Having set myself up with my own private little wizard's hut, I actually then went back to the normal things of my day, mostly to see whether or not everyone hated me now. Carli came along, and accordingly my first stop as Malla's hut. She was out; I could see the goat herd in the distance, grazing, and Malla was out with them, but I didn't see a good reason to chase her down just to talk about this. Most likely, she hadn't heard, and bringing it up just to say "I'm leaving, and also now my goat is super smart" seemed a bit silly.

I stopped by Nim's quarry, and I could tell from the look on the man's face that something had changed in our relationship. He didn't voluntarily bring it up, and I wasn't sure I wanted to, either. Of everything, I had kind of assumed that Nim wouldn't like me once he understood that me doing backbreaking labor beside him was... well, who knows what he thought. That I was making fun of him, maybe? He politely said he didn't need any help for today, when I asked, and I left it at that.

Heglid was polite, and directed me to a few items that had fallen off of shelves due to either the sonic disturbance or a meeting of elders in his shop, and I repaired them all. He didn't seem to have anything to say beyond that, and he even left me with the impression that he didn't really care all that much what my history was, which was nice. While I was in the area, I fixed several windows without asking anyone and made the burn mark in the street go away, but I wasn't sure what else was related to the incident. There were a couple people who saw me working, but they didn't comment, and I didn't ask them to.

Miun had busied herself with painting some ceramics, but interrupted that immediately when I stopped by. Or, well, sort of; she kept going for a little bit, but she stopped doing detail work and only moved to things that she could do without intense focus. "Sounds like your secret's out," she said, and I wasn't sure if there was humor in her voice.

"I realized too late I might have continued pretending," I said, "but there's no point to it. So yes, for now... at least the elders know, and plenty of others saw part of it."

"Everyone will know everything," she said, tiredly. "That's life in a small town."

"I suppose," I said, without venom. I leaned against a counter, watching her, and I know she was looking at me in her periphery, because she raised her eyebrows. "Given that they know, I'm not sure what to do about the pipe situation."

"Just fix the ones I have," she said. "They'll honor the original contract, as long as you don't undercut it."

"You don't mind?"

"I took the job for money, not for fun." She moved from one small clay pot to the next. "It's nice to do something useful, but the pipe sections are large and ugly things. Necessary, but not pleasant."

"And what do you do for fun?" I realized as I said it that it could be taken for flirting, but I also wasn't sure what there was to do in a small town like this.

"Archery, mostly," Miun admitted. "Plenty of pieces break in the kiln, and I like to take things that displease me and destroy them."

I grinned at her, and I could tell she was working not to smile. The words had a little bit of an implied threat to them, but I had no reason to think it was directed at me, except in jest. "I could never get a handle on archery myself," I said after a moment. "It just doesn't suit me."

"However will you defend yourself?" Miun let her sarcasm sound perfectly innocent instead of biting, which I appreciated.

"Hopefully there will never be any need for me to defend myself," I replied easily, shifting my weight. I felt the counter shift slightly underneath me, and frowned, momentarily considering just fixing it before I realized that tampering with other people's property without permission--even a friend's, and even something that's an unambiguous improvement--was a dick move. Arguably, I shouldn't have just fixed the windows in town for that reason, but... that, at least, I was responsible for. Or, well, sort of. Either what, what happens in Miun's place of work should be up to her. "If you want--"

"Don't do anything to my shop, please," she replied immediately, and I nodded. All things considered, it didn't surprise me at all that she would be fussy about that.

"If you ever want me to, I don't mind."

Miun glanced up from the clay pot in her hands and raised her eyebrows. "I believe you," she said, and looked back at her work.

I really wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean. Was it just a reaction to me being, essentially, flirtatious? I hadn't meant it that way. I just shrugged and set it aside. "I have decided to make myself a home by the plateau. The others say it's haunted, or cursed. Do you know anything about that?"

Miun nodded, without looking up. "Whenever there's a blood moon, the plateau glows too brightly at night, and an unpleasant shade. Creatures from the wilderness gather there and howl, and some people claim there are ghosts." She dabbed her paintbrush back in the container and glanced at me only briefly while her hands were busy. "I saw one there, once."

