.

They're in a ravine down thataways.

"If someone would oblige me by going and get the..." he does a quick count, names the number, "hostages who are in the ravine over there, none the worse for wear than they are right now, I'd be so much less annoyed," Cam says, gesturing ravinewards.

THEY INDIGNANTLY PROTEST THIS INSULT TO THEIR HONOR!

"I'm at like, a six, on a scale of ten, annoyed right now? But it will be so much worse if I have to figure out how to make everybody behave while I'm all the way over there getting them myself."

They are not going to go back on their story because of threats! The Kina Basar sneer at threats!

The still titanium-bound officer coughs. "I or my men could fetch them without trouble, if you need it done."

"Oh, probably, but I don't actually know if all of them are friendlies relative to you. And I know that I know what condition they're all in right now but do you know that I know that? I guess I could spy on you the whole way. Are any of you going to start aiming shooty things at anyone if I let you go do stuff?"

The soldiers look very dubious about being sent off without any weapons to protect themselves.

"If they were not friends of the Far Traveler, they would not dare the Iron Road," the officer says calmly. "I can manage without a weapon." Because he can sprout steel from his hands at a moment's notice.

"Nah, you I want where I can see you, something's up with you."

"The Traveler gives many gifts to his soldiers," says the officer, in accordance with Priority Six*.

(*: Blame Everything On The Nutjob From Space If Anyone Scary Comes Along.)

"No shit. Azlisa, do you want to go untie people in a ravine since we've got some folks I don't trust and some folks I also don't trust refusing to acknowledge that they exist?"

She looks SPECTACULARLY UNCOMFORTABLE with this, not being arrow-proof. "Do you have any weapons?" Or armor? Or ability to give magic superpowers?

"Do you expect people heisted from the same train as you to benefit from you having weapons in some way?"

That was more of a polite way of saying 'If I do this I will die.' This isn't underwater.

"I would prefer to stay close to you if I don't have a way to defend myself," she says.

"Man, this is proving to be so complicated. All I want is some people moved from point A to point B without being further injured. Maybe I can do it from here."

He's going to drop a little drone by the ravine and watch its progress though his computer.

Before long, the drone will see a bunch of people, mostly but not entirely noncombatants who look like the Kina Basar, hiding there. (There's also a few combatants who look like the Kina Basar, and the beaten-up people previously located.)

"Attention!" says the drone. "These prisoners are no longer yours. You will be unharmed if you do not attempt to impede their departure."

Are they like tied up or anything.

Nah, they're just huddled in the back without any pointy objects and people with pointy objects are pointing the pointy objects at them.

Someone is going to try to shoot the drone with an arrow! Through a glass bit, if there's a glass bit.

There's a glass bit, but this injury doesn't impair the drone from gauging the guy's exact distance and direction from Cam and reporting it to his computer so Cam can drug him.

... How about rocks? And more arrows? The people with pointy objects (and the people without pointy objects, and the small children) are not that enthusiastic about surrendering anything to evil killer robots, even prisoners.

Yeah okay he will just drug them all until the prisoners can climb out without further obstruction.

The prisoners cheer, and some of them will do this! One more vengefully-inclined fellow will see how cutting their throats while they sleep works.

That works like he gets drugged too. "Will someone please carry that guy?" says the drone.

... Everyone is fantastically confused. Some of them will try to run towards the voice, others will scream for help, and some will run away because it is clearly not on their side.

"Look," says the drone loudly, "you're free to go but I recommend regrouping with the other hostage and the rescuer to get toted to Profectus instead!"

... Well, some of them figure that makes sense, and some of them figure this is a trap and they just need to grab a water skin and head down to the railway and wave down a train, and then they don't need to interact with the weird alien that doesn't act like other weird aliens.

(A couple of people will haul the unconscious hostage, though.)

"Thank you!" Cam says in the same voice as the drone when they come into view. "Over here!" Wave wave.

One of the hauler-people observes that the Profectus soldiers are tied up on the ground and the Kina Basar are still allowed to have weapons and drops the guy and bolts.

Well, now that he can see them he can grow a little cart under the unconscious guy and trundle him over.

This will work? Everyone in this scene except Cam is scared and nervous and wondering what Cam is going to do next, though most of them are trying to avoid showing it.

