Three weeks.
In three weeks the Veth situation had resolved, the Aldeach alliance had formalized, the Steam Engine Assembly Hall had come online in year forty-seven, and John had made what he now recognized as the decisive strategic error of his entire Federation playthrough: he had moved too fast.
The alliance with Aldeach had been the correct move against Veth. He didn't revise that judgment. The deterrence had worked — Aldric III had withdrawn from Varenk without engagement, the provision intelligence proving accurate, the bluff called and folded in eleven game-days. The Nationalist satisfaction had climbed to 61%. The industrial transition had resumed without interruption. For four sessions after the Veth withdrawal, everything had been running correctly — the Steam Engine Assembly Hall producing its first components, the railway survey team completing the northeastern route assessment, the parliamentary majority holding on the Labor Reform Act.
The error was the alliance itself. Not the fact of it. The visibility of it.
He'd made Aldeach too public. He'd used the alliance announcement as a domestic press event to manage Nationalist satisfaction, which meant the alliance had been reported in every newspaper in every province of the Federation and every nation adjacent to it. Veth had seen the announcement and read it as encirclement. More critically, Skarrath — the major eastern power he'd been carefully cultivating non-alarm in for five years of game-time — had seen the announcement and run its own strategic calculation: the Federation, now allied with Aldeach to the northwest, was forming a power axis that would eventually constrain Skarrath's own expansion toward the coast. Skarrath had concluded, correctly, that the Federation's ambitions were larger than its current territory suggested. Skarrath had begun making its own alliance arrangements.
In game-year fifty-one, the notification had arrived: Coalition of Eastern Powers formed. Members: Kingdom of Skarrath, Principality of Urven, Free City of Celd. Coalition declares grievance against United Ardan Federation: Territorial Ambition.
In game-year fifty-two, the Coalition had crossed the eastern border.
That had been seventeen in-game years ago. The Federation was now in year sixty-eight, the war in its seventeenth year, and the Coalition armies — after a long campaign through the northeastern hill province that had cost John the iron ore deposits for six years before he retook them — had at last reached the home province and were pressing toward Ironhold from three directions simultaneously.
The siege had been underway for four game-months. And John, sitting at his desk on Crestwood Avenue on a Thursday evening in late November with his headphones on and the apartment dark around him, was managing it with the systematic precision of someone who had spent sixty game-years building exactly for this moment.
He was, he recognized, at his best.
Karen's note was on the kitchen counter: Double shift. Home Friday morning. Pasta in the fridge. Love, Mom. She'd underlined the pasta twice, which was her way of telling him without telling him to actually eat it. He'd read the note that afternoon, heated the pasta, eaten about half of it while reviewing his siege supply calculations in the composition notebook, and returned the remainder to the fridge. He would finish it later, or he would forget to, or she would come home Friday morning and it would still be there and neither of them would mention it.
The apartment at nine in the evening: quiet. The HVAC cycling low. A car on Crestwood Avenue passing every few minutes, headlights sweeping the ceiling of the living room in a pattern he'd been seeing for two years without registering it consciously. The white noise machine silent in his mother's room — she only ran it when she was home and sleeping, and the silence from her room was the absence-quiet, the specific texture of a space occupied by no one.
His father had sent another text four days ago. Hey bud. Thanksgiving coming up — you and your mom have plans? Might be able to make it work if you want to come down to Dayton. He'd drafted three responses and deleted all of them. He didn't have an answer that was both honest and brief, and dishonest answers required a kind of sustained performance energy he didn't have reserves for. The text sat in the notification shade. He would address it eventually. Not tonight.
Tonight he had a siege to manage.
He sat down. He put his headphones on. He opened the save.
Ironhold in the city view: year sixty-eight, population 143,000, the river valley transformed across two decades of sustained industrial development into something that looked, in its morning renderings, like a functioning Victorian-era city with ambitions toward the early twentieth century. The foundry district along the western riverbank now ran at 97% efficiency, the ore processing chain from the recaptured northeastern province fully integrated after the six-year interruption. The eastern industrial district had expanded twice since he'd laid its foundations in year forty-three — a second expansion in year fifty-four adding the Chemical Works and Precision Tooling complex, a third in year sixty-one adding the Locomotive Assembly Hall that had finally completed the rail network binding all three provinces. The residential zones had grown outward along the valley terraces, the housing stock now running from Tier 2 through Tier 4 across most of the city, the old Tier 1 tenements in the western laborer quarter scheduled for phased replacement as part of the Civic Improvement focus he'd completed in year fifty-eight.