"A ghost?"

She nodded, focused again on her work. "I was... out, with the son of one of the farmers, late at night. He had been warned not to go near, and he had regretted not visiting in prior years. He thought that it was a rite of passage, and he was behind, because the blood moons had come and gone without him noticing. He wanted to challenge the haunted plateau, until he saw his grandfather again, or so he said. I don't believe what we saw was his grandfather, but whatever it was, it was real."

That was interesting, and spooky, but it didn't necessarily mean that it was something I couldn't handle. "How often do blood moons occur?"

"It should be months until the next one," she said, "but I don't keep track. They are at most twice a year, on the night of a full moon."

I nodded, not really sure which phenomenon was termed a blood moon, anyway. A lunar eclipse? That would make sense, if the atmosphere let only red light by. Why would an eclipse affect the mountain, though? Or was it actually unrelated?

We sat there in silence for a moment, and I realized after a bit of that that I had meant to ask something, though I wasn't sure how to go about it. I frowned, and I saw her eyebrows rise, so I cleared my throat. "I... am not from around here," I said, "So forgive me if this is a strange question. I heard an elder complaining about the Naishi."

The look that crossed her face confirmed my theory that the racism was directed at her.

"...I am not the sort to believe those sorts of things, as I hope you know," I said. "I'm curious what the bad history is."

"Bad history." Miun's voice had gained a very sharp edge. "The bad history is that many of my people went to war with many of their people, and many of theirs went to war with ours. That's always the way of it."

"I have no doubt," I said, wryly, and when she didn't comment, I just shrugged. "You don't know anything specific?"

"Wars have soldiers, and soldiers die," Miun replied, testily. "I don't know anything about what happened, but I can guess."

"Then I won't ask more." I shook my head. The elder was certainly old enough to have had a brother, son, or grandson go off to war and never return anytime in the last fifty years, or more if the people of this world were long-lived. "I was just curious."

"If I thought you were trying to give offense, I would have thrown you out," Miun said, and I could tell there was anger in her voice. "As I hope you know."

I just nodded, and after a moment, stood. "As far as I am concerned, we are friends, Miun," I said. "I won't do things just to upset you, and wouldn't even if we were not friends. It's not in my nature."

Miun nodded at me, finishing what she was doing, and set her brush down. "Thank you," she replied. "That's not a particularly special thing, but it's nice to have it confirmed and not need to guess."

I nodded at her, and I noticed that her eyes drifted for the first time to Carli, who had remained outside and was now peeking in the door. Miun looked... confused, and I grinned at her.

"One of the goats took a liking to me," I said. "And Malla said that the other goats didn't like her, so I am taking pity on the poor thing."

Miun looked at the goat for a moment, then frowned. "Taking pity on a woman just because she has no friends, you say?"

I realized only after she said that how that could be interpreted very cynically.

"Not an adult goat," I clarified. "A child. I doubt an adult would need anything from me."

Mean! I was surprised to note that Miun startled when Carli's mental thought rang out. Don't leave when I grow older!

"You can hear that?" I asked, a little surprised. In truth, I wasn't entirely sure whether it was just a loud thought, or an active power that Carli now had, but it only got more suspicious when Miun didn't seem afraid, only surprised.

"I, uh..." For the first time, Miun seemed entirely flustered. "It's not... the first time..." She looked down and away, blushing.

"You hear spirits?" I raised my eyes. Classic earth mythology didn't treat people who dealt with ghosts very well, but this was a world with magic.

"Not spirits, usually. Our people have ancestral gods, and one spoke to me when I was younger." She frowned. "I was told that my bloodline was special, and I would be persecuted for it. The words were correct, at least in that. The Naishi have attempted to leave certain things in their past."

I nodded. "Your bloodline doesn't change who you are," I told her. "It may open doors, and behind some of those doors are bad things, but you have to make your own choices."

She gave me an unimpressed look. "Very wise sounding words, coming from a man who was handed his power," she said. "Sometimes, the things hiding behind doors are trying to get out, and should not be allowed."

