"Yes! Please teach me all about designing mountain ranges!"

So Cam walks him through the process - he has all kinds of fun demonic software for designing mountain ranges and such - and here is how it can be shaped and here is what it will look like if he puts a different composition of rocks in it and then they slide and here is how tall it will have to be to have snow caps once there's more general moisture around and here are plants that could go on the mountains!

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Tiro is so excited about his mountains. He has mountain-related aesthetic opinions! Trees are good! Snow is good! Attractive rocks are good!

"I mean, do you want it to look naturalistic or do you want me to get fancy..."

"How about... mostly naturalistic, with occasional departures into fancy?"

"Scattered around, or, like, Mount Fancy in the middle of the Naturalistic Mountains?"

"Well, what does your mountain simulator think about those options?"

"Oh, let's see -"

Cam dabs flourishes scattered around in the range - high caldera lake with unreasonably pretty waterfalls, vein of bright quartz, copse of excessively shapely trees, salt terraces, basalt columns - displays the result and pans around - and then shuffles things around until it's all crowded onto one mountain.

"...As much as I love Mount Fancy, I think I like them better scattered," says Tiro. If he had a tail he would be wagging it. "This is going to be such a great mountain range."

"I think so too!" Cam reverts to the scattered version. Adds in some more things. Cave system! Wildflowers! Cliffy parts!

Tiro admires the design and maybe makes quiet 'eeeeeeeeee' sounds.

"Are you going to want a house on here? Easier to know going in if I am going to want to put a house foundation."

"Yeah! Like—" He tracks down his favourite section of mountain, a nice little forested valley in a particularly naturalistic section. "There?"

"All right, let's design you a house!"

He's got a "plain" default house design for nondemon residents stored somewhere. It has things like indoor plumbing and electric lights.

"Fancy amenities," comments Tiro.

"Pretty bare-bones for my world's tech level," Cam says. "Feel free to suggest tweaks!"

"Yeah, the design is a little... bland. And I'm used to way different architectural styles. I'm not that good an artist or I'd just draw you a picture... actually I guess you could just make, like, a tiny model of my childhood home if you felt like it, right?"

"Yeah, sure -" Now he is holding one that is just slightly outsize for the palm of his hand, he hands it over for Tiro to point things out.

It was a pretty big childhood home and they are going to have to squint to get some of the details, but Tiro is happy to talk about the difference in architectural styles. He's not actually an architect but he can point out things like the customary shapes of windows and the way the roofs have that particular profile and the open awnings with the decorated columns that go over all the main doors... Haelahar architecture is overall very pretty.

"Oh, the palace, too, that has some really good stuff," he thinks to suggest. "But you might need to make it bigger for us to, like, see the windows."

"How big?"

"Let's see..." He moves some things from one side of his table to the other. "That should be enough space. There's two sets of walls, see, and the really old stuff is mostly inside the inner walls and the newer stuff is mostly between inner and outer, and I'm a fan of both."

"Gotcha." Scale model!

The palace of Haela is huge and gorgeous. The inner fortifications are blockier, the construction techniques less refined, but their entire surface is decorated with beautifully intricate carvings, mostly abstract curves and lines, a little weathered but still clear. Between the inner and outer walls, the interconnected buildings are a little more elegant and modern in style, looking more like Tiro's childhood home and less like an ancient and forbidding castle. There is an enormous beautiful garden surrounded by charming colonnades. Tiro smiles wistfully at it.

"Pretty," Cam remarks. "What do you want to copy from here?"

"How hard would it be to copy, like, the style of the stonework on the inner castle without actually copying the exact designs? And there's a huge window somewhere around here that I really like," he hunts down the huge window and points it out, "yeah, this, that one." It's latticed diagonally in the Haelahar style, small individual panes of glass held securely in a wrought-iron frame, but unlike previous examples the frame has been crafted to look like a huge climbing vine instead of being a simple crosshatch of straight bars. "Isn't it great? I used to climb it as a kid until my mom caught me. Literally, I fell off and she caught me."