There appears upon her map a person! He is a featherless biped too, but his hair is brown all the way down and his ears are round and his limbs are differently proportioned and also he has navy blue wings and a tail. They match his pants. "- uh, hi," he says.

His summoner gasps and switches her grip on her pencil to one that would work better if she had to stab someone with it. "How did you even get here?" she says.

The person on the bed, meanwhile, aims a gun at him.

"...uh, you summoned me," he says, glancing nonchalantly at the pencil and the gun. "I'm... not going to hurt you?"

The man on the bed doesn't move.

Rit sets her pencil down. "How did we do that?"

"Drawing on the floor. Awful habit. Uh, where am I?"

For some reason this question makes her grimace and suck in a breath through her teeth.

"Haven City," the man says.

"Which is... where."

They both relax slightly at this question.

"Second planet out of twelve," says his summoner, "and if that doesn't help I don't know how to identify the star system."

"It doesn't help at all! How fascinating."

"If you can get home," says the man, "you probably should. The baron would be interested if he knew you were here."

"How ominous. What form might this interest take?"

"If you're really lucky, maybe you can sell him alien tech to fight the metal heads. If not, I wouldn't put it past him to cut you open and see what's inside."

"Metal heads?"

"The other aliens - you can recognize them by the glowing yellow gems in their heads. There's a range of intelligence, a lot of them could theoretically be bargained with if they didn't universally hate us and want us dead. Oh, and if you somehow kill one, don't touch the corpse without gloves, they leak dark eco."

"What is dark eco?"

"They don't have it on other planets? Uh, eco is a fundamental part of physics, like matter and time. The lies-to-children version is that it comes in five or six colors and the purple kind, also called dark eco, is evil - it can dissolve some kinds of things, or warp them, and in smaller quantities just makes people sick and more likely to be violent. It's part of what we use for the power grid."

"........gosh. What do the other four or five colors do?"

"So, still bearing in mind that this is the lies-to-children version and if you want the other version I have a degree in it - green is used for poorly-directed or undirected healing, if you're fast enough and have enough to work with, and for encouraging plants to grow. Blue is also used for the power grid, the Precursors used it for all their cool stuff, and if you know how to channel it and grab a bunch you can run faster. Red sort of lets things act like they have more inertia than they do. Yellow's another good one for power generation but it tends to be sort of explosive and hot and very capable of starting fires - there's even a trick for channeling it to shoot fireballs. And light eco is probably real - you can sort of tell from studying the other colors, but it only shows up in old legends. If it exists, it's... probably related to negentropy somehow. Might do healing, might make things fall slower, might do levitation, I'm kind of guessing."

"Goodness. Uh, how does the wisdom of my being here change if I cannot in fact be cut open by curious barons?"

"...Then I'd expect him to want to convince you to fight for him. Against the metal heads that might even be worth it."

"Why do they hate you so much?"

"They practically run on dark eco, in amounts way bigger than what it takes to have a measurable effect on how evil a city full of humans is. And they probably think we're ugly aliens - we're not hot, our art is probably ugly, our crying orphans aren't whatever they think is cute. We both need eco and there's only so much of it and we're edible to them. Can't really imagine why they wouldn't hate us."

"Hrm. Uh, is eco a - substance? Like, could you put it in a jar or whatever."

"Yeah - not arbitrary jars, and it doesn't interact with the jar the same way it would if it were a gas or a liquid or a solid. But yeah."

Jar of blue eco?

Nope.

Rats. "Do you think they'd leave you alone if they had all the food they wanted?"

"...Maybe? I think they might also want their own planet."

"If they had their own planet and all the food they wanted?"

"I haven't talked to one. If we could give them their own planet, we could maybe not give them any way to get back to this one..."

"Sounds plausible enough if neither of you guys has invented space travel."

"They got here somehow."

"Yeah," says Rit, "but if they had their own independent warp network at all the entire war would look different and at least one wastelander would ever have seen at least one metal head teleport."

"Oh, they're recent arrivals, this isn't a forever war situation?"

"Written history says they suddenly arrived centuries ago and we've never found any fossils of them."

"Interesting. Did they immediately start hostilities, according to your records?"

"Supposedly, yes, they just arrived and started hunting us."

"Yikes! Are there any communication attempts, is the language understood at all..."

"Yes and sort of. There's a lot we don't get but there was a famous parlay attempt a long time ago - it broke down because they, uh, wanted us to unilaterally disarm in exchange for not being exterminated. The king at the time told them where to shove it."

"...wow, okay. Uh, do you have any ideas of official people I could go to who do not like to cut apart and study strange visitors? It wouldn't work but it would be such a waste of time."

He laughs darkly. "I'm it. Second in command in the Underground, the resistance here. Or you could check if Kras City still exists, but we haven't heard from them in years and we're assuming the worst."

...does Kras City still exist?

It does! It's not even in particularly bad shape. A number of convoluted racetracks loop around and through the entire city.

"This look right?" he asks, displaying his palmful of city.

"...Yeah. You really don't need to worry about the baron, do you."

"I don't think so! Unless eco in particular can zap me. Do you have any around?"

"Not pure. I could shoot you, most kinds of ammo use eco."

"Sure, you wanna nip me in the wing? It's easy to replace." He sticks out a wing.

He shoots. It's not any more effective than a normal bullet.

"Cool," says Cam, shaking and refolding the relevant wing. "Okay, so, does Kras City existing change anything important here?"

"Maybe. You have somewhere to go if you want to leave. We probably still don't."

"You don't wanna come?"

"Suppose we take the worst-off thousand people and go. If Kras can feed that many more, they won't do it for free. All thousand of them would need new jobs over there, without any idea who to trust less than usual and who to bribe in which business. And they're not on our warp network, so it'd be a long trip. The baron could shoot us down on the way out, Kras could get spooked and shoot us down on the way in, and in between here and there there are metal heads unless you put them on another planet first. And this is all assuming you want to help out with enough air trains to carry everyone, otherwise we can't get out."

"I can feed people. And make a - I don't know what an air train is, a shuttle."

"Might work. Wait. You got Kras without knowing it existed. Can you check for... places in Kras where they torture dissidents?"

"...that is not a conjurable parameter but if you can name some dissidents I can see how they're doing?"

"I don't know any in Kras - I do know some missing people here - what is conjurable?"

"Books by title and author, locations by time, all the works ever written in a particular language... I should maybe do that anyway, try to train a computer to speak what the metal heads speak..."

"Damn. - Can you do prisons in Kras?"

"I don't think so but if there's a uniform the prison guards would wear, or something, I could bootstrap from there...?"

"I wouldn't know. If you can do groups of armed people within fifteen feet of injured, unarmed people, that's either a prison or important anyway."

"That's too elaborate. I can... do... surroundings of blood that is not in people? But that will get me a lot of false positives."

"And negatives. - Better plan. You get rid of the metal heads and we make a new city."

"I can start there, sure, after my computer's chewed on the language some - it might only be able to do writing if they don't have audio recordings - is this an okay place to put a person-sized amount of hardware?"