I shrugged. "Well," I said, "I guess it's good to have powerful friends in that case, isn't it?"

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

She had no cynical reply to that, which was just as well, because Carli was grumpy at me for not replying to her, and charged in to bonk my shin. Don't leave!

"I won't leave, Carli," I said, kneeling down to pet the goat. "You're special to me now, you know?"

I'm special. The thought carried more than enough arrogance to let me know that, one way or another, I'd be in trouble for taking care of this kid, but it was also cute, and those things were hard to reconcile.

"Special?" asked Miun, and I grimaced, a little.

"Yeah, well," I said, and sat down on the floor next to the goat. "She is, and I'll take care of her."

Carli appreciated that, as though she understood all the reservations that I didn't voice, which I very much doubted. Either way, she moved in and butted her head against my chest, and I gave her a little hug. I feel like... like that shouldn't have been a gesture that communicated cleanly across the human-animal barrier, but apparently it did, given the reaction I could feel in her.

"Special or not, if she makes a mess of my shop, you're going to clean it up."

I just laughed, and stood up. "Yes," I said, "I would, and will. But I ought to go instead of taking up all your precious time, oh great potter."

Miun sniffed at me. "Don't say that like you mean the opposite."

"You're the greatest potter I know," I said with a wide smile. "At least, the greatest real one. Some time I'll tell you a story--"

"Oh, just get out of here," she said, clearly exasperated. "Go and leave me to my clay."

I laughed, waved, and was gone.

I visited several others around town through the rest of the day, but avoided the tavern, just because... well, because the last thing I really wanted was to be in the middle of a crowd that wanted to talk about it all. Dealing with the elders was problem enough, and that was a select group. That left me having to get food for myself, but I planned ahead well enough to buy some meat from the butcher's, and some pickled vegetables.

Pickled vegetables wasn't my idea of good food, mind you, but I realized very quickly once I started talking to the woman in the market that in ancient societies, there were basically three types of food: fresh, preserved, and spoiled. Vegetables being what they were, you either caught them in season... or you didn't. I made a mental note to start a vegetable garden of my own, especially some kind of root vegetables, and also to make something like a fridge as soon as I could.

The only other person I who treated me exactly the same was Malla. I briefly described what had happened when I passed her by, and explained that I would be moving to my own place to keep trouble away from everyone, and her first questions were about Carli. That made me happy, and when I told her that I would keep taking care of the girl, that seemed to make her happy, and that was about all there was to it. I guess she was just an animal person at heart, and judged others based on how they took care of animals above all else.

I told Carli as we left that Malla clearly liked her and was worried, and Carli looked like she wanted to run back and be nice to Malla, but we continued home regardless, with a promise to stop by again tomorrow, and many times to come.

After eating (and Malla had given me some tips for helping Carli find forage out my way) I went straightaway into making a large walk-in insulated room off of the lowest floor of the tower. The insulation was a tricky thought for me at first, until I remembered something vague I thought I'd heard about silica aerogel--something like a gel or jelly where all the liquid was safely removed. It took some experimenting--trying to create what was essentially jello out of water and crystal powder, set it up, and the remove the water--but before too long I was able to produce something workable, and even that was probably not ideal--though it was definitely good enough.

Now, I knew just a bit of chemistry--it wasn't something that I did professionally on Earth. I knew that there was a difference between pure silicon and silica, an oxide, but nothing about how useful the difference was or how to predict it. I was able to fashion a regular mesh network out of silica, though, that had all the properties I expected from aerogel, including being incredibly sensitive to breaking. Considering I could replace it later, I didn't care about that; I just made my new cellar a stone box with enough arched supports all around so that I could walk in it, and all the areas aside from those supports were voids filled with the stuff as insulation.

For some reason, it was relatively hard to use the same Fabricate power to suck all the heat out of the cellar once I made it, even though it was kind of ridiculous to call that difficult when I could do such incredibly fine work with the bracers as aerogels and diamonds, let alone finding radioactive elements deep in the earth from the royal palace's throne room. I guess... it's just something that the gods chose not to include in my power set? I wasn't in any position to complain, given the circumstances.