(Or unconscious. Some people are unconscious.)

"Okay. These guys and you and the soldiers all going to Profectus sound like the next step assuming we rule out all plans that involve anyone dying for any reason?" Cam asks Azlisa.

She draws a deep breath. "I think so."

"Great. How far is it from here and what approximate heading as the crow flies?"

She thinks it's about units-that-translate-to-about-three-hundred-miles that way? "The iron roads leads straight to it."

"Cool. Will I be able to find an open space about two-three times the size of a -" He looks at the surviving buildings. "Four-five times the size of a house?" Also while he's at it he's going to patch up the buildings that look like they would benefit from this and drop a few sacks of lentils and oats in a convenient spot because you can eat those without cooking fuel and this is a desert.

Technically, this is only semidesert.

"Yes," she says. "Profectus is in the middle of a desert." 

(People will jump when he starts fixing things. And when the sacks appear.)

"Great." Shuttle pops into existence. "All aboard as are going aboard!"

Everyone still looks nervous. (Especially the Profectus soldiers, who are all still tied up.)

"Shouldn't we take the iron road?" one of the former hostages suggests.

"- I have no idea what the train schedules are like around here, if we hike all the way to the railroad and I materialize a train car how will I know if someone's coming the other way ready to have a head-on collision? Besides, this is faster."

Another former hostage will make a break for the railroad, running like mad straight south.

Everyone else is either Azlisa, who is pretty sure Cam doesn't want her dead, or injured enough to want to not run. "I understand," she says. (She feels like she ought to be trying to make a GIGANTIC FORTUNE out of this, it doesn't look too hard to figure out, but for some reason her brain isn't working all that well and it seems extremely difficult to try to innovate, under the circumstances.)

"Do you want like a canteen or something?" Cam yells after the departing person. If nobody else is running he will usher people onto the shuttle.

Nobody else is running.

... How about the people who are tied up?

They get carts if they don't have stunning arguments for being released to walk aboard themselves.

They're mostly trying to avoid coming to his attention as much as they possibly can, so no, no arguments.

(Azlisa will inspect the shuttle. She expects the Traveler's are similar to the... other Traveler's... who showed up here, but she's never seen one so she doesn't know.)

The shuttle lifts off into the air and heads in the direction Azlisa gave.

"I would like to thank you for generally being the evidently sanest person on that regrettable battlefield," Cam tells her. "I'm Cam, did I say? Nice to meet you."

"I don't think you did," she says. "I'm... also very glad you showed up. How did you do that?"

(The soldiers feel that they were perfectly sane, they just had a ridiculously powerful person show up and that was highly unreasonable.)

"That is a great question," says Cam, who does not then go on to answer it.

... Okay then. She figures "where are you from" will get the same response, so... "Do you know the Traveler?"

"I have not met anyone going by that name."

... She is really very confused but will try not to show it.

"Is there a good map of this planet? Or this continent, or, failing that, region?"

"I'm sure there are, but I don't have any on me."

"Right, I just mean like give me the name of one or tell me where I'd find one."

Okay, let's go for broke with Mystery Man. "Ferzun Jahnen's Atlas of the Known World?"

A moment later a subscreen of the ship starts flipping through the atlas pages. "Great, thanks."

It's a really pretty atlas! It's probably not accurate, it's got the whole 'here be dragons' thing going on in the corners, but it's very pretty! There's nice illustrations everywhere of the local architectural styes and method of dress. The continent with the most detail is a vaguely circular or rectangular blob, with some cities marked on the map that, if they are to scale, are probably larger than the Great Northeast Urban American Blob in Cam's US; roughly speaking, it consists of a ring of states circling a desert in the middle of the continent, marked on the map as the Dead Wastes. There's the most detail for Qalmir, a place that (if the atlas is to be trusted) is a garden of every earthly delight, precisely circular, roads and rivers like the spokes of a wheel (northeast corner, ringed by mountains); descending clockwise, there's some extremely tiny statelets that are tributaries of Qalmir, Karakral in the southeast (dark and stormy with everyone going around in black-and-dark-clothing or black-and-white, fancy gowns that suggest vampires and evil spiky black armor), some more microstates, Viranatu  in the southwest (shiny multicolored temples and red and purple and gold clothes and a nicely-doodled phoenix), more microstates, the Lemrysh Forest in the northwest (women in furs and deerskins, no men), microstates, the Timeless City in the north (a warrior in Bronze Age-looking armor), and then more tributaries of Qalmir. Laukera is a really big dot in the middle of the ocean, with drawings of blue-haired people in tight clothing swimming undersea from underwater building to underwater building. Ringing this continent are scattered minor islands, all colored blue for Laukera.