"...Maybe. We probably won't be raided here but that's... say a seventy percent chance we make it another month."

"Oh, it doesn't need to be safe, just not in the way, I can remake it if anything happens to it." He finds a corner to stash the processors.

"Hey, while you're making things, can you get me everything Gol Acheron wrote, if he existed?"

"That will get you his diary and love letters and whatnot, which I need a better reason than a casual suggestion to turn over."

"I would guess he's too dead to be embarrassed, but fair enough."

"Maybe you have an afterlife, who knows? Can someone recommend me a good map of this, let's say continent?"

"There might be dozens of good maps but I kind of like the ones in the front matter of my history textbook, what was it called, Legacy of the Precursors? Something like that."

Cam produces a nice big instance of that one.

Haven City is along the southern coast of its continent, just west of a jungle and southwest of an active volcanic crater and some similarly geologically interesting areas. There are a lot of ruins: some lost cities, including one just off the coast marked only as "lost Precursor city", and some places marked with names like "ancient citadel". There are some known areas of metal head settlement, and some badlands that (based on their general latitude and distance from the ocean) should have been nice and fertile.

It's not a very big continent.

"What's the deal with Precursors?" Cam asks.

"That's the million-orb question. There's a bunch of ruins that would be older than recorded history if they didn't have words engraved on them. The tech still works, including the talking statues - we have one here but unfortunately it makes less sense than a romance novel plot, when it bothers to say anything."

"It speaks your language though?"

"It does, I think."

"Can I meet it?"

"Yeah - can you hide the wings and conjure really realistic fake ears? Not that the oracle will care, I think, but the people between here and there..."

Cam puts on a long coat and a mirror with which to prosthetize his ears convincingly.

"Should work. At least it's the season for a coat like that. I can show you the way there, then?"

"Yes please!"

Up a flight of steps to street level, the hideout exits into a dead-end alley that itself exits into a poor neighborhood. The uneven pavement is cracked and occasionally simply missing in irregular patches. In a couple of places there are huge trenches carved into the ground, with small wooden bridges placed over them that themselves are falling apart and full of gaps. The pavement is entirely for foot traffic; the vehicles fly overhead, just a couple feet below the lowest of the cables stretched across the streets. It's hard to tell which parts of the buildings are artistically uneven and which are just poorly made, but if nothing else the roofs tend to look sloppy. The air smells like some pollutant that isn't a normal byproduct of a gas engine. They pass one of the baron's propaganda stations, which is currently playing a recording of him exhorting everyone to sacrifice for their city, and then head out over the water on an uneven network of boardwalks. A lot of the other pedestrians are walking slowly and looking down.

Their destination is a smallish one-room building over the water. The statue inside has two glowing clear domes in front that might or might not be supposed to suggest eyes. The rest of the room is full of burning candles.

The statue deigns to speak to Cam. "Greetings, visitor," it says. "You are a surprise. I must urge you in the strongest terms to wait and learn until those things which are in progress now have begun. For your patience, I offer you a title and an author." It enunciates the title and author clearly, but they're definitely not in the local language.

Cam resists the temptation to fix infrastructure on the way.

"Hello," Cam says. "I won't be able to read that today, do you have other suggestions for how to get oriented to the situation?"

The oracle does not answer.

"Honestly that's better than most people get," Rit says after a few seconds.

"Most people it won't talk to at all?"

Wobbly gesture. "Not on their first try, anyway. Hey, I don't know if it counts if I don't have to buy it, but just in case can I have a candle to light while I'm here?"

"Uh, sure." Little glass jar of vanilla candle. "What for?"

"It's an offering - the oracle doesn't exactly ask, but people who pray and meditate and make offerings seem happier and less, you know, evil." She lights it from one of the other candles and sets it on the floor.

"What does it do that's oracular?"

"It says mysterious bullshit and seems to see the future or at least see the entire present and be very smart. You're the only person I've ever heard of getting a book recommendation you couldn't get at a library. And it told my mother once to 'embrace solitude and shun the imminent festivities' and she didn't go to a party the next day and the entire section of the city the party was held in was overrun by metal heads and most of the guests died."

"Yikes, okay. I'll, uh, see if I can crack the book, same as the metal head language.." He produces a hard copy and flips through it in case it has useful illustrations.

It has a map of a galaxy with a place marked, a map of a solar system with only two planets, pictures of alien scenery, pictures of metal heads and other creatures, a timeline, and a diagram.

"...gosh," says Cam. "You said this is a twelve planet system, yes?" Do the other creatures look like they might be of a biosphere with the metal heads.

"And that's not the yellow sun or the green one."

Like the metal heads, some of the other things depicted have glassy glowing parts, often but not always the same yellow color as skull gems. Like the metal heads, some of them have metal parts or half-exposed tubes.

"You have two?" Is this the same language as his computer is currently chewing.

No relation to that one at all.

"Arguably. The yellow one's our star."

"And the green one visits on bank holidays? Can I put some more hardware here or should we go back -"

"I figure we can go back whenever but I don't know what kind of hardware you're thinking."

"Same kind I put in the corner of where I popped up."

"It will definitely be noticed and examined and possibly have candles put on it but I don't think there's a rule that says you can't."

"...maybe I'll put it inside a crate or something." Crate. Cam puts a few candles on top of it as extra obfuscation.

"Anyway, we can go back but we could go to the port, I've got a red pass - I don't know how much freedom of movement you're used to but here you can't leave your neighborhood without clearance."

"How dystopian! Do they check the passes against any kind of central authority that has a record of to whom they are issued?"

"They explain when you get them that they're doing that. I know for a fact they have the capacity to do it. But in practice not really."

"So I could have one too, presumably - where would you like to go?"

"...To the green zone to watch the races, if that's an option - can I just get a copy of all of - if 'all the kinds' won't do it then all of Commander Erol's, if I promise they're not for bedrooms anything like that?"

"I, uh, don't think smuggling you into entertainment venues is a priority for me, since there's a war on."

"It's more war-related than it sounds but not in a way where me being there in person matters, especially not today. But the stadium section is also the section with the good library, which maybe doesn't matter anymore, and - almost everything that's set up to encourage people to think, or do anything for fun that doesn't involve drinking. And all the people who have access to that kind of thing. It's, I dunno. Fifty percent frivolous."

"Library does not matter unless it comes with particularly helpful librarians," Cam confirms.

"I mean, some of it is seeing which books they're putting on the shelves this month and which have disappeared, or who's reading what, but if you're about to make it safe to run then everyone can quit the cloak and dagger shit. And maybe you can conjure the other stuff anyway... Is there anything you need to do in person at all or is the smartest thing just to hide out reading stuff for a week?"

"I will probably want to hang out reading stuff for a week."

"...If, while you're doing that, you make a lot of boring food that people could plausibly have gotten around here, I bet they'll want to take time off from fighting to distribute it - you can't leave it in public for the taking and expect the guard not to confiscate it but we can probably get it where it needs to go."

