Sophia Kartwright –like her father before her and his grandfather before him– was a marketing expert. Although, being employed by a company that normally preferred its name being out of the newspapers rather than in, their form of marketing was a little different. And as such, none of the Kartwrights had ever been formally trained in business marketing. Her grandfather was an artist, her father went to school for psychology, and she’d majored in history.

This was typically mocked by most at her level, but here –in this exact situation –it was slightly helpful.

“I look like Friar Tuck.” A man with thick brown eyebrows grumbled as he itched the rough material in the hooded robe he’d been outfitted with. “The bear version.”

“I know, it’s perfect right?” Sophia laughed as she stretched a long cord of hemp rope and tied off the ends to secure a pouch to her waist.

Her outfit was a simple peasant outfit, dark green cloth folded underneath with a light brown overcoat. It wasn’t uncomfortable and was loose-fitting enough for video cameras and transmitters to be easily hidden.

Similarly, her assistant Laura was dressed in a two-piece outfit adorned with a handful of cute embroideries.

Noticing the glances when she’d arrived, she pouted and stamped her feet. “It’s a hobby, excuse me for getting into character.”

The group, many of whom met during their internships years ago, burst into laughter as the girl’s cheeks grew pinker.

Sophia was directed to form a team to make first contact with the city nearby and they were told to blend in. So, drawing from her limited improv experience, Sophia knew the most important part of acting natural was being comfortable with the people around her.

In that case, ‘What better group than this’ she’d thought.

She surely wasn’t starting to regret her decision as soon as they all rambunctiously got into their outfits. But, it was too late now. So after an hour of preparing their roles, the group finally felt comfortable and stepped out of the office building and into the cold parking lot.

A cart had been roughly fashioned, and fortunately, Jeremy, the Friar Tuck look-alike, was familiar with horses so he was able to get the hang of controlling it after a few laps in the parking lot.

After a few final checks on the equipment, the five bid farewell to the small team helping them prepare and set off down the outer road encircling the complex.

“We turn once we can see the river, then we’ll follow that past a couple of bends.” From the rear of the cart, a thinner man wearing glasses was watching a video feed streaming to his phone from a drone circling above. “After around five miles, we’ll find a bridge we can cross and the road that will lead to the village.”

He wasn’t the only one watching the over-head feed. Many of the TVs around the complex were tuned into stations coming from the makeshift mission control room.

There wasn’t much entertainment going on, so people were taking what they could get.

Just as Clint said, after a while following the narrow icy river, they crested a short hill and spotted the first piece of alien construction any of them had seen. It wasn’t particularly impressive, like any typical stone bridge. But as they drew closer, they noticed the joinery between the stones was shockingly tight, leaving little room for cement or mortar.

All five breathed deeply as they maneuvered the cart over the bridge and onto the road. From here on out, they were peasant travelers from a nearby village, just visiting to buy some local ingredients and explore.

A few giddy smiles leaked onto the faces of the group as they began the rough journey. They understood the risks, but they couldn’t help but brew with curiosity.

Fortunately, the wait didn’t feel long. Half an hour of riding later they reached the outskirts of the city. Plains turned into roughly sectioned fields speckled with the remnants of various crops. Each field was surrounded by loose piles of stones stacked into rough walls. It wouldn’t do much for most pests, but maybe it helped organize workloads or something.

Eventually, they reached the end of the road. A large open gateway was flanked by two guards each bundled in thick hide coats. They appeared relaxed and simply gave a nod as the cart drew near them. Perhaps they could tell the cart was empty, so they felt it unnecessary to conduct a real search.

“Warm welcome,” Laura mutters under her breath as they pass the gatehouses on the interior of the wall.

“Hey, we are lucky they didn’t look at us twice,” Jeremy responds without loosening his white-knuckled grip on the reins. Driving a cart is one thing, but driving a cart through a city is much scarier.

He was praying they didn’t ask him to parallel park.

“That building up there,” Clint says turning his head away from where his phone was hidden in a book and pointing down a side street as they reached it. “It seems like it’s a bar or inn or something. Lots of foot traffic. Maybe we can start there.”

