He shakes his head for both questions rather than bothering with an earpiece swap for yes or no answers.  

"Alright then. We'll have to walk, I don't know if the pups can carry you."

They flash-message at the hot air balloon with a lighthouse light attached some more, then motion him to follow them. They stay fairly spread out, seeming a little bit nervous about him.

He follows quietly.

And after a few more hours of walking they come over the lip of a rise in the snow to see... A small city, more of a town really, nestled into a semi-sheltered area surrounded by a huge metal construction that dwarfs even the four-story workshop buildings off to one side. There are a lot of tents. There's at least one sawmill. People are bustling about, working.

"That's our new home. I think Boss is going to come out here to talk with you, but do you mind if two of us go deliver what we scavenged to the kitchens? We found an old cannery yesterday, and some of the cans are probably still edible!"

Ara'Vine nods, then settles down to watch the town from a distance and wait for the Boss.  

They shuffle him into a hut at the rim of the crater, to at least be out of the wind. The Boss comes out presently, hauled up to the place by some kind of elevator.

"Hello. You are... Very unexpected. And have demonstrated at least one unprecedented capability and claim more. I don't know what to make of it."

He shrugs, offers the earpiece and motions that it should be worn.  Presumably he would have been told about how it functions.  

"I didn't expect to be here either.  I had meant to leave the desert soon, but I expected to leave by foot or wing, not teleported by a giant snake.

"Magic is rare across all of Tle, but most places have at least heard of it.  Then again, if what your scout said about the number of continents is true, it's possible that the thing that sent me here sent me to another planet."

"I'm sure the astronomers, sociologists, and anthropologists will be fascinated as soon as we're not all barely managing to not starve or freeze to death. And linguists. We don't really know enough about how the rest of the world is doing. I find it hard to believe that we're the only survivors, but we don't have contact with anyone else at the moment..."

"I haven't been out there long.  I appeared a little over a day ago near a spindly metal tower on a ridge.  It was abandoned, just some unfamiliar machines left, and a note I couldn't read.

"I originally followed your light because I wanted to know where I was.  Judging by what I've heard about the weather, I think it would be best for both of us if I joined your city.  I can normally survive out in the wilderness, but I do need to eat as much as any other human and am not confident in long-term hunting if the weather stays like this. 

"As for what I bring - I have six hours of shapeshifting magic every seven days.  It keeps the same mass and the same atoms, but can re-arrange them - graphite to diamond but not lead to gold.  This magic can be put into charge-stones to be used by others for healing, but anything more complicated takes a lot of practice.  Since there is time pressure, the most maximally efficient thing is probably to have me create organs which can generate useful chemicals - vaccines, antibiotics, silk, anything else that can be grown from a living thing - that can then be harvested repeatedly.  That will let about 3 hours of magic create a constant supply of a medicine for years rather than needing to heal infected wounds manually each time.  I was in the process of learning how to create seperate functioning systems so they could be taken out and survive seperated from me, like a houseplant on a windowsill, but the extra life support for the organs would take more magic and matter to create.   

"I'm also trained in mundane medicine, though I expect I'll need to check with your doctors before they determine I'm up to the local standards.

"Uh, and possibly remove this fur or mess with the edges so it looks more like a coat."

"Interesting! That's a clever use of the power, strange as it is. The use and the power. Everyone's vaccinated against the common things except a few of the smaller children. We could use antibiotics, off the top of my head, but it's not really medicine we're short of otherwise. I think. I'll have you speak to Dr. Vauners. A few questions - this tower, did it have anything at the top? And the equipment, was there a steam core hooked up to it? A sort of round generator with arms and gears coming off, about twice as big as you? It sounds like a radio tower, very new technology, which is either a lot of useful parts or, more optimistically, a means to try and contact others."

Thoughtful pause. "...Can you make viable seeds? We lost our entire strain of kidney beans while we were trying to set up the greenhouses. And making it look a bit more like a coat would be a good idea, yes. I'm sure we can soothe most of the alarm you would cause at my word - though it might be best if we tried to run steam out a ways and gave you your own dwelling instead of trying to fit you into the bunkhouses or a tent. People would be alarmed. They've lost a lot, you know, it's hard to be calm in these conditions."

"It tapered to a point at the top.  I'm not sure how much of what I saw was a machine meant to do something and how much was just the saffolding, but there wasn't anything large like on a water tower.  Inside..." he describes the intereor of the little shed at the tower's base as well as he can remember it, with the stove, the engine, and the console.

"I'm not sure about the seeds.  I can't make them from scratch, but if you have any of the damaged beans or dead plant material still around I might be able to rebuild them.  I mostly just used my power for what the monks suggested, and they had me focused on human medicine.  Theoretically I should be able to do more with plants than I have, but it might take years of practice to get anything better than what selective breeding can do.

"It'll take me about 15 minutes of focus to kill off the hair folicles around my face and arms, and switch some along the edges to be a different color like a hem.  Later on I can duplicate my skin and shed the outer layers to make into a real coat, but that'll take about two hours and I don't have that much magic built up right now.  As a Champion, normally I'd stay at a temple, but I don't know your local gods or how they operate.  I'll just follow your lead on what I should be doing until I have a better idea of what's going on."

"That sounds like a radio tower, yes. I appreciate how you're being conciliatory and adaptable. We don't have a lot of room for luxury in the face of survival, but perhaps we'll have a little extra security with more options. I don't have a good sense of your, er, magic's budget and limitations, and it's your ability in the end. If there's nothing very urgent, that could be worth it. My scouts are too professional to admit it, but they were terrified of you at first. Doesn't seem ideal. Gods? We only believe in the one, and it doesn't really seem like His hand is at work, here."

He glances around for some kind of trash bin that he can shed the face and hand fur into.

"Adaptibility is my thing.  Gills for water, fur for cold, being reasonable for when dealing with people is important.  I like to be whatever makes sense, though usually on the large side because having more spare mass to shapeshift is handy.  

"There's 249 gods on Tle.  My god, Diamondeye, is the god of preservation and anything closer to that than to another god's domain - conservation, jam-making, museums...  She mostly leaves me to my own devices but nudges me along sometimes.  Throwing me somewhere to help keep a civilization alive is something she'd do."

There are empty crates and such.

"I will reserve judgment of, uh, Diamondeye."

And belief.

"I should send scouts to find that radio tower. We haven't found other survivors but if we can perhaps we can get help, or help them if they're in even worse shape... Can you shed that in such a way as to make it usable to patch a coat? Now is not really the time to be squeamish about anything of use, I'm afraid."

He nods.  It's good that people here are thinking ahead and not being squeamish.  There's always a fine line between giving people enough information and having them refuse to deal with it, and it's been a while since he didn't have the monks to run interference.  

"I can get started on it right away.  Probably better to do that now, before I have to walk around near other people.  Is there anything else?  I'll need to focus on the shapeshifting."