"I would be happy to also make some boring food if you can tell me what food bores people."

"Personally when this is over I am never eating another limon again. Oh, or brown rice, or cornberry and cheese stew. I guess don't make the stew, just make the grains. You could leave some here first, I think, and then we can go back?"

"Yeah, sure, what's a normal looking package situation for 'em?"

"...Mm, the fastest to describe and hardest to get wrong would be burlap bags."

"Cool." Burlap bags with "brown rice" and "cornberries" stitched into them appear.

And then she can show him the way back if he needs a guide.

He does not have such a perfect sense of direction as to turn her down. "Did you have a name, by the by? I'm Cam."

"These days I go by Rit. Cam is such a normal name. Don't know what I expected, just."

They pass a couple of armed people in red armor, and the propaganda station again ("welcome not the unknown face," it intones).

"Unknown faces a big deal around here?"

"Well, they can't be immigrants, so they're either regular criminals in disguise or metal heads in disguise - second one's not likely, they'd have to be stupid powerful to even get inside the shield wall, but it's technically possible."

"Shield wall is - eco thing, something else?"

"Eco-powered thing. Also a physical wall but that doesn't help much when some of them fly."

"I see. And 'powerful' here cashes out to...?"

"So bearing in mind I spent half a semester on metal head bio and it was more about the cellular level, and the people who really work with these rankings are the ones who go out and shoot them, probably the ones that are smarter and less likely to just fall over dead for no reason and have armor that can stand up to more blaster rounds."

And here they are.

"Some of them fall over for no reason?"

"It's sort of like aging, but if you want to do math to it you want to pretend they have a half-life instead of - I don't know if your species even ages, though."

"We do not. How interesting. Are they radioactive?"

"Literally the entire planet is radioactive, you can even find out how old some things are by checking the isotopes of carbon in them. But metal heads aren't much more radioactive than the average crocadog."

"Crocadog. Gosh. I wonder why the half-life model then."

"I know a textbook that explains that - Metal Head Microanatomy by Doctor Lany, uh, but the preface is by someone else I forgot - actually, do you want a dozen titles and I can answer questions when you're done?"

"Dozen titles sounds good. And your food order."

"Oh. Yeah. Hey, Torn!"

The man, who is still resting on one of the beds, looks up. "Hm?"

"I thought if the strategic situation is about to change and we've got Cam to conjure things we could be giving out more free food, am I right?"

"Yeah. To start with, as many five-pound bags of cornberry flour as will fit under the table and two dozen cans of chipped yakow - make them look like the Laughing Lurker brand, if you can."

"Can do." Bags under table, chipped yakow. He makes a nibble of chipped yakow to taste.

It's dried meat, offensively salty and otherwise unseasoned.

Torn looks over the foods. For the first time since Cam's been here, he smiles.

Rit recommends an introductory biology textbook, an introductory eco studies textbook, a history textbook, a biography of Baron Praxis, What Makes A Zoomer Zoom, Computers Made Simple, A Brief History of Eco Studies, and a bunch of fiction she thinks will give cultural context.

"Thanks!" He sticks them all into his computer on a little stick and starts in with the history textbook.

The book explains that, while the Precursors were very important and existed in the past, they are the subject of an entirely different field of study and will not be covered here, and skips forward to the earliest currently readable narrative records and their archaeological context.

This continent was the second one settled by humans and the first one settled by most types of lurkers (the reader is assumed to know what a lurker is). Historically it wasn't the seat of the most important civilizations, as judged by people at the time. But the descendants of other civilizations are few and scattered and assimilated, and there's only so much room in one book, so the local civilizations get nearly all the focus. The book covers their migration to the continent, their initially peaceful relations with the more intelligent lurkers (there's substantial evidence of trade, and there are burials of lurker skeletons in human graveyards, buried with similar sorts of burial goods). The humans on the continent eventually unified politically, partly by making use of salvaged Precursor warp gates to keep travel times low.

The centuries that followed are sometimes known as the golden age of sagecraft. The sages were people who studied and worked with eco, and usually studied other things, and were recognized by other sages as learned and worth listening to. They were described at the time as usually having powers like levitation or the ability to communicate with plants.

Then at one point an unpopular law was followed by arson and acts of sabotage, many of which specifically took advantage of the warp network; the book claims that the resulting crackdown on dissidents wasn't strong enough, since the violence got worse. Eventually, for only partly related reasons, the country split down the middle, northwest and southeast, with lurkers controlling the territory in between. The fact that the split was along geographic lines was partly a coincidence but it made it much more appealing to just shut down the warp network. Written records from the west in the following centuries report fewer and eventually no sages, fewer scientific discoveries, increasing border raids from lurkers, and two famines. At least there are substantial records from the west, though. The east - might not have kept good records, or their records might have been destroyed. As best modern historians can tell, there was at least one all-out war with the lurkers, maybe more; the country fractured further, but it's not clear how much; there was a volcanic eruption in the middle of their territory; and this would have been when the lurker sharks migrated to the area en masse and would have taken a bite out of their fishing industry. One of the very few stories from this time and place is that of the Last Sage, also called the Dark Sage, Gol Acheron; the books assumes the reader has heard that one before. It does say there probably was a historical Gol Acheron; it's wildly unlikely that the legendary hero defeated him and opened a door in his citadel that let the metal heads out, because the metal heads arrived far to the south, near what is now Haven City, and the only plausible locations for his citadel are nowhere near there.

When the metal heads attacked, the east was devastated, but still had the knowledge and technical ability to put together primitive force fields. The west was hit later, but more thoroughly destroyed. Its survivors fled east. It isn't clear whether Mar came from the east or the west (the reader is assumed to have heard of Mar before), or even if he came from another continent; he appeared when he was needed, built Haven City, unified the southeast, drove the metal heads out of a substantial area, and made Haven City the capital of a smallish but prosperous country. Under his rule, science began advancing again, the population started growing again, and mankind even made peace with the lurkers. After his death, the war carried on at a stalemate for a while. The humans spread and prospered, but so did the metal heads.

Then there are centuries of names of rulers of Haven City, and the dates of their reigns, and the dates of the destruction of dozens of other important settlements; the last time a city fell was less than twenty years ago. As of the writing of the book, Haven and Kras were presumed to be the only two human settlements remaining anywhere on the planet. The book ends with Baron Praxis, who (contrary to popular belief) is related to the House of Mar, rescuing the city from the weakness and laziness of its prior ruler and preparing to reverse the era of decline.

Cam's questions are:

- what's a lurker
- what's Gol Acheron's supposed deal
- what's Mar's deal

"Lurkers are a whole group of related animal species - except lurker sharks, they're not real lurkers - they're pretty varied but they all have these weirdass jaws, it'll make sense once you've seen one. A few species talk - not random words, they know what they're saying, they mostly know what you're saying - and they even make tools that are almost as complicated as what people make. We have a couple that are citizens, they're not that much less civilized than, well." She smiles bitterly.