Not included: Any mention of the Traveler or Profectus.

(Azlisa is surprised, and trying not to show it. This doesn't look like any of the copies she's seen, which suggests this might be the original that he just conjured up. Just what is he?)

"Is there a more up to date edition or am I looking in completely the wrong place for Profectus?"

"It's the biggest city in the desert," she says. "Every new conqueror changes the name."

(The soldiers are not going to disagree.)

"This one?" He highlights Qalmir. "But he didn't rename the language, interesting."

"- No," she says, trying not to laugh, and points to a flyspeck in the middle of the Dead Wastes.

(Not everyone makes their save against laughter.)

This doesn't appear to anger Cam, at least. He labels Profectus. "Inside the desert, gotcha."

She nods and refrains from saying anything about it.

He flips through the rest of it. Any comments on anything else in the atlas?

Nobody else has comments, though Azlisa looks to be metaphorically biting her tongue about the depictions of Laukera.

As he passes, more of the world becomes visible. "East" is desert, and desert, and more desert, and the occasional oasis. The only civilization, other than occasional villages that are trying to camouflage themselves, is the iron road, a long steel line cutting through the desert, occasional covered stops usually half-buried by standstorm. Aside from stainless steel rails, the occasional train he passes could be nineteenth century.

And then he can see the city.

(He can see it quite quickly. Shuttles go vroom.) 

It is... quite the contrast, with the preindustrial village and the pictures in the book. There's a lot of it. The best comparisons for what it looks like would be "overly optimistic depictions of Victorian London" and "illustrations in science-fiction magazines" and the occasional demon special project that is usually built very far away from anyone who would blow it up for laughs. It is indeed in a desert; there's an oasis vaguely central, but - there are huge factories belching smoke and steam into the sky, there are tall blocks of apartments of reinforced concrete and plaster or of glass and steel, there are open-air fountains blasting water into the sky; the city (barring one inner area surrounding the oasis which is mostly mud brick) is laid out in paved grid, with asphalt paved streets for cars overshadowed by palms and other desert-native trees and elevated tracks over them for electric light rail; more drones are hovering around, some of them armed, others on package delivery, and there are multiple optimistic airports scattered around the city with landing pads for shuttles. (There are also shuttles. Not very many, and looking shiny and deadly and like they were built to be weapons as much as transport.) There's electric lighting over the streets for when it gets dark and illuminated signs in front of buildings with pictures of whatever they sell as well as characters spelling out the names of whatever the shop is or what's being advertised. (In Qalmiri, which seems to be the local lingua franca inasmuch as there is one.)

There's also a fantastically evil-looking skyscraper in the center of town, for whatever that's worth.

"Wow, I've never seen anything quite like it." Can he commandeer an actual landing pad or is his best bet setting down oustside?

"That's what most people say," says the officer.

It doesn't look like there's an air traffic control sufficient to stop him?

The question was more about whether they look sufficiently loadbearing and sizable!

He touches down on one such pad. Glances at the soldiers and interpolates all their bonds off. Opens the door.

The Traveler (whose name is not 'Traveler', nor 'Nau,' but something that cannot really be expressed in languages for people who talk with voices, but they usually do) has a problem. That problem is that someone has found him, which is glorious and ideal, except that (a) he's pretty sure he's not the only person whose ship crashed as soon as it got here, so this probably isn't a rescue, and (b) he's going to be SO VERY, VERY ARRESTED for all the crimes he has been committing, which is going to be mildly annoying.

So, two problems. Probably more.

Also the guy isn't picking up. So, probably (c) this is from a foreign power that will object to Everything.

Either way, he'll have a drone floating in front of the Mysterious Civilization's Mysterious Shuttle when it lands. And not people uselessly pointing guns, that won't help unless it's the Unity of Man, in which case it will be counterproductive.

He can see... his troops flooding out... and someone bioengineered who is not, in fact, made of substances identical to Actual Meat.

