The impending promise of tactical drills forces me to acknowledge that my Gift would give the ATF a collective aneurysm. In the same way that it’d be impolite to walk around a city playing with a gun, then, it’d probably be impolite to walk around a city repeatedly casting spells. So I put the spells away while we’re in Calfort.

The city today seems rather more lively than it was yesterday. There are many more people out, particularly people carrying things like logs, stacks of sawn lumber, and pallets and crates of miscellaneous goods. I also see maintenance, cleaning, and constructions workers out and about, made identifiable by their equipment. No power tools, of course, but some of the more well-off builders are carrying what appear to be enchanted gear. We pass a mason that’s maintaining the road, using a glowing runed chisel and a ludicrously oversized one-handed hammer to effortlessly split small stones into the required shapes.

Even better, the operator of the blacksmithing shop I saw yesterday is working today. When we pass, she’s hammering away at a lump of metal on her giant anvil.

“Hm?”

It’s like if you told Weta Digital that this blacksmith was simultaneously forging The One Ring, Excalibur, Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, Mjölnir, Frostmourne, Nightblood, Andúril, the Iron Man Armor, the Master Sword, the Green Destiny, and the Swords of Shannara, Martin the Warrior, and Gryffindor.

“Whitney?”

And then you took what Weta gave you and gave it to Industrial Light and Magic along with a blank check and instructions to make an even cooler scene.

“Whitney.”

The fire roars. The anvil clangs. The ground shakes. Her hammer is literally on fire, leaving flickering orange arcs in the air when she swings. Her tongs are made of the platonic ideal of the zappy blue stuff that special effects artists use for science fiction force fields. The entire smithy explodes in a fountain of fizzing sparks every time she slams the white-hot head of the flaming hammer into the metal.

“Hey. Whitney.”

It is everything I have ever wanted from a fantasy blacksmithing scene.

“Whitney!”

“Aah! What?”

“You can stare at the hot blacksmith lady later,” Liv says, snickering at me.

“Totally not what I was looking at! Seriously,” I protest, tearing my attention away from the awesome display.

She’s still snickering, so I think angry thoughts in her direction as we continue walking.

We pass without incident through the consumer district, a cluster of relatively fancy houses, some more office buildings, and a fairly impressive warehouse district.

Our final destination is revealed to be a transshipment yard of some kind, where it turns out that this place does have vehicles! A dozen clerks bustle around, checking labels on what look like small wooden shipping containers against documents on clipboards. One container has apparently passed through the bureaucracy successfully and is being loaded onto a wagon, simply hoisted onto the shoulders of a team of about twenty burly Gifted workers and carried to its destination. Another team looks to be readying itself to pick up another container, belting out a rhythmic call-and-response song that I’m guessing make sure they all lift and step at the same time. Something about flowers? I guess the content doesn’t matter as much as the cadence.

Gifted couriers are probably only used for local transportation, then, and vehicles are used for intercity freight? It’s like the way you don’t see panel vans or medium trucks on controlled-access highways and you don’t see giant semi-trailer trucks in the middle of cities.

The containers aren’t as big as what I remember, probably due to material limitations. Not that I’m denigrating their efforts - the fact that they’ve standardized at all is impressive enough all on its own. There’re two kinds of container, one full-length and one half-length, both with a cross-section about two-thirds that of one of Earth’s standard intermodal containers. Which is to say, a particularly tall person would be at risk of banging their heads on one of these, where that’s not an issue at all with a normal shipping container. I notice that the containers are often stacked two high. I wouldn’t be surprised if the relatively low height of the containers was specifically intended to let workers simply lift a container high enough to be stacked on top of another.

The wagons themselves, nearly two dozen of them, are substantially larger than I’d expected. They’re still nowhere near the size of a semi-trailer truck, if only because those wouldn’t fit on the roads around here, but they dwarf the wagons I’ve seen in museums and at historical recreations. Each is clearly built to accept a single full-size container, and about two-thirds of them are loaded exactly that way.

And there still aren’t any draft animals! I guess they’re just hauled by more Gifted workers? I suppose it’d make sense; people are actually much easier to manage than animals, since they don’t need any specialists, they don’t need special diets or housing, and the population is larger so they’re much more replaceable.

Liv moves out ahead of us at this point, intercepting one of the clerks on his way from container to container. She asks a question that I can’t hear and the clerk responds by pointing at a tavern-looking building bordering the yard. Liv heads off in that direction and we trail behind her.

