I smelled trouble when I went into Miun's shop, but it felt like past troubles, or future ones. Even though she was sitting behind her counter like nothing was wrong, I could feel something off.

"Hello, Colin," she said, and I could tell from the hint of something in her voice that I wasn't entirely wrong. But, she also didn't say anything.

"Miun." I moved up to her, trying to judge what might be wrong, and also casting a sense out to see if there was anything broken or messed up, but I could find nothing. "Is something wrong?"

She looked up at me, frowning intensely. "No," she said, immediately turning back to her work.

"Miun..."

"I understand that you are a hero, Colin," she said, and I blinked, not sure what that was a lead-in for. "But if you wish me to consider you a friend, there are some rules, and first is that you warn me if your other..." she made a strange face. "If your other heroes are coming."

I raised an eyebrow at her. "Did they do something?"

"No. Yes. It does not matter." She shook her head. "My people have a bad history with what you northerners call heroes. It is... something I cannot control."

That upset me, a little, but I just frowned at her and nodded. "I'll try to warn you," I said, "but they may show up without much warning. Now that I've..." I paused. "Ah, right. I have a tower now."

She raised her eyebrows. "I do not have all that many people who like to share gossip with me," she said, "but few is not the same as none."

"Mm." In other words, everyone in town knew, already. I suppose I should have known that when kids showed up to gawk. "If you ever want to see it--"

"I am sure that your tower is mighty, splitting the sky, and that none will ever doubt the size and strength of it," Miun said, and I could hear condensed desire to make dick jokes bubbling up somewhere underneath her facade. It made me smile. "But no, I don't have a particular need to see it with my own eyes. Certainly not yet."

"Not yet," I purred in response. "You aren't yet prepared--"

"I admit I walked right into that," she said with a sigh, and she leaned back, and waved one arm in a vague admission of defeat. "Yes, I am afraid your mightiness is too great for me. I am but a simple woman, and I am sure the mere sight of it would make me swoon. You are too much man for me, great Hero Colin."

I laughed long and hard at the dry tone to her voice, and at least she was smiling when I finished. "Alright," I said after I finished. "We'll call the joke there before it gets too old. I know--"

"It would be a pain if it was the only joke we could share," Miun replied, nodding. "But somehow I suspect that you will find other terrible jokes to make in the future. I suspect my life will be too interesting rather than too boring, with you around."

"I hope you look forward to it," I replied, smoothly, and her smile got just a little bit shy, before fading a bit.

"It is good to have a break from my a boring life," Miun said, and I was surprised that there was a leaden weight in her words, replacing the humor that had been there. "Since I have come here, I thought my exile would leave me with no one worth speaking to and little to say. As pathetic as your humor is--"

"Hey," I pointed out, "you started this."

"--at least there is humor in your heart, and not only the cruel humor of the impoverished. Too many people here speak idly about failure and death as though that is all there is to life."

I thought of Ella and her casual certainty that the song about failure was a song about her life, and about the song Steve had gotten everyone singing--about conquerors and mounds of corpses. Perhaps it was some part of the Golden Armory, but it had felt like everyone in the tavern knew that song, despite how macabre it was.

"I understand," I said, finding that there was no mirth left in my own voice, either. "That's..." I wanted to say something like, 'that's why I'm an outcast hero,' but that would only be a lie. I hadn't thought about that, or anything else, I was just... repelled by the idea of being used by the asshole Grand Vizier. "...ultimately, death is a part of life, but I don't agree with making that the center of your world. And it's different, talking about failure like you can do better, compared to talking about it like you can't."

"Do better?" Miun lifted a clay pot in her hands, and I saw her slender fingers flexing like she was considering throwing it on the ground. "I don't... I do not like those who speak of sorrowful fates as though they cannot be changed, but I also..." she scowled, looking at the pot in her hands.

"But you also don't want to live as a potter forever."

She set the pot down, roughly. "I am not content," she said. "After what I left behind, and after what I have found here, I am not content. I do not believe in the fate that was given me, but there is no changing it, either."

"What fate would you want?"

She looked at me, and there was something behind those eyes of hers, something I couldn't understand. She was trembling, I realized, just a little bit. But she closed her eyes and shook her head, and I got the impression that she wasn't going to answer that question for a long time, if ever.

Still, I reached out and took one of her hands in mine, and squeezed it. Her hand seemed small and cold in my own, clammy and uncomfortable. Still, I wanted her to feel better, and I knew that words wouldn't help, not now. I had no right to talk glibly about fate--not as a person handed godly favor--but the whole point of being a hero was to try.

In the end, I left without a good answer as to what had bothered her about the other heroes showing up. It occurred to me after I left that I... hadn't even considered her being jealous of the other women, the way I had considered it while they were here. It just struck me immediately that it was something more serious.