Everyone silently agreed, and the voices in their ear didn’t stop them either so they proceeded with that idea.

Parking the cart was easy enough and fortunately, it seemed to be free until evening unless they rented a room. They were warned though, if they didn’t pick up the horse by nightfall it would be in the morning stew.

They didn’t like the idea of that so the first branch of the plan began immediately. The team split into two. Sophia, Clint, and Jeremy would explore the Inn and try to get an idea of what people around here were like, while Laura and Francis would secure some shopping money by heading to the market and selling an earthen jar of honey.

They had decided on honey because they assumed it would be an inconspicuous thing for a group such as themselves to have and sell. There had been thousands of proposals from gemstones to salt but eventually, honey was deemed least suspicious.

It didn’t take long for the pair to find a buyer for the jar, a few doors down from the inn they caught the scent of fresh bread from inside a cramped stone hovel and once the two revealed the contents to the woman working the ovens she happily counted out a fistful of grimy stamped copper coins.

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“Should I slice ya a pair-a loaves before ya part with ‘er?” The young proprietress asked, motioning between her bread and the hefty jar of honey.

“Ooh!” Laura perked, glancing between the delicious scent and Francis.

Shaking his head subtly to Laura, he kindly refused the offer. “Our friends are already waiting. Next time maybe.”

“Might be gone by then.” The woman shrugged with a greedy look at the jar.

Laura’s frown persisted until she remembered she was likely being broadcast, and a tantrum with her boyfriend was probably not the best content to share.

“This is kind of fun, isn’t it?” Laura instead asked as she chased after Francis out the bakery door.

“We are supposed to be avoiding attention,” Francis interrupted, shaking off her grasping hand with blushing cheeks.

“Muuu–” Laura moped, letting her head droop.

Blocks away Sophia, Jeremy, and Clint were having similar good luck on their side. The people at the bar were happy to talk about the news of the area without much prompting on their part.

Although ‘seemingly mundane’ talks to the speakers, Sophia, and her colleagues were glued to every word.

“Blue dragons were sighted in the north so winter should be closing out sooner than later.”

“My cousin in Belfort heard the Academy of mages is holding exhibitions for some Nulickian Sheikh.”

“The Gaurdian King was stricken with fever but ministers expect him to make a smooth recovery thanks to the strides made by the royal alchemists of the past years.”

Everyone spoke jovially, perhaps due to the drinks, but people seemed genuinely happy, there was extraordinarily little bad news mixed in. Of course, there was mention of a family disappearing into a blizzard, or the savages of the wasteland. But mainly, people seemed satisfied with their lives.

Eventually, the groups reassembled in the bar they had been waiting at. With funds now in hand, they secured their lodging for the night and began working on their tasks. That’s not to say they split up entirely, for security they were directed to never leave the building alone.

Clint volunteered himself to hold down the fort once he decided the mattress was adequate and the light from the shuttered window was enough to feed his small solar charger. None of them had any complaints, as they were eager to hit the town, so the new groups were decided.

Sophia and Jeremy had two directives and arguably they were the most important. Sophia oversaw gauging what is needed, while Jeremy had to determine what was available.

That's not as easy as it sounds, if it for some reason sounded easy.

Jeremy wasn’t looking to see what was currently available, but what was wholly available. And not just here, but in the entire developable area.

For instance, the small coal seller delivering door-to-door with his dozen employed miners might seem insignificant. But a single glance at the structure and luster of the load in his cart can give more information about a mine than any satellite scans ever could.

And while Jeremy was busy with that, Sophia was talking to the man resting by the carts outside the shop. Apparently, he was paid daily to run coal back and forth between here and another slightly larger nearby city.

And he wasn’t alone, in the five minutes the two had been here three other carts arrived and loaded up with dozens of bags of crushed coal.

And it wasn’t just coal she realized. Even now in the dead of winter, the roads here were constantly dotted with small carts pulled by a single horse running goods from place to place.

If you asked, they would all say a different destination.

This place, while not a trading hub by any means, was bustling with transport which was a great sign.