"Gol Acheron is supposedly the sage who first decided to start studying dark eco and supposedly might have turned evil and supposedly might have wanted to destroy the world and supposedly might have been friends with some lurkers and supposedly might have been killed by a legendary hero who might or might not have been Mar or Mar's father or Mar's lover or Mar's pet crocadog, I know five different versions of this bedtime story and I don't believe any of them but sages were real and someone started trying to study dark eco and turning evil is the kind of thing that could happen if you did that without taking any safety precautions and the world wasn't destroyed, thanks to Mar.

"Right, Mar is - I mean, he's in the book, there are lots more books about him. He's a hero, he's the next best thing to a Precursor, whatever. I don't know, I don't care much, I barely even celebrate the Feast of Mar."

Cam makes a lurker model to investigate its jaw. "What's a good Mar book?"

It has a pronounced underbite and four protrusions from the lower lip.

"Dunno," Rit says, "it's not my field."

"Early Governance of Haven City: a New Perspective by Samos," says Torn.

Cam adds that to his reading list. "Did you find anywhere else to put food or anything while I was reading?"

"I texted the Shadow about it. He's interested in seeing if you can 'heal the ecology'," he says with barely detectable sarcasm, "so we can farm more in the long term. We could use more potable water for the stockpile, too. We need things for the war, but it's hard to say what we'd still need if the metal heads were on another planet. Other than that, what kind of assurances do you need to do recon for us?"

"You don't have the species I'm used to so my ecology healing would be inexpert at best but if you tell me in what containers you want your water that I can do. Recon like...?"

"Plastic jugs or glass bottles, doesn't matter. We need to know if the baron is planning anything in the next few weeks. I want everything he's written and every room he's visited and every person he's talked to in the last week. I want to know about every weapon he has. I want to know the location of Mar's Tomb. I want to know where an orphan we're taking care of came from. And while we're at it, I want to scout sites for the new city."

Plastic water jugs. "I would need more reason to be confident the baron's bad news before spying on him. Tomb and orphan origins and a scale model of the continent I can do though, where do you want that last one and what time should I be looking for orphan contexts in? I'll also need their name."

"Scale model of the entire continent should wait till I've cleared the food out of here, unless you can put it up on a wall. The kid can't tell us his name, is there a way around that?"

"I could put it on the wall if you like, though I'll need to plasticize the water features and stuff so they don't slosh out. Do you have a name you're calling him?"

"...'The kid.' And - I guess not much is secret from you - the Heir of Mar."

"...like a descendant or something weirder?"

"A descendant. I mean. We think so. I think."

"Okay, I'm gonna call him Junior for conjuration purposes. When did you find him?"

"Couple years ago, couldn't tell you the day."

"Can you narrow it down like at all, I don't want to drown us in models."

"I can call the Shadow - parents aren't a conjurable parameter or this is still trying to pin down who the kid is?"

"I can conjure the parents, I thought you wanted something more like geographical provenance - who's the Shadow, anyway?"

"The leader of the Underground. More than that is supposed to be secret but..." He makes a face. "He wrote that book about Mar."

"Good for him." Tiny model parents of Junior.

A tall bald man and a green-haired brown-skinned woman.

"That's impossible. - That's Damas, the one Praxis deposed. He's been dead a lot longer than this kid has been alive."

"...could it just be a weird lookalike?"

"It could be. Can you check?"

"In a sort of roundabout fashion, sure... how old is Junior?"

"Maybe four."

Scale model of Mr. Damas five years ago, with surroundings?

Leaning on a parked car, either talking or laughing, gesturing. The person next to him, a dark-skinned man with "life" tattooed around his arm, is reacting with mock anger.

"This is Damas five years back."

"...So he abandoned us. Guess I can't blame him. - I need to talk to the Shadow about this." He shakes his head. "In the mean time, you wanted more reason to believe the baron is bad news. For a first pass, you can get it by listening to whatever the propaganda is today - even he can't make himself sound good. And I can name some laws he came up with. That'll only scratch the surface but it's what I've got that's already public."

"What do I wanna grab to read up on that?"

He can name laws, mostly by numbers but sometimes by nicknames. "The propaganda plays on the loudspeakers with the red holograms all day every day. I don't know if there's a file of all the soundbites for today and if there was I'd ask you to listen to it somewhere I don't have to hear it."

Cam'll start with the laws then.

This one makes leaving the city without permission a capital offense. This one declares a state of emergency and indefinitely suspends council elections, something similar to habeas corpus, funding for public television, and the right not to be subjected to torture without having been convicted of a crime. This one authorizes the exile of families that don't adequately support the city, such as by having members in the Krimzon Guard or donating eco. This one ends all funding for the publicly run orphanage and grants all its assets to the Ministry of Extreme Labor. This one declares that neither the city nor Mar Memorial Stadium is liable for any injuries or deaths that may occur during sporting events.

...and the author of these things is definitely the Baron they're talking about?

He doesn't seem to have written the one about the orphanage and he isn't the sole author of the one about exile or the one declaring a state of emergency.

That leaves plenty to spare. "Yeah, okay, what did you want on this malevolent despot again?"

"To start with, everything he's written in the past week - can you get it in a format where we can search for mentions of weapons or the underground?"

"Do you have computers, want to learn to use computers, or want me to do the searching?"

"They exist. I have one but not much of one. Can you make our kind? They run on eco."

"It seems like I can't make eco. If the file storage doesn't run on eco I can make that, though."

"Don't think so. Can you make one that works like a model I specify and runs on a power source you can make?"

"I cannot naively do power conversion so that would involve a detour into electrical engineering."

"Then I want the files and a new portable computer but the search'll go a lot faster if you do it."

Cam hands him a computer, and loads another chip into his computer, and looks up what the Baron has to say about the requested topics this week.

In a message to the commander of the Krimzon Guard, he wrote:

If we must make the choice, the weapon is a higher priority than the shield wall. The best defense is a good offense! Be prepared to take a stand and die for your city.

In a note to his daughter, he wrote:

Our plans are coming to fruition. The war will be over soon, one way or another. Afterward, I have no intention of continuing any of my sadly necessary wartime policies or prosecuting the rebels. Trust me for another three months. Keep up the good work. I'm proud of you.

In a message to a small handful of high-ranking people, he said:

Why can't we spread a rumor that the Underground is a honeypot? The vermin who flock to them would think twice about that!

Cam is curious about more correspondence with the daughter!

The daughter reported that she did find a buried artifact but wasn't able to move it, here's a picture, and she got attacked by metal heads while she was out, here's a list of the kinds involved. He told her not to bother going back to excavate it properly yet. His note about plans coming to fruition came after this and not in direct response to anything she wrote. She answered:

I'll do whatever I have to.

Do you want to spend the anniversary together?

And he told her when to be at the palace for dinner and which dining room to meet in.

Scale model of the artifact.

Chunk of metal with the seal of the House of Mar on it. It's not obvious that it does anything besides stick firmly in the rock and look pretty.