When I left and started looking around for Carli, I found she had wandered off. With the bracers, I quickly tracked her down, finding my goat standing on the roof of (according to the sign) a tailor's, chewing on what was probably nothing and staring at the distance, with at least two bystanders staring at her.

"Carli, what are you looking at?"

Mean (violent) thing (fox) over there (not close). No danger.

I frowned and looked in the direction she was looking, pulsing the bracers just enough to have them relay some sense of what was going on. There were several small animals a little ways away, but they were slinking and foraging, not preying on anything. I frowned, but looked back up at her. "Do you want to do something about it?"

Carli turned to look at me, and I could tell she wasn't sure quite what to think. Special girl (me) does something (fight)?

I frowned, remembering again that she was just a kid. I shook my head. "You don't need to fight them if they're not a danger." I considered telling her to threaten them or establish boundaries, but... I didn't like the idea of intervening, in general, without provocation. Not for me, and not for her.

Carli just looked at me for a moment, then bleated and jumped off the roof and came over to me. Okay.

"What did she see?" One of the bystanders, a middle-aged pudgy woman that I didn't immediately recognize, asked.

"Just some of the desert foxes, out that way," I gestured with a thumb. "They don't seem to be hurting anyone."

The woman frowned at me. "They don't usually attack people, but I heard Malla got hurt the other day..."

"That was a strange, black fox," I said. "If you hear any rumors about creatures like that, make sure I hear about it, okay? We'll try to keep an eye out."

The woman looked from me to Carli and back. "If you say so," she said, then frowned. "I haven't been introduced, have I? I'm sorry. I'm Curima. I help my husband, Jeth, over at the cobblers."

I nodded at her, and introduced myself briefly--though clearly she seemed to know who I was, at least roughly. I introduced myself only as a "magician," because I wasn't exactly sure how to phrase exactly what I was without calling myself a Hero. When I mentioned the location of my tower, though, Curima frowned.

"Isn't that place haunted? Are you sure that's not why the foxes started attacking people?"

I frowned back at her. "It shouldn't be why," I said, "but if I discover that it's the cause, I'll leave. I think it might have more to do with..." Did I dare say that the Demon Lord was rising? I shook my head. "...Something bigger than us that I'd heard is going on."

"You mean the rise of the Heroes? They say trouble always comes when they show up."

That was one way of looking at it, and from a certain, superstitious point of view, it wasn't wrong. On the other hand, the way she phrased that now sounded like she didn't know who I was, or didn't believe it. So I just shrugged. "I'd heard that," I said, now being deliberately cagey, "though they're supposed to be summoned by the gods. Who knows if they're the cause, or the answer to the trouble?"

Curina frowned. "Gods," she said. "Can only hope they know what they're doing." She looked away. "Not my place to worry, though. I just trim and stitch leather for shoes." She glanced down at my feet, and I felt a little embarrassed that my shoes were, of course, better than most people would see around here, since they'd come from the capital. She sniffed, but didn't comment, and instead just looked back up at me. "If you ever need yours repaired, let me or Jeth know."

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I smiled, a little sadly. "I'll keep it in mind," I said, knowing I'd never be a patron of their shop. Or... would I? They might know how to make things from scratch better than I did, and I'd rather support them than buy from random passing traders, if the quality is similar.

We parted ways, and I headed back in the general direction of my tower, taking a look towards the approaching trader caravan when I got a chance. It occurred to me as I stood watching that the spring water that was the town's lifeblood wasn't perfect; it was clean, but I felt like it was hard water, and the spring itself was only poorly contained. It could use a good paved stretch for people to wade in and water horses with full confidence, and a water purifier of some kind to ensure that the town could sell premium water to travelers. Not everyone would want to do that, but any little bit would help the town, especially if I didn't charge much or anything for the installation.

For now, though I decided it didn't matter, and it'd be better to ask before I started on a project like that anyway. In the meantime, I distracted myself wondering if I should show up for the caravan when it arrived--for all of them, in principle--and see if there was anything I could learn about the world, or do for them. The more I thought about it, the more the question seemed unnecessarily complicated; I was a little paranoid about being outed as a Hero, but if that was the case, wasn't it better to be there and prevent any talk of it? But what if some roaming agents of some evil could detect the bracers? Had the black fox shown up because the heroes were here--because I was here?

I decided on the spur of the moment that I wouldn't be there for this one, but maybe the next. In the meantime, I blew out a frustrated breath and went back to my tower.