Well. That's new.

"Greetings," he says. "You have the Hegemon's attention." And plasma cannons trained on everything coming out.

"Hi! I found these guys torching a village. I hope you need to work on your troop discipline but suspect you need to work on your war crimes code. And these folks were being held hostage so I gave them a lift. A handful of others preferred to make their own way so this might not be everyone you knew to be missing, if you keep track of that kind of thing, but I am not aware of any who were dead when I left."

He needs to work on his everything because everyone here is a savage.

Saying that won't help.

"Thank you, now who the flaming antimatter are you?"

"My name's Cam!"

"From where?"

(The soldiers are not wholly sure which way to go -)

"Return to barracks! I will deal with you later."

And he can handle assuring Iraqual that there's nothing to assassinate him over worry about later.

And Azlisa is watching, because she really wants to see this.

"Depends what language you're speaking. I usually go with 'Hell', in my native one."

"I find that unlikely, since neither an Abaddonian nor Hades accent sounds like Laukerol."

"None of those proper nouns refer to anywhere I've ever been."

"No doubt. Well, you are presently in PROFECTUS, heart of civilization on this terrible, terrible world which for some bizarre reason has magic. Congratulations. Do you like the landing pad I made you?"

"Eh, it's okay. It has magic? That wasn't obvious so far, it can't be very good."

"No! It's horrible! Everything about this stupid, stupid planet is horrible!"

(Azlisa appreciates that the absolute dictator of the newest Great power doesn't seem to know or care she's there. She's learning a lot!)

"Then why the fuck do you live here, dude?"

"As I have little doubt you noticed, every ship that enters this system crashes on this terrible terrible planet, no matter why or how it arrives! Are you not here for the same reason?"

"Not really."

"What were you doing in the system?"

"What are you doing in my city???"

"Dropping off these guys. I can leave if you want since they're here now."

... He does not, in fact, want that.

"I was on a mining survey. Then my ship crashed. Then everything ELSE went wrong."

"Everything else too? What was left after all that?"

"Oh, you know, just ALL THE ATTEMPTS to FIX THIS STUPID WORLD via ALL OTHER MEANS ACHIEVABLE BY ME that did not involve conquering cities. Are you going to tell me anything and/or try to overthrow me, or can I go back to trying to fix the massive and persistent nutrient deficiencies afflicting everyone on this stupid planet?"

(run run run run run run run run)

(she is not there yet)

"What're they deficient in?"

"Everything, as far as I can tell!"

"Oh, come on, they probably have plenty of vitamin D." He gestures at the sun.

"And yet when I test them they are apparently short of almost everything else! I have been TRYING to do something about this, but PEOPLE KEEP RAIDING MY TRAINS, which makes it somewhat difficult!" Also he's at many many wars.

"Why do you suppose they're doing that?"

"Because I do not have the required skills at lies and flattery to persuade them that it is in their interests, even though it is, and also because they are tribal savages."

"That is an interesting perspective. Why do you care so much about nonconsensually vitaminizing these folks anyway?"

"Why do I care about tens or hundreds of millions of people starving to death? Why wouldn't I?"

"Well, I mean, it's all very well to wish in the abstract that they wouldn't do that, and as far as that goes it's commendable, but you could also choose to care about, like, what they want you to do in addition to what modern science suggests might be best for them. Do you have modern science results to the effect that shooting people and burning their villages down is a great source of vitamin K and molybdenum, I have to admit I'd be shocked."

"Profectus is attempting to feed and clothe a continent! A handful of bandit camps who can simply refrain from banditry any time they desire to not engage in acts of war against my empire are not my chief concern! If they abandon their banditry I will stop fighting them, if they want to immigrate they can work at Profectus wages and buy whatever food they want, but I will not sit back and let warmongering criminals steal from me without using the resources I possess to stop them!"

"Why are dudes who like torching villages among the resources you possess? Why didn't you invest in better armored trains or something instead?"

"I inherited them from the previous ruler. I have very few competent engineers" (one) "and very many armed savages, doing what their ancestors have done for generations, only with better weapons. They come cheap, on this terrible planet."

"Gotcha. What do you say I take over all the feeding and clothing a continent business and you can work on things you're more fully specialized for?"

