"Will the places that haven't seen one before contain literate people at all?"

"Certainly priests, often someone who isn't. The priests wouldn't take kindly to this issue."

"Yeah. I could also drop little audio thingies if we recorded an audio message, but those do not biodegrade."

"Mundanity is your department."

"The backup plan is to use the existing telephones and railroads to get as much of a head start as possible, then send messengers from there. It'll work, but there's little real chance of completing the project before the news that there's going to be a nationwide election spreads the sixth-century way."

"I'm pretty impressed that you were able to nonmagically reinvent phones and trains, have I mentioned? When you weren't even planning to time-travel, at that."

"Well, thank you. I was a factory foreman back in Connecticut; had to know how things are put together. I have to say, though, the create-anything-imaginable approach has quite a bit of appeal."

"Oh, yeah, I don't envy you one bit. I'm just impressed."

"I tend to assume that society progressed enough that most anyone from my century would be the best and brightest here. The things I know how to do are probably the most dramatic, but a teacher or a lawyer would be no less the best this Britain had ever seen. Either of them could work the same scale changes, if slower."

"Unless they weren't a people person and got burnt at the stake."

"I don't think most people want to change the world that much. Given motivation levels like yours or mine, probably, you could do a lot with nothing more than germ theory and high school math. Although, I think a fair number of them would probably have gotten smallpox or something, and died before they could do anything. In 1895 have you got rid of smallpox yet? I know that happens before daeva are public knowledge but not exactly when."

"Vaccines had been around for almost a century when I left, but the disease wasn't eradicated yet. That was easier here, with smaller and more command-able populations. I was immune when I came here, but I suppose if you don't have it at all then nobody would bother with the immunity."

"Right. I mean, I won't get it, but that is because I am a demon, not because I am from the future."

"Would you be able to immunize someone by looking at them? Create the antibodies by looking at them or some such? Cowpox infections are far better than the alternative, but not exactly pleasant."

"I can make antibodies, yeah. Or just a rack of state-of-the-art vaccines."

"That sounds like an excellent idea. The state of the art has changed little in the last hundred years, but I imagine it might in the next three."

"Quite a bit. Although smallpox in particular didn't get a lot of development after it was eradicated."

"Mm - I have textbooks, what I don't have is a lot of knowhow about how to make things without directly making them. I have never studied vaccine-crafting while not, you know, being a demon."

"Neither have I. This is one of those points where a factory foreman is exactly the wrong sort of person to have."

"Well, the population of Earth proved itself equal to similar tasks with less help in the past. Or rather, the future."

"It's a question of when. We ought to be able to accomplish the same in a tenth the time, one way or another."

"Oh yes."