The biggest thing there was for me to do was to catalog all my new materials, especially various flavors of plastic. Something had itched in my brain about carbon fiber, and now I was recalling that it was fiber reinforcement in some kind of plastic or resin shell, the fibers being strong in one way and the shell being strong in another, like with reinforced concrete. I didn't bother to experiment with that right away, but I kept it in mind as I tried to figure out the pluses and minuses of various plastics that had been a part of the random assortment of items we had on our person.

Even with godly powers of creation and telekinesis, testing all that was complicated, in part because I wasn't even sure what to test. Flexibility, crush resistance, brittleness, ability to be used as thread, whether bending it kept the new shape or it returned to its original shape, like the memory metal--I know that there were words for these, but it wasn't my industry. Halfway through I realized there was something about twist resistance, or shearing resistance, or something, and had to go back and re-test some materials I thought I was done with. All this on plastics, metals, and glass, plus the gem samples I'd been given, since I knew that at least some gems were metals at heart, but I didn't know the chemistry as to which. Not quartz, since that was silicon. Maybe ruby?

Before I knew it, my supply room was full of a bunch of little squares with names and properties etched on them. I lacked the knowledge to identify all the samples, really--some were obvious, like metalic aluminum, but it might take Jess or a proper Earth scientist to tell me what the plastics, which I labeled A through K, were named back home. Frankly, it didn't matter. I loosely determined the letter order from toughest to most flexible, intending to use Plastic A as structure and Plastic K (which was probably nylon, but I lost track) as thread. Slightly more problematic was not knowing which metal sample was what, exactly, but I wasn't likely to get into proper metallurgy or chemistry. The important ones to me were raw iron, a few types of steel, John's memory metal, aluminum, titanium, and chrome, plus copper, silver, and gold, and whatever magic metals I was handed, which for now was only the meteoric steel. I'd also set aside a few samples of magnets, but I had no idea of their composition. At least one had to be based on a rare-earth metal, though, because my Fabricate couldn't pull any real quantity out of the surroundings.

By the time I'd gotten that far, the sun was setting and the caravan had long since both arrived and settled in for the night. After making sure that Carli was safe--by which I mean, she had found some food on her own and not gotten into any particular trouble--I Fabricated a bunch of gold and silver coins from nowhere and wandered in to town, doing my best to remain inconspicuous.

Haal wasn't a part of this convoy, not that I expected him. He had said he had business elsewhere, so it would have surprised me if he was passing through so quickly; in terms of sheer travel time, it would take him a while to get to the next town in any other direction, then at least that long to get back to Amash, then repeating the journey I took to get here. At minimum, I would expect him to be another week, but he'd more likely swing by some months from now.

One of the elders was standing in the streets, just kind of staring at them, and I realized it was the person that I'd assumed was mayor, given how he talked with the traders before. He'd been among the elders more friendly to me, but I hadn't quite been introduced to yet, so I came up and got his attention. He looked at me, his thin white eyebrows raised a little in surprise, but nodded. "Good evening, Hero."

"Just call me Colin, please," I said, grimacing. "I'd prefer to keep that part quiet."

"I'm not spreading it. I don't think anyone else has, either, but who knows what will be spoken of in a drunken stupor. Of what's spoken, who knows what will be remembered, or believed, but there are always those who keep a clear head. Traders must, even in a safe town like this one." He nodded, looking back at the collection of wagons and carts and the few guards they had brought with them. I recognized the same town guard who had showed up when I arrived, who was sitting and talking with their guards.

"I don't believe we've been introduced--" I managed, and the man suddenly made a surprised look and turned back to me, offering his hand.

"I'd forgotten. Yes, I'm Dannis. I tend to handle affairs with traders; they like to have a friendly face, someone who seems to be in charge. Daen," he gestured to the town guard, "is my son-in-law."

I shook his hand, and we looked back. "Does something bother you about this group?"

He shook his head. "They are Kial traders," he said, after a pause. "Sometimes, Kial traders trade slaves with Bur'jaal, and we have had to be firm in not allowing that within the town borders, although we still sell them water. We don't look into closed wagons, though, and it makes me nervous."

I pulsed my bracer a bit, getting a feel for what was hidden, and shook my head. "I don't sense anything like people who are chained up or in despair."

Dannis nodded, though I don't think he trusted my senses entirely, though he did force himself to calm down a bit. "Good to know," he said. "I don't like it, still. Some of the people in the caravan are doubtless slaves, anyway--just not for sale. Traders that make use of slaves typically treat them well, to avoid trouble on the road, but the Kial are firm on their insistence that humans can be owned."