"That sounds like it would be excellent. Again, who the rotten smoking scree are you?"

"I told you my name, it's Cam!"

"That doesn't answer my question!"

"Maybe you should ask your question in a more precise way?"

"What society are you part of. What technology do you have that produces that primitive shuttle. What beliefs and models of the world do you possess. What moral principles guide you. What can and cannot you do. Did you go to school to become this annoying or is it a natural talent."

"I told you I'm from Hell, and you decided it was unlikely. I think you'd probably find all my answers unlikely. Except that it's all natural."

"This is not inspiring me to believe you will do a good job feeding this continent!"

"I went to medical school. Also I have some natural advantages." He materializes a churro and takes a bite.

"How did you just do that."

"You'd find it unlikely!" Wag wag.

"I! HATE! THIS! PLANET! I am the SINGLE person MOST qualified to know how IMPOSSIBLE this is! This is nonsense! Stop your nonsense or explain it! One of the two! Now!"

And that is about when a panting woman makes it up the stairs to the landing pad. She's wearing the same cheap machine-manufactured clothes as everyone else here, but a solid slice of her body is made of a silvery metal, which fits in with her body moving exactly as normal flesh would, including both legs and one arm - she's got a cane in the other arm, but she's holding it to run faster, not leaning on it. Where metal meets flesh she's badly scarred, and aside from that she sounds exhausted, gasping for breath.

"Oh hello, Rinara, this is Cam, we are both obsolete according to him! So now I am fired. Cam is in charge now! You will probably also be fired."

... She can in fact (huff) tell he is joking (puff) even through the drone.

She is also kind of worried because he... doesn't... show up to fights through drones, even unwinnable ones. He appears in person or not at all. She is very confused and quite worried.

"- hello there, what can I do for you?"

"Haven't figured that out yet." Pant pant pant.

"Hi." She waves at Azlisa.

Shit! Someone noticed her! "Hello."

"Rinara, Azlisa, Azlisa, apparently this is Rinara. Well, thank you for joining us even if your rationale is pending."

"I am in charge of agriculture for Profectus! Also diplomacy, sometimes. Also whatever other jobs Nau wants to give me."

"I am a citizen of Laukera. I was on the iron road traveling here for business when I was kidnapped and my servants were killed, and Cam provided a rescue."

"Oh good, a diplomacy person. I don't have one of those, so you will have to put up with me directly, sorry."

"Actually I grew up in a forest with practically no human beings I wasn't related to. We should probably hire an actual diplomacy person at some point but nobody wants to work for us because we're trying to take over the world."

"Oh, you know, when you put it that way it makes so much more sense of the village-torching action than did the mission statement 'feed and clothe everybody'."

"That was the original plan! Then Nau got kicked out of every country on the continent for telling them they were stupid and evil and had to start his own. Now we're trying to, uh... steal spaceship parts so Nau can call in social workers to fix everything wrong with the planet and make everyone immortal? There's been some mission drift."

"... To be clear I am in charge of the Feed Everyone On The Planet department, though. That is a department we have. It's just mostly, you know, me and my bodyguards."

This is NOT an accurate summary of his recent life!

"Seems like a rough staffing situation, that. Are there... spaceship parts around? What do they have to do with social workers?"

"Every spaceship that enters this system crashes, often on this planet. Mine wasn't the first! If I can recover enough pieces to repair my spaceship, I can contact an ACTUALLY CIVILIZED SOCIETY that has people who are neither fools nor knaves, and they can rescue everyone and then study whatever nonsense magic this planet has so we can advance the frontiers of science by millennia or, if we are very lucky, fix entropy."

"He's from a heavenly utopia. Kind of explains some things."

"If you repair your spaceship... how will this route around the mysterious problem where everyone who comes into the system crashes?"

"Run my systems manually and ignore them whenever they say the Stupid Planet has infinite mass."

"...I guess maybe that could work if that's the problem. Were all the previous lost ships from your same civilization?"

"NO."

"Were they... from places your civilization knew about."

"Of course! We knew about everything in this arm of the galaxy, a few INSIGNIFICANT ROCKS WITH NO RADIO SIGNALS aside."

"And you are planning to be the first person to generate any radio signals on this planet?"

He smirks. "A slight temporal error, but otherwise correct."

"Why do you reckon the previous crash-landers didn't manage it?"

