It was a month before Elaine and Teddy returned from their trip. At first, it looked as though the trip was going to be a waste--one bad lead led to another, and several times they ended up at a dead end with no leads at all. But Elaine, usually over Teddy's severe protest, dragged him on, always searching for someone who understood--or could possibly understand--the technical problems they were faced with.

The short answer was, nobody had yet been successful in making use of the Archon ansible servers. There were, however, three other places across the Two Worlds where people were seriously trying, all better equipped than Teddy by far. Teddy, from the look of things, was absolutely astonished to see that his salvage had really made its way to the far reaches of both worlds, and that his works were in the hands of people who could not live a more different life than he did.

Teddy had been agog from the first moment he stepped foot in what was clearly an actual, well-maintained, powered building, deep in southern Africa. Elaine found it amusing, while also registering the fact that whoever was keeping the building operational was clearly the kind of person willing to throw a lot of power around. There were a great many men with guns, a great many bits of trivial bureaucracy that they had to step carefully through in order to get an audience.

All that for... not much.

The person on the other end was a very short white man who surrounded himself with very tall, very muscular people. Teddy seemed to instantly be on edge around the man--in fact, if Elaine were honest, the feeling seemed mutual--but she did not immediately understand why.

"My name is Frederick Zimmerman." The small man offered his hand to Elaine, who had to bend over to accept it. "I hear you had some questions about our research."

When she sensed that Teddy was thrown off, Elaine stepped quickly into the breach. "We are looking for people who might have had success working with one of these units," she offered held out a paper roll, one that depicted in intricate detail one of the ansible units. "We heard you bought several of them."

Frederick had his bodyguard hold out the paper for him to study, and spent the time waiting for him to unroll it studying Teddy. When it was unrolled, the man barely needed to glance at it. "Ah, the Red Ansible units. Yes, quite the mystery around those. You are curious about its origins, I suppose?"

"We have a more practical concern," Elaine replied smoothly. "I have had some contact with the ...Administrators trying to get answers out of them but as I'm sure you know--"

"They answer no questions about these things." Frederick sniffed indignantly. "It is not too much of a surprise; rumor has it that these items were stolen from them to begin with. In any case, we are basically starting from scratch, which is not a trivial problem with such complicated machines." He squinted up at Elaine. "What is your interest?"

"We have some hints," said Elaine sweetly, sensing that the man was eager to be seen as the one on top. "about what to do once we can get the unit operating. However, even getting the things to turn on has been a hassle."

"And what are you willing to trade for that information?" Frederick inclined his head back just a little further, as though the short man was turning his nose up at Elaine, but she honestly couldn't tell if it was intentional, given the height difference.

"That depends on what information you actually have." Elaine leveled her gaze at the man. "I can assure you, we have plenty worth trading."

"Yes, my men did tell me that you apparently flew here, which is... something of an achievement." He glanced from her to Teddy and back again. "I take it your man here has some kind of flight-related keyshard? Certainly that would be too great a resource for you to trade away."

Elaine had to bite back an immediate response. Without being able to ask Teddy directly... she decided to throw a quick mental message at Ciddia instead. What the frig is a keyshard? Please answer quickly.

It was only a moment before there was a response. The system magic was built on broke. Sometimes people find spiritual shards of magical knowledge, but you need a spiritual key to make use of it. A keyshard is both.

Elaine processed that quickly, and immediately processed the reaction that Teddy and Frederick had to each other. "No actually," she said. "He has another use. Flight is an ability I saved for myself, you see."

Frederick's bushy eyebrows rose as he studied her. "Funny, I don't sense a shard in you."

"Indeed you wouldn't." Elaine offered a wide smile, and let her feet lift off the floor just a bit, to prove her point. "I wouldn't mind telling you, but then, you're the one who believes in withholding information unless you get paid, are you not?"

Frederick studied her as she floated, and after a moment, gave an unemotional chuckle, one that lasted more than a few seconds. "Very well," he said. "You have me intrigued. At the very least, it's fair to say that trading with you will be... interesting." He gestured for them to follow. "Come along, let us talk over drinks."

Over the next hours and days, Elaine gave away a few pieces of knowledge that she would otherwise have shared gladly, and Frederick grudgingly admitted that they had been able to get the Ansible units working, but only barely. They seemed to have no understanding of the machine learning coprocessor, and had completely wiped away the old software, so the notes Ciddia had given her about how that code worked would be no use to the man.

Not that Elaine was willing to let slip that she had an 'in' with Ciddia. The man seemed highly interested in being on the top of all things, and she didn't want to make him jealous, not at this stage. She had no fear of his bodyguards, but extracting information from him would be a lot harder if he was hostile, even given her background. Instead, she traded a copy of her own notes from the Freeworlds Aliance, which would likely be of substantial interest to him, in exchange for working, bootable code that would not do much, but did prove that the system worked.

Additionally, Frederick pointed them towards the only two other players in the Two Worlds that he considered competitors, insinuating that he would gladly buy any secrets that Elaine could wring out of them. One was rising from the ashes of China (Elaine had assumed she would find something somewhere over there, mostly out of sheer optimism), and was researching chemical manipulation with ansibles, while the other was an information broker in the frozen northern wastes of the Anstran continent on Draco, who was hoping to use ansibles to restore something like a global internet, but (in Frederick's opinion at least) had no understanding of how exactly to do that.

Hunting down those two took time, but neither had any firm successes with the ansible units, either. The leader of the Chinese Chemex firm, at least, was willing to part with information more freely, and so Elaine was able to form something of a rapport with the woman, if tenuous and somewhat strained.

Everyone could tell that Elaine was holding a lot back, which of course she was. But everywhere she went, something stank. The closer she got to people with power, the more frightened people were; the researchers were always either frightened followers or people who seemed to have their own sketchy side agenda.

Why couldn't people with power ever be normal? Elaine wished she still had access to her high explosives so that she could go work off her aggression by destroying some remote part of the world, but successfully repressed her urges, even if she really did not understand the irony.

By the time she and Teddy got back, Jim and Anna had finished salvaging and selling a lot of what they had left, and Anna had some extra notes on things she'd like to try when they got back to the test rig, but she set those aside to examine the bits of knowledge and code that they'd returned with. Jim, for, his part, had set about repairing the walls, but in his ardor to do so had torn apart parts of the internal buildings for materials. Teddy didn't seem to mind, even if that left him with a hole in his own personal rooms, but Elaine couldn't hide her twitch when she saw the kitchen was now--at least temporarily--unusable.

Elaine smiled through it all--through the sketchy leaders, the scheming researchers, the cowards, Teddy's own constant protests, and Jim's thoughtless renovations. She smiled, even when what she really wanted was to force people to stop being stupid--at gunpoint, if she needed to.

She smiled, but she privately wondered if she would be able to keep resisting those urges forever.