The city was functioning. This was both a strategic asset and the source of his current problem, because a functioning industrial city in the late Industrial era was exactly the kind of target a Coalition of three powers would coordinate a siege around. Ironhold's production was the Federation's war-making capacity. The Coalition understood this. The siege was not, at its core, about territorial acquisition. It was about stopping the factory that was feeding the Federation's army.
He opened the defensive overlay.
The city walls: completed in year fifty-four, after the war's opening phase had demonstrated that his initial assessment of Skarrath as a twenty-year threat had been off by six years. The walls ran the full perimeter of the home province's inhabited hexes — a circuit of twelve kilometers, stone-and-mortar construction with bastioned corners and a two-tiered artillery platform at the four cardinal gates. He'd upgraded the northeastern gate towers in year sixty, anticipating the approach axis the Coalition eventually used. The upgrades had held. The northeastern wall had taken significant artillery damage in the Coalition's first serious assault three game-months ago, and he'd repaired it under fire, which had cost him treasury and construction worker casualties but kept the breach from materializing.
The garrison: three infantry regiments, one artillery battery, and a cavalry squadron tasked to interior lines — moving between threatened sectors as pressure shifted. In the northeastern sector, his First Regiment was deployed along the wall with the artillery battery in direct support, facing the Skarrath main force that was currently positioned two hexes from the wall in the hill terrain. In the western sector, the Third Regiment was holding the river crossing approaches against the Urven light infantry that had crossed the Cresward upstream two weeks ago and was now probing the western wall for gaps. The southern approach — the least fortified axis, which he'd always considered his most secure because of the agricultural province's buffer depth — was where the Celd Free City's mercenary force had arrived eight game-days ago: 3,200 troops, professional soldiers hired specifically for siege operations.
Three axes. Three force compositions. Three different threat timelines.
He opened the supply panel.
This was the layer most players underestimated in siege operations. The garrison ate food. The artillery consumed ammunition at a rate calibrated to the intensity of combat, and John had been running sustained counter-battery fire against Skarrath's siege artillery for eleven game-days, which meant his ammunition stores were at 43% of baseline — still adequate, but declining. The city's internal food production — the urban farms and market gardens he'd developed in year fifty as a buffer against supply disruption — was feeding approximately 40% of the civilian population's needs. The remainder came through the southern gate, which was currently open but narrowly so, the supply convoys running a gauntlet past the Celd mercenary positions each game-day. If the Celd force advanced another hex toward the gate, the convoy route became untenable and the city went to strictly internal supply, at which point he had thirty-one game-days before civilian food supplies ran critical.
He had thirty-one days of operational margin. He intended to resolve the siege in twenty.
He opened the campaign map.
The Federation's field army — 12,400 men, his largest force since the war began, assembled over three years and held in reserve precisely for this moment — was currently positioned in the southern river province, sixty kilometers from Ironhold by the rail line, four game-days from arrival at full readiness. He'd been holding it there for eight days, which was the length of time it had taken him to confirm all three Coalition approach axes and determine where the field army could be applied to maximum effect.
He'd determined it two sessions ago. The answer was Celd.
Celd was the weakest link in the Coalition. Their mercenary force was the smallest, the least fortified, and critically, the farthest from reinforcement — Skarrath and Urven were both positioned on their respective approach axes with established logistics, but the Celd contingent had arrived late and its supply line ran back through a pass in the eastern hills that John's light cavalry had been harassing for five game-days. The Celd mercenaries were on reduced supplies, operating without siege equipment against the most-defended wall sector, and — this was the intelligence the diplomatic espionage network had produced two sessions ago — were under a fixed-term contract that expired in fourteen game-days. If they hadn't achieved a breach by contract expiry, their commander was within his rights to withdraw.
The field army's arrival at the southern gate, combined with a sortie by the garrison's cavalry squadron against the Celd supply line in the east pass, would produce one of two outcomes: either the Celd force withdrew to preserve their unbeaten status and contract negotiating position for future employment, or they pressed the assault and were caught between the sortie cavalry and the field army in a pincer that would end their effectiveness for the rest of the campaign season.