She’s already entered by the time we get there, so we follow her in. We’re immediately hit by a wall of noise, workers and armed guards singing or shouting at each other over games of cards or just talking loudly to be heard over the rest of the crowd. The only thing separating the situation from utter confusion is the tavern’s bard, perched on a stage in the corner and leading the chorus. The tavern is much bigger than it looked from the front, going back far enough to have nearly two dozen tables, most of which are occupied. Maybe fifty people?

Liv’s interrupted a card game between a merchant-looking person, a clerk, a guard, and a handful of workers. It’s interesting how their clothes immediately identify them; the guards are armed, the workers have incredibly sturdy clothes, the clerk is fastidiously clean, and the merchant is just identifiable, with a towering misshapen top hat and magnificent beard that together form an unmistakable personal brand. Heather leads us over to join the conversation, but she lets Liv hold the point position. Giving our face room to work, I imagine.

“—willing to help defend the caravan, of course,” Liv says, apparently finishing an initial offer.

“One of your six is a prisoner, so you’re net neutral at best,” the merchant says flatly.

Now that I think about it, it is kind of weird to be carrying an obviously evil dude around like a sack of luggage.

“I also note that your guards are short on either detection or experience,” Liv counters. “Not even one of them responded when I started flashing Bureau of the Guard tactical sign.”

“And you think you can do better,” the merchant says, leaning back and crossing his arms challengingly.

“Yes,” Liv says simply. “Whitney, see what you can find. And while you’re doing that…” She scans the room, looking for something that I can’t see.

I don’t pay too much attention because I’m reacting to the sudden request for spellcasting. There’s only one spell she could want, and that’s Find Spellcraft. Can I trust my memory and risk flubbing the spell, or should I take the hit up front by making Bob hold the book again? I successfully cast from memory yesterday and earlier this morning, so I think I’ll give memory a shot. I’m the backup anyway, Liv’s going to find something sufficiently impressive.

I pull my sleeves up, magician-style, and with extreme care begin casting Find Spellcraft, taking a moment to go over the hard parts first so I don’t get hung up in the middle of anything.

One of the great things about being a wizard, as it turns out, is that nobody can tell the difference between you wiggling your fingers in the air to cast a spell and you wiggling your fingers in the air because you’re trying to remember how that one gesture at the end goes.

“You encountered trouble on the road to Gouledel about twenty days ago,” Liv states. “That guard over there, the woman with the green helmet,” she points, then reaches over to tap her shoulder, “got hit in the back and badly broke her left shoulder, and the second-cheapest healer in Gouledel that can still do joints leaves them stiff like that.”

The merchant looks suitably impressed by this, conceding the conclusion with a tilt of his head.

To my immense satisfaction, I successfully cast Find Spellcraft on the first try. Even better, Liv manages to time the conclusion of her little speech so nobody’s staring at me while they wait for me to finish.

“Right, let’s see- oh,” I cut myself off, “that was easy.” I don’t even have to move the spell around to get hits. As soon as the display comes up I immediately find two dots right at the base of the cone. A moment’s inspection says that both the guard and the clerk have magic running.

The guard looks intrigued. The clerk looks begrudgingly impressed.

The merchant looks at the guard first. “Gervasius, I’m not sure we need the bodyguard skill right now, but good initiative. Aelfraed,” he says, turning to the clerk and sighing with exaggerated disappointment, “Is that really the best you can do?”

Aelfraed, the clerk, laughs. “We caught you with a literal ace up your literal sleeve not ten days ago,” he says. “You’re not allowed to complain for at least the next hundred.” The workers at the table, who’ve so far been mostly uninterested in the conversation, all nod, indicating their agreement with this argument.

“He’s got you there, Yaroslav,” Gervasius, the guard, points out.

“Fine,” Yaroslav, the merchant, gripes, “you’ve made your point. You ride for free, on the condition that you always have someone on lookout duty. Someone useful,” he warns us, looking like he wants to wave an admonishing finger, “mind you. You argued detection, you’re providing detection.”

“Acceptable,” Heather says, taking over from Liv. “Supervisory Special Agent Heather Townsend, commanding Bureau of Isekai Affairs Team 24,” she introduces herself, holding out a hand.

“I thought she wasn’t the one in charge,” Yaroslav says as he shakes her hand. “Yaroslav Tikhonov. Glad to do business with you.”

“Likewise, Mister Tikhonov,” Heather says.

“The loaders think we’ll be ready to depart in under an hour,” Yaroslav says. “If you’re not there we’re leaving without you. We’ve already been delayed enough today.”

“We’ll be there,” Heather promises.