"They weren't full-conversion cyborgs with Sarengha steel by the ton and largely intact ships designed to withstand solar heat and process raw materials into refined alloys, now were they?"

"Gosh, I guess not." He turns back to Rinara. "Anyway, I'm from a completely different utopian universe, it's called Hell. I'm a demon. I can make stuff." He takes another bite of churro. "Do you want one of these?"

"... Sure?"

Churro!

She bites into it. Chews. Surveys the tastes in her mouth.

"What... is this?"

"Deep fried dough with cinnamon sugar on it."

"It's pretty similar to the latest experiments Profectus cuisine, really. Tasty, but the kind of tasty that suggests it's like thirty percent things humanity was not meant to consume. More refined, though!"

"You created that out of nothing." He has the required technology to see what "Cam" just did. And what he did was break the rules again.

"Isn't it likelier that I'm just very good at sleight of hand? I suppose not having sleeves would make that a little bit farther fetched."

"She's halfway across the landing pad."

"When you have eliminated the impossible, like me being a magical demon from Hell, whatever remains, however improbable..."

"Oh, your nonsense superpowers are not impossible. They are merely very annoying."

"I'm willing to leave if you would prefer me to get out of your city!"

"I think he would like it if you told him enough that he could make strategic decisions? I certainly would like it if I had any idea what consequences your arrival here had."

"It has the consequence that I'm here now and doing stuff? Like bringing these folks here and putting out the village that was on fire. I gave the villagers some food and put some of their buildings back. I don't think it has weird side effects or anything."

"I think you're trying to conceal information about your powers and weaknesses from us because we look evil, and I agree this makes superficial sense as a policy, but I am pretty sure everyone else is worse? We are very bad at things, but we are mostly very bad at good things, and my admittedly limited and secondhand experience suggests that most of the other factions are either very good at bad things, or very bad at bad things, which is probably worse on net, though I grant it is a somewhat complicated topic."

(Her chief update about Profectus is that it is a clown show, which she is carefully not saying because in Laukera, people learn tact.)

"I have no particular trouble believing that you are bad at good things on top of torching villages. I feel pretty negatively about the torching villages. I do mean to, after this conversation, go set up somewhere and have a go at the feeding and clothing the masses thing myself, and I'm not actually sure what this conversation needs to establish besides that."

"I grant that is a reasonable perspective. I think trying to do things will probably go badly for you if you don't have a robot army, and you will probably get arrested and/or disintegrated. I would attempt to convince you to work with us if I had any idea what you valued, since I think we are mostly doing good things, and will do more of them and do better with more resources, but I... don't, particularly, know what you value other than that you disapprove of villages being burned and claim to support feeding and clothing people, or how the trees/food tradeoff works where you come from, or..."

"I am not worried about being disintegrated. Or, particularly, about being arrested, though it would be possibly more inconvenient. I'm indestructible. What do you mean by the trees/food tradeoff exactly?"

"My sources suggest that 'indestructible' may be a relative term with the southern magics?"

"And I meant that there's limited amounts of dirt and you can't plant crops in ground already occupied by forests."

"Make a canal and you'll be doing something useful."

"Right, I was mostly going to create food out of nothing and maybe distribute higher-yield seeds. A canal would actually be nontrivial for me, I can only make things, not remove them."

Nau looks like he has a low opinion of Cam's inventiveness.

"I wish you the best of luck. We haven't really managed to get people to buy fertilizer, maybe you'll have better luck with seeds?"

"What are your sales tactics like?"

"Telling people that our fertilizer is very cheap and good for crops?" she hazarded. "I don't know, I think exports are..." she looks at Nau.

"I know exactly how little marketing skill I have; there are three fertilizer factories, each in the hands of a separate concern; some of their product I purchase, and the rest is sold off, chiefly to greenbelt farmers. These concerns then send wandering salesmen to try to persuade various of our neighbors to purchase the product on the grounds that it is cheap and that it works, and to the best of my knowledge have very little success. Farmers can't, and nobles don't, pay for it. What little is purchased is then shipped off by rail, chiefly to Laukera, which presumably sells it overseas where my name is less of a curse."

"Huh. Solid try, at least. How did your name originally acquire this patina of accursedness?"

"My considerable lack of tact."