Maybe there is normally eco stuck to it which didn't come along. What else did he write to the commander of the Guard?

The baron sent him some requirements for the updated version of a patrol schedule and summoned him for some in-person meetings. They discussed how to keep someone called Krew from betraying them and whether it seemed like Krew understood their true aims. If he's conjuring both sides of the correspondence, the commander sent over reports on the numbers of various sorts of crimes reported and the number of criminals apprehended and mentioned that someone had voiced a worry about the eco reserves for the shield wall.

"Krew deals in weapons sometimes," says Torn, reading over his shoulder.

"In, like, a supplying the resistance sort of way, or like an opportunistic black market sort of way, or...?"

"Second one."

"Charming." He shakes his head and goes back to his books. What's the deal with Mar.

It's sort of unclear. Instead of going into too much detail about narrative accounts of Mar's actions, this book comes at it slantwise, looking at his policies and the growth of the city and associated country.

Specific laws and policies attributed to Mar include universal military service for people between twenty-two and twenty-four who couldn't prove health or financial hardship; exile and seizure of assets for rape and murder; the recently-suspended policy that resembles habeas corpus; jury trials, semi-voluntary for the jurors; money and food aid for pregnant people, all children under five, and children between five and ten actively attending school; and the election of an advisory council.

It's possible to infer a lower bound for tax revenue based on the number of person-hours of labor that went into the shield wall and the eco grid, both public works attributed to Mar, and given the amount of time those took to complete and the published tax rates (where those are still available), it's possible to put a lower bound on the mean population despite the lack of a census. That plus other records make it possible to guess the population growth rate, and it's particularly impressive given that they were actively subject to attempted genocide the entire time. Of course, part of it isn't from people being born. By all accounts they put a lot of effort into facilitating migration and trade between different settlements, and Haven City and its associated country seem to have gotten a lot of net immigration.

Another notable thing about Mar's reign is that, while it's remembered extremely fondly now, published works from the time, including newspaper editorials (something that only began to come into existence about halfway through his reign), included a lot of criticism of him and his policies.

It's possible to date the construction of nearly every large statue of or monument to him, and they all post-date his reign, with exactly one exception: his tomb was almost entirely completed in his lifetime.

There are not only no statues of him from during his reign, there are also no reliable contemporary depictions of Mar. Samos has a pet theory that Mar isn't even one person, but several working together under a shared pseudonym. Not just because his face isn't reliably known; also because he handled a lot of governance himself, at the same time as he directed the war against the metal heads, at the same time as he designed and organized the building of the shield wall and the eco grid and the sewer system and the tomb, at the same time as he collected and wrote commentaries on surviving samples of Precursor writing, at the same time as he apparently had a family, at the same time as he wrote an impassioned treatise on the concept of human rights, at the same time as he negotiated peace and mutual protection with the lurkers of Misty Island, at the same time as he wrote half a book on astronomy and two contradictory books on the philosophy of governance. It's also possible there was a Mar, but that other people's achievements ended up attributed to him somehow, whether because he deliberately stole the credit or just because of the unreliability of the historical record.

If this were true, the narrative of Mar as one person who appeared one day and won his victories through his personal valor and strength of character would be thoroughly ungrounded.

It's not a terribly long book.

While he's reading, Rit leaves, and someone stops by to pick up some of the food.

Cam waves distractedly at the food-getter. Checks to see if "Mar" gets a unique conjuration result.

Nope!

Interesting! Author(s) of the attributed texts?

The unfinished astronomy book is by a short man with green hair that fades to yellow and a conventionally pretty woman with callused hands and blue-and-green hair. The treatise on human rights is by that same man, a woman with facial tattoos that look a little like Torn's, a woman with black hair and a missing eye, a yellow-skinned man and a red-skinned man. One of the books on government is by the tattooed woman. The other is by a blue-skinned man, a man with a badly-damaged right ear, and an orange creature with a tail that isn't a lurker.

"Hey, uh, help me out here, is this within normal variation for your species?"

"I do know a guy with green skin. That one," (the orange one) "is an ottsel."

"What's an ottsel?"

"Don't I want to know. They talk. The one I know won't shut up."

"But not about, say, where they come from or anything?"

"They don't look alien but then neither do you. I haven't asked, the one I know lies for fun."

"Charming. Okay, thanks." He puts the models aside. Reads the bio textbook.

The biology book begins by explaining the concepts of phylogenetic taxonomy and evolution. There's a two-page spread of the tree of life, followed by a brief discussion of what phylogenetic groupings (like "fungus", "bird" or "reptile") are useful for and when paraphyletic groupings (like "arthropod", "plant" or "mammal") can be more useful. The book takes pains to clarify that this phylogenetic taxonomy is based primarily on observable, current genetic similarity; if, as is extremely plausible, the Precursors created all life, they nonetheless created it in such a way that it fits into this tree and more genetically "related" species are more likely to have similar reactions to drugs and be similar in their internal anatomy. Then the book explains the concept of a food web and illustrates with a sample one.

Eventually, after a disclaimer that none of this necessarily applies to metal heads, the book gets into more contingent facts about life on this planet. A lot of it is like Earth biology: the local people have cells, they have blood and lymph, they have organs recognizable as livers and hearts and stomachs, and they run it all on ATP. But they don't have a separate mitochondrial genome and their blood and bones have cells that are specialized at carrying and storing eco. Most species have the ability to draw energy from eco, instead of or in addition to things like food and oxygen, but the systems for that are woefully inadequate to the energy needs of large, active species, and in some cases animals can survive having mutations that make those systems nonfunctional.

And then it goes on to explain how photosynthesis works, which is not notably different from how photosynthesis works on Earth.

At one point Torn interrupts to let him know the Shadow is coming over soon and wants to meet Cam.

"Sure, I can put this down when he gets here.'

In the time it takes the Shadow to arrive, the guy handling food distribution stops by for another load and heads out again.

And then the Shadow arrives. He is the green-skinned person Torn knows. He is currently wearing his hair up and wrapped around an entire log, the ends of which are just poking out from what appears to be a sack that has tiny sprouts and mushrooms growing from it.

"Hello," he says. "You must be Cam."

"Hello, that's me. Interesting updo."

"Why, thank you. I find it helps me keep the natural world on my mind, so to speak. Anyway, I'm told you can make just about anything except eco and that you've been very helpful to the cause. I thought it would be... interesting to talk you about your goals."

"Eternal flourishing of all sapient beings everywhere."

"Eternal, hm? I suppose we wouldn't have to worry about the food chain or running out of planets."

"You wouldn't! It's great!"

"And you intend to stay here and fill the universe with eternally flourishing beings?"

"I mean, I have to do something about your ongoing metal head conflict first and there might be logistical issues with my remaining here for always but in the broad strokes sure."

"Aha. What sort of logistical issues?"

"I need to be summoned, so if my summoner is no longer summoning me, poof. I could probably come back just fine with someone else summoning me, though, I'm just not sure - see, if it were possible for people here to summon us then it's very odd for this to be the first time it's happened."

