this is crazy

[from_scratch]

Cam is watching a new recording of Atriama, tail swishing in the gap in his couch, and doesn't stop to pause the show when he feels a summons go by.

Comments

[wormcan]

"We will have to convince people to use it. Saying it comes from a strange parahuman who is definitely extremely powerful and probably not lying about what it does might take some doing."

[from_scratch]

"Yeah, I understand. I mean, I can also explain how it works. I don't have to make any of the components at all if that helps. But I do not have to ship the cure for hepatitis to every continent literally tomorrow."

[wormcan]

"No, just as soon as possible.
But that is a good point, we should focus on enabling production of as many things as possible as much as possible rather than just relying on you for direct creation."

[from_scratch]

"I'm glad you agree. I imagine you suffered awful brain drain from the remaining population after the disaster; do you have or can you potentially import doctors and engineers and so on?"

[wormcan]

"Under normal circumstances no. Very few. But if we're suddenly offering the best laboratories and the chance to produce tinker technology that actually makes sense, it becomes more doable. This does depend on you being correct about the difference between you and every other tinker."

[from_scratch]

"I'm afraid nothing novel to you that I can make is also simple enough to teach you to assemble here in this room unless you want to trust me on the parts being exactly what I say they are, so we're back to square one there, but I can get you started on offering attractive working conditions."

[wormcan]

It goes on the list next to power generators and repaired (or replaced) roads. Lower on the list, since reversing brain drain is not the kind of thing anyone was expecting to get around to any time soon and the blueprints don't currently exist, but still.

[from_scratch]

Practicalities time? Practicalities time. Cam recommends tidecatchers. They are an island and nuclear plants would be a big target for more Endbringers; tidecatchers are pretty harmless and will serve. And what are their power needs and projected power needs...? All right, that will require so many catchers and the following equipment to get what they catch onto the grid. He can't offer very much internet upgrade and still have them connected to the outside world, but he can do some, and lay down infrastructure for 2157 quality network within Japan itself if they'll kindly tell him where to put the stations. Roads he can do but is possibly not very efficient at doing unless they want all their roads to hover; he'd have to overfly the areas to get everything flush with preexisting matter. He can tell them how to maintain a hovering road system but they might not want to rely on that what with Endbringers plus brain drain.

[wormcan]

The plan for attracting valuable professionals: pay them with money. They do have a budget for continuing the rebuilding process, such as it is, and large parts of it recently became a bit redundant.
(Unfortunately, Earth does not contain a whole lot of emergency architects. Faster to settle for copying the buildings they once had rather than designing a shiny new one of each thing.)

[from_scratch]

Cam can totally copy buildings! And if their budget is lacking he can also make stuff that other countries want for Japan to sell. Wealth generation: not the same thing as inflation.

[wormcan]

As it happens, duplicating Japan entire is a really bad idea. What with the unusually deep oceanic trench right next to the existing Japan, putting islands there would do a lot worse to water levels than re-raising Kyushu did. But there's plenty of improvements to be done on the original. The infrastructure ministry will be able to keep Cam as busy as he wants to be, getting gradually more creative as they have more time to think of useful applications of conjuration.

[from_scratch]

Good! Cam likes being busy. And he will drink all the coffee he needs to to continue being so.

[wormcan]

The fact that he can be doing things continuously was not part of his stated power set. But that's fine, his employers already knew he was hiding things because who goes around restoring countries for free.

So one minute Cam is building a harbor full of ships fully loaded with miracle cures to be exported, the next he's walling off some not-quite-cleared-up nuclear accident sites.

All of this is extremely public, of course. The government announces that there's a helpful parahuman, doesn't announce their doubts about his motivations, and hires a lot of people to help with demolition. He no longer sends people running in fear; even for those citizens who think it's obviously a deal with a devil of some kind, it's a deal that isn't going to backfire right this minute.

[from_scratch]

Still, he leaves off the wings and tail for now.

Does he get assistants? Trustworthy, human assistants who can handle his correspondence and maybe hold chalk?

[wormcan]

Assistants yes, human yes, trustworthy depends on what for (they're probably reporting to the prime minister unless Cam wants to take the trouble of hiring his own), and of course no one knows the importance of the chalk.

[from_scratch]

Cam will take assistants who report to the prime minister. With some rigmarole and much private musing he arranges for there to be a circle of bent carpet fibers in a room where nobody can get without his authorization, design extending juuuust under the wall such that -

"Sousuke, can you vacuum the place? That end of the room first, please."

- it hasn't happened to come up that he can make vacuum robots yet.

[wormcan]

And the circle gets completed by Sousuke, certified human.

[from_scratch]

And Cam keeps an eye on the camera feed from the room.

...And he checks to make sure that Sousuke vacuumed in the correct direction, which he did.

.......And watches the camera feed some more.

Fuck.

Cam leaves the circle open for an hour - it was a generic circle, he needed results, this place is a mess! - but there's no way that no angel in the entirety of Heaven has picked up a legit summons. He's a fluke. He is going to have to do this himself.

...Where has his summoner's tracking device got to?

[wormcan]

The city of Takamatsu, plus or minus a decade. Cam's summoner is about as far southwest as anyone still lives, or at least he was before Kyushu's grand reopening.

[from_scratch]

Okay. Cam keeps an eye on that. Drawing attention to the guy doesn't seem likely to help, but he wants to know if he leaves the country or starts spending much time at a hospital or anything.

Back to work.

[wormcan]

None of those things happen.
After a bit more upgrading of the country, Cam gets an email from himself.

Do exactly as we say or your summoner dies.

There follows a warning to not even try taking him out of Takamatsu, and a set of surprisingly innocuous instructions.

[from_scratch]

You don't have to fucking threaten Cam's summoner to get pomegranates. Why is someone threatening Cam's summoner to get pomegranates?

If they wanted a nuke he'd probably go try to protect the summoner and not make any nukes, but pomegranates? Pomegranates it's worth paying whoever this is off the once, to see if any more information might be forthcoming about who the fuck they are, how they know anything about where he came from, and whether they can follow through.

Cam puts pomegranates where the extortionist wants pomegranates. It doesn't actually say not to follow the pomegranates, so he lurks.

[wormcan]

Cam can lurk pretty surreptitiously if he wants to. And as he hovers above a fruit basket in an unremarkable part of China, he sees it get picked up by...no one at all.

Eventually a bystander stumbles across the pomegranates and collects them because why not. Well, nothing else about the extortion has made sense so far.

[from_scratch]

Cam sends himself an email recording this event, in case the extortionist was going to come by later and wonder where their pomegranates went. He puts a tracker on the bystander.

[wormcan]

The bystander is very quickly confronted by people in uniforms. If Cam's surveillance is detailed enough to pick up sound, it's something about smuggling and suspiciously out-of-season fruit. Turns out "I just found it" isn't very convincing.