Part of me not being able to complain was also that I could cheat--again, it didn't make sense, but I could just convert the nitrogen in the room to liquid nitrogen, Fabricating something into a colder version of the same thing, and that chilled things pretty quickly. But trying to adjust the temperature? Control it? No, I couldn't do that. That would be silly.

Having made an insulated cool box, I also decided to make an insulated hot box, on the other side of the basement and a level up. This was... not a walk-in thing, just a fairly standard-sized oven, by American home kitchen standards, I guess. I had to do a bit of engineering to make it work, making it coal-fired but insulated from the smoke and gasses themselves. I wasn't fond of the idea of burning solids to cook, but I could generate coal out of nothing, and besides, with enough insulation I wouldn't need too much fuel... I hoped.

My first attempts to cook meat in that oven suggested it would be harder than I thought, but well, that wasn't much of a surprise.

Lighting the coal and getting the oven up to temperature worked in roughly the way I expected, though the lack of a thermometer left me with some guesswork on that part of it. I had basically tried to make a metal rack for cooking meats on, but again, I didn't have proper steel; I had the ability to make pure iron, out of nothing, but attempting to use that caused chemical reactions with the meat and juices very quickly, including where the meat charred and stuck. That's something I could do something about, in the short term, but I'd want proper materials, or a better way to handle things.

Anyway, one way or another, I had a meal, and it was... fine. Pickled vegetables weren't great, but they were fine.

I lacked a bed, since I didn't take mine from Malla's, nor even ask if I could. Instead I spun up a hammock out of thread, and that was more than enough for now. I hung there in the darkness and thought about thread, wondering if I could find a nice sample of silk or even spidersilk, and that thought got me wondering about the armor I was supposed to make for Jessica and Alice. Ideally, I'd make it out of some kind of magical super-material, but I'd need a sample to do that. There was no chance of something like kevlar, from Earth, without a sample of it. I frowned, as I considered the clothes and things we'd brought through the portal, things that had been taken from us the first day--and I hadn't stopped back by the room to pick anything up, since nothing I'd had on me was helpful nor sentimental.

It hit me, and I sat up in the hammock suddenly. Wallets, I realized. Credit cards. Plastic.

I took a meditating position and reached back out for Jessica... to find that she was, ah, busy with John, the archer. I shifted my focus immediately to Alice, to find that she and Steve were laying in bed together, though from the emotional waves pouring off of Alice, she wasn't an eager partner... or, possibly, even a willing one. I bristled, but once I confirmed that she was, at least, awake, I touched her mind, gently.

[ Alice? ]

She immediately sat up, waking Steve, but she didn't seem to care. [ Colin? Do you need something? ]

[ I... well, yes. But more importantly, are you alright? ]

Alice flushed, and Steve sat up, beside her. I couldn't hear whatever was said out loud, but Steve laid back down, and I feel like some magic was involved there.

[ I'm fine, ] she said, with the obvious subtext it isn't your business.

[ I'm not going to pry. I just... don't want... ] I shifted subjects, so subtly that I'm sure she didn't even notice. [ Do you know if they kept any of our stuff from Earth? ]

[ We made sure that they did, ] Alice replied. [ Why? What do you need? ]

[ The power I'll be using to make things is called Fabricate, and it needs a sample for anything with complex chemistry--anything I can't understand myself, basically. If it's just a single element, like carbon, aluminum, or iron, that's one thing, but I need samples of things like silk, steel, or plastic. ]

[ Plastic? ]

[ I was thinking credit cards for that, ] I replied. [ But also, nylon and elastic from clothes, and anything else that would be helpful that you guys can get your hands on. If they have materials you want me to make something with, get a sample. It doesn't have to be much. ]

[ What about things made from animals? Leather, bones, dragonhide? ]

I passed along a sense of surprise. [ They have dragons here? ]

Alice sent back a sense of exasperation, as though this was something I was supposed to have run into on my own, in the few days we'd been on the planet.