"Bizarre. How does a summoner summon you and how would your current summoner stop?"

"I can make you pre-print circles to lay out on the floor and fill in, and if, say, she died, that would do it."

"I'm not sure leaving something like that around is safe if the baron might raid this place. I am also asking what to avoid - I'd already be dead if you wanted that and I don't know whether to trust that all members of your species universally want the eternal flourishing of all sentient beings."

"Oh, they don't, I was planning to leave you circles that mention me by name. The usual advice back home is not to draw on the floor; more specifically you don't want any diagrams roughly circular referring in any language to summoning anything, flat on the ground with room to stand in the middle."

"It's not that surprising that it hasn't happened to anyone here before but I'm surprised it never happened to the Precursors. Speaking of which, I bet you can conjure their writings, can't you?"

"Sure, though I'll need another of those," he waves at his hardware, "to decipher the language."

"...Do you have a way to get rid of things you make?"

"No. It won't be useful to random people from here, though, I guess they could learn some materials science from disassembling it but not the contents."

"I wonder how hard it would be to get you a warehouse... Anyway, those might be slightly farther future concerns than - what exactly are your plans for the next, let's say the next month?"

"Orienting to the situation - the metal heads' language will likely help with that, and the language the book the oracle recommended me is in."

"Prudent of you. I can't say that I'd want to launch straight into a humanitarian project on your planet, if I found myself there, either. But, ah, there are ways I expect the situation might deteriorate unfixably in that time."

"Oh?"

"According to our sources there's currently enough eco in reserve to run the shield wall for another two days. The baron's mining operations are under attack by metal heads right now, and as best I can tell the reserve is shrinking. The city might well be overrun in a matter of weeks. Our plan of last resort is to get the Precursor Stone, which I doubt you can conjure a copy of, and use it to destroy their nest, with substantial risk of casualties - uh, on both sides." He doesn't particularly care about metal head casualties and isn't particularly convincing at pretending to but he has a feeling it'll play well with Cam to try. "And I don't even know what the baron is planning next but rest assured there's no chance it won't endanger anyone."

"Does the Precursor Stone look like, uh, this -" He rummages in his models for the rock the Baron's daughter was after.

"It would have a version of that symbol on it, but records indicate it would have been green and not made of metal."

"Okay, uh, I can't make eco, but I could - go wade into the fight and see if the metal heads will back off if I'm indestructible at them and when my translation's up try to talk to them?"

"That sounds like the best plan anyone has proposed this year." This may be damning it with faint praise, a bit. "Ah, you can probably have a conversation without the translation, but only with the ones who can sound... intelligible."

"Oh, even better. Okay, gimme directions?"

"Well, your best bet would be the nest, but they might take it amiss if you just barged in. You could leave the city through either the dead town exit or the north drain, and try talking to the metal heads there - they won't be able to talk back, but they might know who could."

"I assume I shouldn't fly. How do I get to those on foot?"

There is, conveniently, a map of the city already hanging on the wall for him to point at. "We're here. The drain is here." It's near the oracle. "You'll need to enter through the same exit you leave by and ideally not change shape while you're gone or bring anything living in with you."

"...okay! I don't change shape, as a rule. Other last-minute advice?"

"If you go for a swim you'll be shot. I don't imagine you'll care. - When you get done with that, I'll have written a wishlist, in case you want to consider doing some conjuration for me."

"Sure, you wanna title your wishlist and I can check it out if I have downtime?"

"Things I Want, Volume One. And good luck out there."

"Thanks!"

And Cam heads out.

By now it's dusk. There aren't really streetlights but there are fires and neon signs. As Cam passes it, the propaganda station is claiming the resistance is dead.

The exit is set up like an airlock, with two doors that never open at the same time. A computerized voice warns Cam that he's leaving the city.

Outside the city, there is a beach. A small part of the beach is taken up by sand and trees and palm trees and sparse grasses and a large chunk of shattered metal something; beyond that there are tall cliffs and lots of plumbing-related infrastructure that would be tricky but not impossible to climb. A tall metal head with four legs and two arms is pacing aimlessly on the sand and does not immediately notice the door open.

"Excuse me!" Cam calls to it, waving his arm.

That gets its attention and gets him shot at. Not by a weapon it's visibly holding, but directly from one of its arms.

Gosh. He falls over. Gets back up. Approaches it.

This gets him shot at again.

It's really inconvenient for this plan that he's so unsteady on his feet. He encases the metal head's arm in a lot of ballistic gel and tries again.

The metal head hesitates and then starts trying to bite and rip the gel off, backing a few steps away from Cam.

"Hey, I just wanna talk," Cam says, still advancing. "Can you find someone who can talk to me?"

The metal head hesitates, then bends down to write a few words in the sand with its non-gel-encased arm.

Are they by any chance in a language Cam can read or no such luck.

It's his summoner's language, or at least an attempt at it. It reads STAT YOUR BUISNESS.

"I would like to talk to your people and try to find a resolution to your conflict with the other people."

The metal head stares at him for a few seconds with its unblinking eyes, then writes STAY and scurries off up a cliff.

...Cam will wait for a bit, then, reading his supply of books. History of Eco Studies?

The field begins with the sages, whose approach was different from modern approaches to the subject in mixing practice and theory and being extremely interdisciplinary. The interdisciplinary approach led people to seek their advice on a variety of other topics, and gave them an interesting position in society.

- And he doesn't have time to get particularly far, because several metal heads show up, three of which look almost identical to the first. The others have only four limbs and are red.

"Hello! Can any of you talk to me?"

Not out loud, apparently. One of the red ones, though clumsier at actually forming the letters, is at least fully literate, and will try to write to him.

Hey, my real name is classified but you can call me Billy. What brings you here?

"Hi, Billy! I'm trying to figure out why you guys are having this war and see if it can end."

Who sent you?

"I sent myself and do not know if my native guides wish to be named."

Where are you from?

"Washington."

Are you from this planet?

"Nope! Are you?"

I hatched here. I can't say I like it.

"How'd your ancestors get here?"

Through a rift. How did you get here?

"That's classified. Rift was - intentional? Natural phenomenon?"

I wasn't there at the time. I'm really surprised you're not trying to kill me for my body parts.

"I don't want your body parts. You don't have history about it?"

I'm not a historian. It might have been made by the Precursors.

"Okay. Is the war about people wanting your body parts?"

The war is about the Precursor Stone and room to live in and eco and food and people wanting each other's body parts and the fact that we're in the habit of being at war. In descending order of importance.

"What's the Precursor Stone for?"

It's an egg.

"One of yours?"

A species we knew before we were stuck in the rift. Definitely not the locals.

...Models of the Precursor Stone's parent(s).

More than two ottsels, each of which is individually smaller than the Precursor Stone.

"Ottsels," he diagnoses.

Is that what they're calling them these days? How do you do that?

"Magic. Why do you want an ottsel egg?"