Either outcome broke the Coalition's three-axis coordination. A siege required synchronized pressure. Remove one axis, and the other two became manageable independently.
He ordered the field army's advance. Four game-days to arrival. He noted the timing in the composition notebook, added the cavalry sortie order with its synchronization window, and checked his ammunition. He needed the counter-battery fire to hold for four more days. It would hold. He had the numbers.
He advanced the turn.
The field army began its march. The Skarrath artillery fired two bombardment rounds on the northeastern wall, both falling short of the current repair section — their ranging was off, which meant his counter-battery fire in the previous turn had suppressed their artillery observers. Good. He checked the wall damage: 12% structural degradation on the northeast tower, within the repair tolerance. He queued an emergency engineering crew to stabilize it.
He advanced another turn.
Celd probed the southern gate. He ordered the garrison company on the southern wall to stand-to but not engage — he didn't want to expend ammunition reserves on a probe that wasn't a serious assault. The probe tested the gate approaches and withdrew. Routine. They were looking for a gap he hadn't left them.
He advanced a third turn.
The field army was two days out. The cavalry sortie entered the east pass. He opened the tactical layer to manage the pass engagement directly — four hundred cavalry against a supply convoy of twelve wagons and a Celd escort company. This was a raid, not a battle: the objective was to burn the wagons and scatter the escort, not to destroy the unit. He ran the raid at speed, used the cavalry's mobility advantage to avoid the escort's pike-and-shot formation, hit the wagons with fire arrows, and withdrew before the escort could organize a counterattack. Three minutes of engagement. Two cavalry casualties. Eleven wagons burning.
He made a note: Supply interdiction costs less than direct assault and produces disproportionate effect on contractor morale. Celd commander now has ten days of contract, seven days of reduced supply, and a field army two days from his position. Decision point arriving faster than he expected.
He minimized the tactical layer and returned to the campaign map.
He advanced the turn.
The power flickered.
It was brief — the monitor dimming for a half-second, the desk lamp guttering, the HVAC cycling down a register and then back up. He noted it without looking away from the screen. The apartment's wiring was old, the building's electrical panel a 1970s installation that his mother had had inspected twice without the landlord agreeing to replace it. Fluctuations happened. He waited to see if the save had been interrupted — the game's autosave had run two turns ago, so if the power had caused a crash he'd lost no more than two turns of progress, which was acceptable.
The power did not crash. The screen stabilized. He noted the field army's current position — one day from Ironhold — and queued the garrison sortie timing to synchronize with the arrival.
Then the hum began.
It was low at first — below the threshold of distinct identification, present the way a very low bass note was present in a room where music was playing in an adjacent apartment. He felt it more than heard it, a pressure at the lower edge of his hearing range that the headphones should have been blocking and were not. He took the headphones off. The hum was louder without them, or different — not louder exactly but more dimensional, filling the room's acoustic space the way a sustained note filled a concert hall. Not like the building's wiring. Not like traffic. Not like anything with a source he could locate.
He looked at the ceiling. The corners of the room. The gap under the door.
The light was coming from the air itself.
This was the thought that arrived, precisely formed, and he sat with it for a moment because it was not a thought that corresponded to anything in his experience. Not from the screen — the screen was visible to his left, its glow unchanged, Ironhold's city view lit in its usual warm composite of foundry-orange and street-lamp amber. Not from the desk lamp, which was still on. Not from the window — it was November, past nine p.m., dark outside, the only window light the occasional sweep of a passing car. But the light was present. It was blue-white, clean and sourceless, emerging from the air of the room with the quality of something that had always been there and had simply decided, now, to be visible.
He stood. He pushed back from the desk and his chair rolled into the wall and he stood facing the center of the room where the light was most concentrated, a column of it from floor to ceiling that was not a beam — had no edges, no source point, no projection angle — just an intensification of some quality of the air that was increasing while he watched.
He raised a hand to shield his eyes. The light was not blinding yet but it was moving toward blinding. He could feel the hum in his chest now, a resonance against his sternum. His shadow was being cast onto the desk behind him from a light source directly in front of him that had no physical origin he could identify.