So I just shrugged. [ I was able to... well, it's complicated. ] I didn't think she would appreciate tales of me repairing my blistered feet. [ I am not sure, but I think those will work, and again, I just need a sample. Any piece will do. ]

[ Any piece will do, but if you can also screw over the Grand Vizier, I assume you would appreciate that. ]

I was genuinely surprised, but smiled. [ I mean, I wouldn't say no, but now that I'm beyond the bastard's reach I don't care about him anymore. That's the nice thing about leaving, you know? ]

I could swear I felt a deep sense of jealousy from Alice, and I realized that things must have been worse for them than I'd realized. [ If he figures out where you are, he'll send someone to kill you. You know that, right? ]

[ I'm not in his country anymore, I'm pretty sure, though it's not like I have any sway with the government here. I doubt the locals could, or would, retaliate on my behalf. ]

[ Okay. So... special materials. And... probably gems, too, right? You could make more of those. ]

[ I don't have immediate uses for gems, ] I admitted, [ but if there are any, I suppose it's better to have a sample just in case. ]

[ I was thinking about money. ]

[ I could probably mine enough gold with my brain to destabilize the economy of an entire continent, ] I pointed out. [ And the same with gems, yes. But I don't have a whole lot of use for the cash, and that whole destabilizing the economy thing... ]

[ You may not need it, but if we're ever to get out from under the Vizier's thumb, we will, ] she pointed out. [ Just tell me that it will help us. I can speak in a way that they know I'm telling the truth, as long as I am. ]

I chuckled, and took a deep breath. [ A sample of any precious gems will definitely help, along with magical metals, special threads, potions, vials of dragon's blood or ommel snot, or shards of divine power stolen from the heavens. ] Most of that was horseshit and we both knew it, though I could tell the specifics of my humor were lost on her.

[ Potions. That's a good one, but I don't think you'll be able to make them, because Jess can. Alchemy is part of her skill set. ]

I sent Alice the sense of a nod. [ Oh, also, spidersilk. Special types if they have it, but regular spidersilk is supposed to be good, tough stuff. ]

[ I'm not sure there are any spiders near here, but I'll ask. Probably oils, right? For burning, I mean. ]

There were probably those things locally, but sure. [ Oils, gunpowder if they've heard of it... oh, actually, as a personal favor, if you see any seeds or vegetables that I could grow in the marketplace, could you bring some? I want to start a garden. ]

[ I'm going to be honest, ] Alice replied, and I was startled by her sudden seriousness. [ If you can provide me with a steady stream of fitted bras for the rest of my life, I will owe you more than enough favors to cover much larger things than that. The one I have will do for now, but I'm already gaining weight from the way they feed us, and once my girls start growing a too-small bra can be worse than none--except that going without one attracts the wrong kind of attention. ]

[ From friends and enemies alike? ] I hadn't studied either woman's chest in any great detail, but Alice was what most people would consider busty, and Jess... perky. Both would attract attention, but in different ways, and Alice would definitely attract more.

I could sense Alice smile grimly in the darkness, but she didn't reply.

[ You don't even have to ask, ] I finished my reply after a moment of silence. [ You guys are my friends, and as long as we're friends, I don't mind doing little things like that. ]

Alice nodded to herself. [ I'll look around for anything else that can help. Maybe books? Maps? ]

[ I'll appreciate anything you get me. I just wanted to make sure that plastic was on the list, and... any medicines you might have had in your pockets, or purse, too. ] Alice, as I recalled, had come with a purse--one that seemed too big for her. I got the impression that meant she, like I, was older than she now looked.

[ Okay. When will you be ready for us? ]

[ I have a location secured, so technically, I could do it now, ] I replied, [ but we might as well wait until you get materials. When do you think I should call back? ]

[ Tomorrow night, but just after dusk, ] Alice replied. [ This time is... late. ]

[ I know, I'm sorry. ] I paused a moment, then said, [ Take care of yourself, Alice. I mean that. ]

She replied with a wave of emotion, first, and then a sense of a smile. [ Thanks, Colin. ]

I broke it off after that and settled back into the darkness in my hammock, caught somewhere between content that my friends were okay... and deeply worried that things really weren't okay, and might not be without some kind of major intervention. The kind of intervention, I was pretty sure, that they wouldn't like.