Why does it matter to you?

"Trying to end the war, remember?"

That explains why it matters THAT we want the egg.

"It's why it matters why you want it! I'd like to get everybody what they want peacefully and you could get what you want from the egg another way, like if I make you a planet, then that will help a lot."

We are not going to leave an egg of that species in their hands because of our history with its parents. THEY can use a different power source. And I'm not qualified to be making deals with you but I think our leader would agree leave them alone if we got the egg, they left us alone, and we got an entire planet with lots of food and eco and other things we want from a planet.

"I can't make eco in particular, unfortunately."

What else can't you make?

"Vacuum, antimatter, people. - can make eggs."

They confer amongst themselves briefly.

Under what circumstances would you make the eggs of things that can choose whether to cooperate?

"...why the phrasing 'choose whether to cooperate'?"

Imagine I want a rock to be grey. I can tell the rock to be grey but that won't change anything. Imagine I want you to make me a grey rock. I can tell you to do it and that will change something. If you do it and I bite you then you won't do it again. If you do it and I give you something you want then you will do it again. I know that, so I would not bite you if you did something I asked you to do. It is wrong to punish people who help you or reward people who hurt you. But at the very beginning, you aren't paying me back. You have a choice. Unlike a rock. Unlike some animals. So when would you make eggs of things that have that choice?

"...well, I draw the important line somewhere else. I'd make you a chicken egg with fewer assurances than a person egg. I would need to be very confident that you planned to treat a person that hatched from an egg well and that this wouldn't have strategic effects that would concern me."

Species that choose not to cooperate start wars of extermination. I'm not qualified to say for sure but I think we have enough of those and don't need more right now. I think our leader will probably be more worried about convincing you not to make eggs. But why would you care whether we planned to treat the person well?

"I care about people in general and want them treated well and object to creating situations in which I am responsible for that not being the case."

Do you object to the death penalty?

"Yeah. I could imagine it being appropriate in some circumstance but generally object to political entities having the power to hand it down because they will not reserve it for such corner cases."

A long time ago there was a species that had everything. Enough food, enough water, enough eco, enough space. They traveled the universe. They came to a planet where they found a different species. They did not like how this second species did things, how they went to war, what their favorite color of eco was, what they believed was right and wrong. So they decided to change all that by force without asking. Is that the sort of corner case you mean?

"...I can see that starting a war but I associate the concept of the death penalty with justice systems."

I don't understand that distinction. Is it important?

"It matters to me. If you're in a position to wield a justice system at someone you likely have the option to choose non-death penalties; wars may not have that affordance."

Because you want the minimum harm needed to stop them or because you think death is out of proportion?

"The former."

It may interest you to know that conquering this city would suffice to put an end to their use of slaves.

"Cool, I like ending slavery. I'd like to achieve that as nonviolently as possible."

I think we need to tell our leader what you've said. How can we talk to you again later?

"You could take me to your leader? I'd like to get this sorted out quick, that's why I didn't wait till I had working translation for your language."

It would be useful if you were there but we walked a long way and don't want to show you secret paths that make the trip easier.

"Suppose I demonstrate that I could find the location anyway?"

The location isn't secret, the paths are. I just don't want to walk the long way back with you. If you had an air train I'd consent to come along and tell you where to fly it.

Cam takes his coat off and spreads his wings.

Billy draws a very messy and approximate map of the area between the beach and the nest.

"Thanks! See you there."

And he takes off and flies.

It gets dark out. The green sun is just past zenith but it's a very underwhelming sun for its apparent size.

The area around the nest was once a city, and not a metal head city, but the ruins are buried under piles of dirt and scrap metal. A substantial fraction of the light comes from glowing plants lining a very uneven and winding path to the entrance. It would be extremely hard to get in on foot. Not impossible, but extremely hard. When he lands, the large spiderlike metal heads attempt to gesture that he should go through the large opening into the cave system that makes up the nest.

The nest itself is visibly alien. The ground looks as if it has veins or maybe a network of very shallow roots, and here and there opaque green domes stick out of it. There are big gaping pits, and the walkways past them have something a bit like fences made of mysterious spikes, some of which look as if they could be alive if they weren't so utterly still. A metal head whose head is bigger than Cam's entire body is waiting inside.

What a creepsome setting. Cam snaps some photos on his way in.

"Hi," he says to the giant metal head.

"I hear you want to negotiate," says the giant metal head, whose voice sounds noticeably off but isn't harder to parse than a slight accent would be, "and I am the one who would make the final decision about any peace treaty."

"Nice to meet you! I'm Cam. I'm a newcomer and a neutral party to the situation and I'd like the war to end, and I am prepared to fabulously bribe you to get it, what can we do with that?"

"I will need to provide context for this. Something I am learning about the people of this planet is the extent to which they operate as individuals. Many species do, to an extent. I am not every 'metal head'. Precursors were different people socially; one might like flying, and another calligraphy, and a third animated sculpture. But they are very similar in values; they make their children very precisely. And they share the memories of their ancestors. If the so-called Precursor Stone were to hatch, the Precursor that came forth would resume their war with us on the day of its hatching.

"I say all this because otherwise you might think it was overkill to hunt and destroy every single Precursor that has ever lived. You would not kill the infant grandchild of one who wronged you. But I will not compromise on the destruction of their species."

"Oh, that's why you want the egg. ...Why has it taken so long to hatch, does it need special conditions to do that or something?"

"It does, but ones persistently at risk of being fulfilled while it remains in their hands."

"Can it think, yet?"

"It is probably able to learn new information. I am not sure if it can draw inferences or feel anything. I suspect it cannot."

"And you're very confident that it would immediately - while alone and many years after the initial conflict - start attacking you all again?"

"I am not confident that it wouldn't, say, spend ten years building weapons and reproducing first."

"Ah, if they can reproduce alone that's something. So you don't actually want the egg, you want the egg to be destroyed? And the other guys want it as a power source, right, how does an egg serve as a power source..."

"Dishearteningly nondestructively! Although I suppose after enough millennia of it it might be exhausted. The egg contains a great amount of eco and energy intended for use by the newly hatched Precursor. There is... extra."

"Where does eco come from under normal circumstances?"

"From one perspective, this question is as answerable as 'where does mass come from under normal circumstances?' but I think you are asking from an engineer's perspective and that makes it easier. Often, where it appears there is no eco, the eco is simply too dispersed to be of any use - like water vapor in the air. It can condense, naturally or with assistance. Most rocky bodies have some trapped inside, as well; it has been mined both from planets and from asteroids."

"Is there enough for everyone if there were enough condensation equipment? If there were that, and also I introduced non-eco-based power for various infrastructure?"

"I am not sure it can be condensed as fast as Haven City uses it. I imagine if they stopped using it for lighting and flight and the shield wall and weaponry and medical experiments that would change. There might still be shortages of individual colors, but I expect we could solve that."

"Okay. So if the egg is destroyed and they stop hogging the eco, do you have a further quarrel?"