His mind produced three hypotheses in the time it took him to exhale: electrical discharge from the building's wiring manifesting as plasma phenomenon, bioluminescent gas leak, some kind of optical equipment malfunction in an adjacent unit producing an interior projection. He evaluated all three and found all three insufficient before he had finished exhaling. Plasma discharge from domestic wiring did not produce a coherent column. Bioluminescent gas was not blue-white and did not hum below human hearing range. There was no optical projector that produced sourceless interior light.
The light expanded.
It moved outward from the column like a tide — not rushing, not violent, but unstoppable in the way that water rising in a sealed room was unstoppable, incremental and total. It reached the walls. It reached the ceiling. He turned toward the door and the hallway beyond was the same — the light was everywhere the light could be, every surface a source, the room abolished as a bounded space by the uniform illumination that left no shadow, no edge, no anchor for the eye to resolve.
He turned back toward his desk. He could still see it, barely, the shape of the monitor and the keyboard and the composition notebook open to the page with the siege calculations, the field army's march diagram, the cavalry sortie timing.
He reached for the desk.
His hand found nothing.
Not that the desk had moved. It was there — he could see it, the monitor light unchanged, the notebook open. But the surface that should have been under his hand was not under his hand. His fingers closed on air that was the temperature of air, and the desk was twelve inches in front of him, and the distance between his hand and the surface did not resolve no matter how far he extended his arm.
The hum reached a pitch he felt in his back teeth.
The pull began.
It was not violent. He had expected, in the fraction of a second he had to expect anything, something that would feel like being grabbed. It did not feel like being grabbed. It felt like standing in a current — the kind of current a wide, slow river had in its center channel, below the surface, where you couldn't see the water moving but could feel its entire weight leaning against you with a patience that made resistance feel not painful but simply beside the point. He leaned into it the way you leaned against a river and discovered the river was in all directions simultaneously.
He turned to run for the door.
The door was where it had always been. The light was between him and it in a way that wasn't obstructing — he could see through the light perfectly well, the door with its brass handle, the corkboard in the hallway with Karen's shift schedule pinned to it, her November calendar with the days crossed off. He reached for the door handle.
The current was not in any single direction. It was inward. Toward the center of the room, toward the column of light that had expanded to fill the room and was now indistinguishable from the room itself. He was moving toward it without deciding to move toward it. His sneakers were still on the floor — he could feel the carpet under them, could feel the resistance of the friction — and he was still moving.
He said, out loud, in the empty apartment: "Okay."
It was not a statement of acceptance. It was the thing his brain produced when his analytical systems were overwhelmed and the language center defaulted to the shortest utterance that acknowledged a situation without misrepresenting it.
He was moving. The desk was behind him. The door was receding. He was at the center of the room where the column had been and he reached for something — anything, the lamp cord, the back of his desk chair — and his hand closed on nothing, on the light itself, which was a temperature he couldn't classify, not warm and not cold, not a temperature so much as the absence of temperature as a meaningful category.
Sound collapsed.
Not as if the sound stopped — as if the category of sound ceased to apply, the way a word stopped making sense if you said it too many times. The hum vanished not into silence but into something prior to silence. He was aware of his own heartbeat in the way you became aware of your heartbeat only when every other perceptual channel was closed. He was aware of his own breathing. He was aware of the light, which was everything, which was the room and the apartment and Crestwood Avenue and all of Columbus, Ohio, which was the only thing that existed.
He was falling.
Not downward. There was no direction to it. He was falling in every direction equally, which was functionally indistinguishable from standing perfectly still, except that the sensation of movement was total and the sensation of ground was absent. His body registered the physical logic of a fall — the vestibular alarm, the anticipatory contraction of the muscles that expected impact — and the impact did not come, and the alarm continued without resolution, and the light continued, and the silence that was not silence continued.
He thought, with the fragment of analytical processing still available to him: This is not the apartment's wiring.
Then there was impact.
Hard. Cold. His face hit first — forehead and left cheekbone against something unyielding that gave a fraction of a centimeter and then did not give further. He felt the impact travel through his skull and rattle his back teeth and register in his sinuses as a sharp ache. His hands had been in front of him — he had put them in front of him during the fall by reflex, the anticipatory muscle contraction arriving a fraction of a second after the impact instead of before it. His palms hit next, skidding against a surface that was granular and damp, cold against his skin in the way that outdoor surfaces in November were cold.
His knees hit last. He was lying face-down. He was lying on the ground.