"Is there another continent or anything where you could start over with your most diplomatic support?"

"None lacking monarchies."

"Inconvenient, though maybe monarchies you got along with would be a big step up from ones that you don't. How long have you been here, anyway?"

"Fifteen years, four months, and twenty-six days."

"Wow, I'm impressed with the industrial capacity given that you can't cheat like me."

"I had a ship."

"I'm impressed with the industrial capacity of your one-person ship! Unless it was a large colony-oriented vessel and just happened to kill most people aboard but leave your equipment intact in which case I'm not impressed at all."

"Asteroid miner."

"Still, looks like you've got textiles and stuff, nice going. What are you going to focus on if I take the reins of project feed and clothe?"

"... You seem to have come to the strange conclusion that I believe the words you say? Pray tell, how did you manage this?"

Ohhh no.

"...I'm not saying, whatever that is go do it right now, I'm just curious what will happen if I do in fact take care of it."

"Continue my efforts to escape this benighted rock by building up my industrial capacity and extorting spaceship parts from the local tyrants. Solve whatever lesser problems the local populace has, such as lack of transportation or furniture or medicine. Eventually, cease to be of your concern."

"Supposing I don't care for extortion."

"I offered to purchase them first, at any price they could name, when they did not attempt to murder me for daring to ask. I have continued to offer to purchase them. Given an alternate source of equipment, I would have no need to do this, but there is no reason for anyone here to suffer or die, and that can be ended just as soon as I get off this planet - and so, 'Cam,' If you intend to start a war with me I would appreciate a declaration in advance."

"How about, you stop making anyone here suffer or die, and if I am satisfied that you are not making up caring about that, I'll make you a spaceship."

"Go to Hell. And get out of my city."

And he will stomp off fly his drone off.

Approximately three seconds later "- Uh, translation, 'he doesn't trust you and feels as though you are mocking him instead of extending an actual trade offer.'"

"Charming," Cam remarks in Rinara's direction.

"The thing about not being very diplomatic is that it makes it much harder to get competent help, such as help at being diplomatic."

"I can see how it would! Well, I've been disinvited from the city. If you need to tell me anything, you can do so by writing a letter, addressing it 'letter to Cam', and then not sending it."

"... Huh. Uh, I think the only thing I have to say before you go is that we actually started very few of the wars we are fighting, except in the sense that the Traveler talking to people often causes them to try to murder him as a natural side effect of him being, uh, charming? And we would like to fight fewer. If you need to tell me things or ask me questions I suppose you can probably make notes in my pocket without bothering to ask me, but if that doesn't work I'll read anything in the Department of Agriculture mailbox that doesn't get stolen."

"I can't reliably hit a pocket from a distance. If I drop a letter that says Department of Agriculture on it and it lands on the street or something will that usually reach you?"

"Absolutely not, paper can be sold."

"Wow, okay. I could give you a phone?"

"I don't know what that is."

"Like the drone was doing but without the part where it moves around on its own and probably has guns or whatever."

"Then yes." She'll ask the Traveler to look at it, obviously, to make sure it isn't a bomb or anything.

"He will probably tell you it could be a passive listening device so you'll probably want to keep it somewhere it wouldn't be able to pick anything up unless we are trying to have a conversation, notwithstanding that I could have placed a thousand listening devices all over this city in the time I have been here already." He hands her a phone. "I didn't though. If it makes a ringing noise I am trying to call you, green button starts the call and red button tells me to fuck off."

She takes it with her living hand. "I understand. Thank you."

"How good are your cyborg bits, do you like them?"

Does she like them? Does she like being obviously recognizably inhuman, or is this about preferring them to being dead?

"They work pretty well."

"- cause like, I can replace meat limbs, if they're not great."

"That's a very generous offer that I will need to think about when you aren't still deciding whether to start a war with the Traveler, sorry."

"No strings attached but legit to be concerned about it for various reasons. Bye, I guess." He steps back into his shuttle. "Azlisa, thing about writing me applies to you too if you need anything."

She nods. "Thank you for your assistance." Eavesdropping is alas over, and so the next step is to track down the local Laukeran community and see if they can tell her where to go to hire decent servants.

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?

A little?

Tragic. He will start flying to Laukera and finesse an underwater speaker setup he can deliver dialogue to by chip.