"They will need to stop hunting us for our skull gems; we might consider refraining from hunting them for their flesh in exchange. They will need to either allow partial terraforming of this planet or get out of the way of our space program. And there is more, but for that, you must also speak to Baron Praxis. As must I."

You might consider it, wow. "I can supply flesh, if they're really that tasty, and possibly also skull gems unless those involve eco. My understanding is they like the planet how it is, though I didn't specifically ask - what terraforming did you want to do? What's their beef with the space program?"

"It isn't tasty at all - very little that grows on this planet is. Our skull gems have many functions, but I think to the people of Haven City they are only trophies; it is possible the mere knowledge that you might be able to conjure them would suffice to destroy the market for them. To leave this place, we would need ships capable of carrying all of us to another planet, and fuel for them, and food for the journey. With the war disrupting our ability to build infrastructure or stockpile food or fuel, we are stuck here. And as for our terraforming plans, I find myself wondering if you can conjure them."

"Probably, but I don't have translation for your language yet. Do you have a planet in mind?"

"Some underwhelming candidates; we haven't pursued that while we have unfinished business here and could not leave anyway. We might be able to terraform one of the other planets in this system, or live in enclosed habitats, but we will, ah, understand if you would sooner see us leave the system entirely."

"I can supply ships and fill 'em up. I can also terraform, but I won't be available for that until things are more stably squared away. What do you need besides materiel to clear off of here?"

"We have an ongoing business relationship with someone on this planet, who owes us and is only falling farther behind on payments. We are willing to consider simply ending the relationship and having no further dealings with them, but I am not sure yet whether to offer them the chance to pay up and have us remain here doing what we were paid to do. I am leaning toward no."

"What're they paying you to do?"

"...It is secret, but I will tell you if you will demonstrate the ability to at least in principle find out for yourself. Would you be able to conjure, say, the multimedia presentation called..." something which cannot be pronounced by a human.

"Sure." Pop.

"Ah, you can. That isn't the secret, that is about our terraforming plans, but now I am convinced I am only saving you some time by telling you. We were hired to attack Haven City on a convenient schedule, by Baron Praxis."

"Wow, everything I hear about that guy makes me like him less."

"I have yet to meet anyone who feels differently. If your proposed resolution to the war involves us disappearing one day with the Precursor Stone, then he is not a concern. Otherwise, the, ah, division within Haven City will matter a great deal."

"I was thinking I'd find and destroy the Precursor Stone, rather than you wandering off with it?"

"...That might be agreeable to us. It would also be a very impressive feat."

"Is it particularly hard to destroy?"

"Yes. My primary plan was to arrange a hatching surrounded by metal heads, but I will accept other options. It might survive being thrown into the yellow sun but it is unlikely that it would ever be able to hatch under such conditions."

Cam looks around for a rock, picks one up, interpolates it into dust.

"I am somewhat concerned that if you break the stone open in such a way it would cause a violent release of energy."

"I'm indestructible, but that's good to know, I can bring it into space first."

"I would expect the resulting explosion to reach us from orbit unless the stone was very drained, much more so than I expect it to be by now. I would expect the resulting explosion to reach the suns from here. I would need to have studied more physics to say whether a light year would be far enough."

"...gosh. Okay. Is there a way to usefully capture this explosion since eco is such a limited resource? Or are we talking about a non-eco explosion."

"Both, and I can set my scientists to answering that."

"Exciting, you do that. Do you maybe want to tell me what makes it hatch in case they're on the verge?"

"Contact with one pure of heart. A certain affinity for eco might also be required."

"...'pure of heart'?"

"I am afraid I am a very biased source but I would expect it to mean someone who approves of the Precursors' values."

"Which is the whole, conquest of you for being culturally distinct, thing?"

"...I believe that is simply an implication of the rest of the set. They existed for many ages before we met, and in that time they pursued a number of projects that I am aware of. They were particularly fond of spreading life throughout the universe and particularly against war and chaos. They had an aesthetic sensibility which I'm sure you can discover through conjuring their ruins. They loved science and discovery, perhaps to an unwise degree. And, yes, they hated dissension, destruction, death, dark eco, the appearance of most things we find attractive, the infliction of pain, vengeance, and heterotrophy. I would even go so far as to say they hated change. And we were on our planet warring with each other and enjoying it - we were the only species there that I think you would consider people and we were still decades away from the capacity for interstellar travel."

"You actively enjoy war?"

"An amount of it. It has been many centuries of fighting with aliens who are unwilling or unable to arrange truces and I am... tired."

"How sure are you that the Precursors weren't just - overreacting to a misunderstanding? Enjoying war is weird."

"It has not seemed so in my experience but I am certain our experiences do not overlap much. They didn't ask, they didn't sue for peace when we responded in anger, they they never behaved in any way that gave me the impression that they were trying to understand. But no, I am not sure."

"I'm, like, slightly worried that I will turn out to be pure of heart if I grab the egg, you see."

"I would expect gloves to suffice but if you're particularly concerned you could try tongs. Made of Precursor metal, if you want to be very sure."

"Also it would be a real pity if someone trying very hard with a suitably restricted baby Precursor could get them to cut it out and then instead genocided them, so I would like to do some background reading once I have their language translatable."

"Naturally. I expect recommending any particular titles or helping with translation would only make it less useful to you. But do you have a communicator?"

"A communicator?"

"The people of this planet use them to speak to and hear each other over distances of miles, as if they were face to face."

"Oh, I don't have one and if you mean that literally I don't have anything as good up my sleeve either but I could make something for it. You can also write to me without going to the trouble of sending the letter; just put 'Letter to Cam' on it and I'll get it next time I check."

"That will work for me to write to you, but what if you have something to tell me?"

"Oh, then it won't work at all, I can make some phones for us, but the letter option is available if it ever makes sense."

"I appreciate it. And - I will, at least for a while, leave Haven City unharmed and let Baron Praxis know that I am ending our deal."

"Thanks, I appreciate that! Do you guys need anything in the short term?"

"Nothing you would find so immediately understandable that you could confirm it wasn't a weapon."

"No? No tasty non-person foods from your home planet? Why are you here on this one, anyway, I didn't get a clear understanding of the history."

"We would love the flesh of..." something unpronounceable to humans, "but I can imagine ways I could use it as a weapon. We were trapped inside a deprecated rift network by the Precursors, only for a curious young man to discover and open one of the gates. We were meant to languish outside time and space for all eternity."

"Wow. I guess if you wanna do some genocide and don't like death that might happen."

"In their defense it was not as long inside as out."

"I think all eternity would have wound up being pretty long! What exactly is a rift network?"

"A more powerful but less safe version of a warp network."

"Which is..."

"Warp rings are circular devices large enough for a person to pass through. When two are connected on a warp network, you go into one and out the other. The old rift network handled time as well as space; you could go in one gate and out the same gate a year earlier."

"...wow, that has, uh, probably a lot of implications. I assume I can't go to the right place and go back in time and see if I can talk the Precursors out of conquest?"