He lay there for what he estimated was thirty seconds, running the injury inventory. Head: impact, ache, no apparent concussion symptoms — his thoughts were sequential, his vision, when he opened his eyes, was singular and stable. Face: scrape on the left cheekbone, minor, not bleeding significantly. Palms: abraded. Knees: bruised. No structural damage. He pushed up onto his hands and knees and paused in that position, letting the vertigo from the fall stabilize, and looked at what was under his hands.
Dark soil. Almost black, coarse-grained, the texture of volcanic material mixed with decomposed organic matter. Not Ohio topsoil, which was the only soil he had a reference for — Ohio topsoil was a medium brown with a sandy quality when dry. This was darker, denser, and it was damp in the way of soil that had not been rained on recently but retained moisture from some other source. He pressed his palm against it and felt the cold go into his hand.
He smelled: pine resin, sharp and clean. And underneath it, something metallic — the specific smell of lightning, of the air before a storm, but without the humidity that should have accompanied it. Two smells that belonged to different weather systems, existing simultaneously.
He stood.
The forest was enormous.
He had spent enough time looking at forest hexes in Kaiserfront to have a visual reference for forests, which was to say that he had a reference that was completely useless here. The trees around him were real in a way that no rendered texture had ever approximated — their scale was the first thing, the trunks rising to a diameter he could not have reached around alone, the bark a deep gray-brown with ridges running vertically in patterns too organic and irregular for any algorithm to have generated. The lowest branches were thirty feet overhead. The canopy, where the branches met and interlocked into something that was almost a ceiling, was sixty or seventy feet above him. Between him and that canopy: columns of trunks with the spacing of a managed timber plantation, regular enough to feel purposeful, irregular enough to be wild.
The leaves were the wrong color.
This registered as simply wrong before he had processed what wrong meant. His brain said leaves, expected green in some shade from yellow-green to dark forest-green, and received instead a deep blue-green that was the color of the sea in deep water photographs — not the blue-green of any terrestrial plant he had seen in a photograph or in person, not even the range of blue-green that exotic tropical species pushed toward. This was decisively, unambiguously not-green. Not a shade of green. A different color that shared green's structure in the way that teal shared structure with blue, but arrived somewhere else entirely.
He looked up.
The sky.
Between the branches, through the canopy's gaps, the sky was visible. It was not the right sky. He knew this immediately with the same certainty that he'd known the leaves were the wrong color — not the certainty of analysis but the certainty of raw pattern recognition, the visual system registering a categorical mismatch before the language center had words for it.
The sky was pale violet at the horizon. Specifically: the color of a winter sky just after sunset on a clear day in Ohio, that particular washed-out mauve that lasted about eight minutes before going dark. That color. At the horizon. Except it was not sunset. The light in the forest was the flat, diffuse light of midday — no shadows from any direction, illumination coming from everywhere simultaneously the way light came in an overcast Northern latitude in the middle of the day. Midday light. Violet horizon.
Overhead — where the blue should have been — the sky deepened to indigo. A blue so dark it was almost purple, saturated in a way that Ohio's daytime sky was never saturated. Not the indigo of a storm. Not the indigo of dusk. The indigo of a sky that had different gases in it, or a different sun above it, or was simply not the sky above Ohio.
He looked back down.
He was standing in a forest on dark cold soil in his school clothes — gray hoodie, jeans, worn sneakers. He had his phone in his jeans pocket; he could feel it. He had his keys on the same ring as a small penknife his mother had given him two birthdays ago that he'd never expected to use. He had a mechanical pencil clipped to the inside of his hoodie pocket. He had the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. The screen was cracked — the new crack running from the upper-left corner down through the battery percentage icon, a crack that had not been there when he'd set the phone on his desk an hour ago. The screen lit when he pressed the side button, which meant the battery was functional. The time showed 9:14 p.m., unchanged from the last time he'd checked it. The signal indicator showed no bars. Not low signal — no signal, the icon replaced by the universal symbol for no network found, a concept the phone expressed with a single hyphen where the bars should have been.
He tried a search. The browser opened, attempted to load, and returned a connection error. He closed it.
He opened the compass app. The compass needle spun slowly for three seconds, trying to find north, and then settled. He noted the direction. North, as far as the phone's magnetometer could tell, was that way — roughly between two of the larger trees, toward a place where the forest seemed slightly less dense. He made a mental note and pocketed the phone. He did not know whether the magnetometer was reliable here or whether north here corresponded to anything useful, but it was a data point and he wrote it down in the inventory he was building in his head.