I shivered a little, but my thoughts drifted to the gods' poem about me taking on familiars, or bonded creatures somehow, to increase my power. The list had explicitly included in that a husband and a wife, so there was no doubt that the list could include humans or sapient creatures in other things--such as the broken soul, the forgotten, the child of the gods, or the demon. Any of those could just be a moderately intelligent animal, like Carli was--presumably, she fit my role of "a creature familiar, to lead a man home." If not... I wasn't sure where she was supposed to fit. Or could I have creatures that were not a part of the poem? Given how the god had laughed at my choice of a goat, I kind of figured it was a binding choice.

Now, I'm not saying that bonded creatures--whether goat or human--were essentially slaves, but the list explicitly includes evil creatures, broken people, and the children of demons. Either I had control there that the poem was only obliquely hinting at, or they expected me to be able to pacify these creatures some other way... or, they were expecting me to be bonded to evil and demonic creatures that I couldn't control. Which was its own fascinating way to be screwed over by the whole thing.

"I shouldn't need to say this," I quietly told the elder, as much to distract myself as anything, "but if there is trouble of any kind--and especially anything like that--please let me know, and I will help."

Dannis just nodded silently, not showing any signs that he had or had not assumed as much.

"I don't know much about the trade routes," I said. "What tends to pass through here?"

Dannis made a neutral noise. "You'd be better off asking them," he said, nodding towards the camp, "but this trade route is not good for fresh food, live animals, or delicate goods. From what I've seen a lot of ores and weapons, seeds and grains, cloth and dyes, dried food, and coins and gems pass through." He looked up at the sky, and away from the traders, for a moment. "Not much in terms of magical goods, now that I think on it. Perhaps that is one of the things that upsets the Sha'lim, or someone else near the route."

"Sha'lim?"

"They are wanderers," he gestured out towards Amash. "I believe your group saw them in the night. They sometimes become bandits, but it is unclear why; they are otherwise quite calm. They do not come close to town, except perhaps once or twice a year."

I raised an eyebrow. "Why?"

Dannis shrugged. "I have not gotten an answer from them about it. Some believe it has to do with the Blood Moon and the cursed mountain that you reside beneath."

I gave him a look. "So it's not just haunted, it also attracts bandits. Anything else I should know about it?"

He chuckled, not meanly. "It is only a guess. They are in the area around that time, but those who study the mountain have never seen them approach."

I nodded, but I didn't believe it for a minute. Given the third-hand report that Miun gave about someone seeing an ancestor's ghost during the blood moon--assuming that was true--superstitious cultures would only come down on one side of this or the other: it was a holy site for communing with ancestors, or it was a haunted place where evil spirits lurked. The townspeople believed it was haunted, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if another nearby group went the other way.

Thinking about it, though, I had no reason to interfere if it was just ancestor worship. The spot I'd chosen was supposedly used by the town, and so probably not used by the Sha'lim. If I'd accidentally messed up... I shook my head. I'd have known if I'd disrupted a burial ground or sacred site. The only question was whether they viewed the plateau as a whole as sacred, the way the town thought the whole thing was haunted.

I was distracted a moment later by some people coming out of the inn, laughing and obviously drunk. That reminded me that I'd been intending to eat while I was here, and so I said a quick but polite goodbye to Dannis and headed that direction.

I'd like to say that the evening was interesting, but it wasn't, really. I found a group to sit with and asked a few questions about what they were trading and to where, but the answers were depressingly pedestrian--nothing magical, exotic, or particularly high quality. That's not to say they weren't valuable--one trader bragged that he had scored a ruby the size of his fist, his fist! And he was eager to see who among his contacts would give him the best price, of course--but too many of the brags were things that I realized I could manufacture off-hand.

Of course I stayed very quiet about that.

The question of where wasn't all that fascinating, even as I tried to mentally picture the map and line up cities and countries that they talked about to where they ought to be relative to me. Amash had been a stepping point along major trade routes in three directions; not only did goods pass through going to and from the capital, but there was also a separate northwest-southeast trade route, and a major road going west. Kurnal was to the east of Amash, but the trade route to Bur'jaal was minor in comparison to the larger roads, and the only reason to use the road was for goods particularly in demand on one side and sourced cheaply on the other.

The traders I was speaking with eventually pointed me at a kind of dull looking, short, round trader and his similarly short and rounded wife, who I was told had a collection of herb sprouts, seeds, and medicine scrolls, though a quick glance at the scrolls told me their value was minimal. They were willing to sell me a small variety of seeds, at prices that I'm sure was highway robbery for so little, and the trader whispered once he already had my coin that one of the herbal varieties was a bit more recreational in uses, and he would happily teach me how to process the result for extra coin.

I declined.

For all that I did return, eventually, to the tower with some seeds, I didn't feel good about it. Carli was sitting on one of her boulders watching me as I returned, and I sat with her for a good while, scratching her head and watching the stars and the clouds in the darkness, before finally turning in for the night.

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