“I wonder if that could be an option…” Sophia mused aloud to herself as Jeremy finished his inspection of the coal and rejoined her on the right side of the roadway.

“Um, ’Scuse me” A young voice called out as Jeremy paused his step to get a better look at one of the storefronts they passed.

“Oops, sorry bud,” Jeremy responded apologetically as he noticed the large buckets of water hanging from either side of the boy’s shoulders.

The boy merely smiled up at him meekly before carefully continuing down the alleyway beside the storefront they’d blocked.

“Talk about an annoying chore for a kid.” Jeremy chuckled tossing a glance in the direction the kid came from. He hadn’t seen one yet, but he assumed there must be a stepwell or river reservoir somewhere near the village. “So, did you want to check out the linen shop or should we look for a smithy?”

He was half asking Sophia herself, but mostly he was asking the voices in their ears. Their time here was limited and they needed to cover as much industry as possible, so the executives and team leads in mission control were extremely careful about how the time was being spent.

On the other side of the village, Laura and Francis were again together, and Francis was again doing his best to shrug off the various attempts at PDA his girlfriend was constantly bombarding him with. The operators in their ears were silently keeping a tally of the embarrassing scenes, but otherwise, they continued with their itineraries involving the two.

“So, that’s where the village chancellor lives?” Laura kindly asked the half-sized cocoon of blankets pointing at an impressive manor.

“Yep.” The kid blankly answered with an outstretched palm and a broad smile stretching across his cheeks.

“Deals a deal. Thanks, kid.” Francis agreed, dropping a pair of coins into his hand and giving a pat on the child’s heavily-bundled head.

“Not kid, It’s Gye.” The boy grumbled before taking another glance at Laura, blushing, and then sprinting back in the direction he’d lead the two from.

“Strange ki- Guy.” Francis chuckled with a snort. “Anyways, nice place.”

The manor grounds were at least four times as wide as any of the other buildings around, and it was built far more robustly. Where most of the buildings were simple rounded river stone or roughly hewn square beams, the Chancellor’s manor was precisely carved with attention even given to the colorings of the stones themselves.

It wasn’t to the same degree as the bridge they’d first seen, but its structure was nonetheless magnificent in its intricacy.

“Looks expensive,” Laura smirked as her gaze rose past the second story and up to the domed roof, topped with a glass cupola. “Better start saving.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Francis quavered as the handful of coins in his pocket grew heavier in his mind.

Again, the voices in their head had to cough quietly to remind them of the audience. Fortunately for them, the executives meeting high above the mission control room had already lost interest in the screens and started talking about the various ideas they’d had.

“How about trains?” An older woman asked, turning to her peers to gauge their thoughts.

Shaking his head, another man offered a quick rebuttal, “They require too much infrastructure and steel. We need something that can be deployed quickly. Aircraft would be my choice. Building a runway or helipad is easy, the locals could even do it themselves with the proper training.”

“Did you not hear the part about dragons earlier?” A nervous voice stammered before hiding his face back in the tablet he had been watching from.

Third and Gary turned to each other for a moment before returning to the topic at hand.

“I think these are good options,” Gary confirmed with a bit of trepidation in his voice. “The problem is the requirements on our end are way too great. I can appreciate the enthusiasm, but we need to think about our immediate future rather than far into the future. For now, we should prioritize mapping the surrounding area so we can have a better idea of what resources we have to work with.”

“We’ve already got about 60 miles around the complex scanned. But progress is getting slower the further out we get; it’d be great if we could get a few more UAVs flying to compensate.”

“Go ahead, within limits,” Gary affirmed, clicking on another tab on his computer and typing in a few notes about the decision.

Unaware of all these conversations, Sophia and her group were still shopping around the markets and gathering information. And while the executive and department heads might not have been paying extremely close attention, many others were.

They were being shocked by prices, laughing at jokes told by shopkeepers, and admiring artworks and music. It was like they were experiencing an entire world's culture for the first time, some sort of first-contact reality show. It fascinated everyone watching.

Each interaction was analyzed. Even background chatter was being preserved and logged for study.