He checked himself again, more carefully. Right hoodie pocket: the phone, the keys with the penknife, two crumpled dollar bills he'd forgotten about. Left hoodie pocket: the mechanical pencil, a folded receipt from the gas station three weeks ago that he'd used to note a forum thread URL. Front jeans pockets: empty. Back left pocket: empty. Back right pocket: the composition notebook.
He stopped.
He reached back and pulled it out. The composition notebook, black cover, college-ruled, approximately two-thirds filled with sixty pages of calculations and diagrams and notes. He'd had it in his back pocket during the session — he'd moved it there when he'd stood to check the shelf for the pasta pan, and he hadn't returned it to the desk when he'd sat back down.
He held it for a moment, in the middle of the alien forest, and was aware of something that was not quite relief — more like the specific recalibration of a threat assessment when a variable you had marked as lost turned out to be available. He had the notebook. He had the pencil. He had a compass reading and a phone with a broken screen and a penknife with a two-inch blade.
He looked around.
The forest was enormous and alien and the sky was the wrong color.
And it was silent.
This was the thing that had been registering since he'd stood, the thing his brain had been processing underneath the inventory and the sky and the leaves and the soil, the thing that now surfaced: the forest was completely, unnervingly, absolutely silent. No wind in the canopy — the leaves above him hung motionless, their blue-green surfaces undisturbed. No insects. In November in Ohio the insect life was reduced but never entirely absent; here there was nothing, not a chirp, not the dry-wing sound of something moving through undergrowth, not a bird call from any direction. No water sound, which meant no stream close enough to hear. No traffic. No aircraft. No mechanical sounds of any kind.
The only sound was his own breathing, which was somewhat elevated from the impact and the adrenaline but moving toward normal, and his heartbeat, which he could hear in his ears with the clarity that absolute silence permitted.
He stood in the forest and listened for thirty seconds. He was methodical about it — he turned slowly, orienting his ears in each compass direction in sequence, the way he'd read about sound localization once in a thread about tactical audio design. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
He sat down on the dark soil and rested his back against one of the enormous trunks. The bark was cool through the hoodie. He opened the composition notebook to the first blank page — the page after the siege calculations, after the field army's march diagram, after the note about the cavalry sortie and the Celd supply line — and held the pencil in his hand.
He thought about the apartment on Crestwood Avenue. His desk. The monitor showing Ironhold's city view, the eastern industrial district lit in the foundry's orange, the supply overlay he'd had open when the power flickered. The field army one day from the city. The sortie cavalry entering the east pass.
He thought about Karen, who was at St. Anthony's running a double shift and would come home Friday morning to an apartment where John's jacket was hanging by the door and his dinner half-eaten in the fridge and his headphones on the desk and John not in it.
He thought about that for a moment. He filed it in the category of things he could not currently act on and would need to return to, because processing it now would not help him and not processing it was not the same as not caring about it.
He looked at the blank page.
He wrote, in small careful letters at the top of the page:
Thursday. Approximate time: 9:14 p.m. Location: unknown forest. Transit: unknown event, duration less than 60 seconds perceived. Physical condition: minor impact injuries, functional.
He paused.
What I have: phone (no signal, cracked screen), compass heading (north), keys + penknife (2-inch blade), composition notebook, mechanical pencil, $2, gas station receipt. Clothes: gray hoodie, jeans, worn sneakers. No food. No water. No shelter materials.
He paused again.
What I know: sky is wrong color. Leaves are wrong color. Forest is large, old-growth scale. No familiar species identified. No sounds. No wind. No water audible. Temperature: approximately 50-55°F, declining.
He looked at what he'd written.
What I need: water. Shelter before dark. Assess threats. Understand situation.
He looked up through the canopy at the indigo sky, at the violet horizon visible between the trunks where the forest opened slightly to the north.
The light was the flat, sourceless light of midday, and it was showing no signs of changing, and the forest was silent, and he was alone.
He turned to a fresh line.
First principle: I don't know where I am. I don't know the rules here. Don't assume. Observe first. Act second. Get the picture.
He looked at that for a moment.
Then he stood, pocketed the notebook, and began walking north.