Whenever Ryan visited RF nowadays, he had to ignore the memory of a confident, feminine voice cheerfully suggesting he just kill the people causing him problems, and get on with his day. Some days, when they were very frustrating, the voice of memory would gleefully suggest killing and eating them to solve two problems at once.

When he'd been younger, he'd thought it had all be part of a very morbid and darkly utilitarian sense of humor, a way of coping with a nightmarish scenario and the stresses of they'd been facing. Now, however, Ryan had to wonder if she'd been completely serious, and if the sighing and whining afterwards when her suggestion had been flatly refused had actually been real.

He currently had the unenviable position of both thinking of those ideas and needing to be the one to refuse them. That sort of casual monstrosity… no. He was frustrated with them, but he didn't actually want them dead.

The memory of a smirking voice noted that he wouldn't exactly be all that sad if they didn't happen to wake up one morning…

He shook his head, banishing that old voice full of deliberately terrible advice from his head. Nope, not doing that. If nothing else, such casually murderous behavior was the mark of trash isekai, and while he'd been isekai'd, he'd was not going to be trash. Admittedly, being isekai'd would have been easier if he'd gotten some kind of cheat power, like being able to multi-task doing a hundred things at once—in his experience the most OP cheat power ever, because plasma beams had limited use case, but multi-tasking was good for everything—but alas, reality was a brutal and vindictive bitch.

Yes, truly brutal and vindictive. Why, it had even taken away the usual 'superior modern knowledge' cheat away from him! Gunpowder? Already invented and highly regulated as an extremely dangerous substance, given the population density of urban areas in demesnes and their propensity for underground structures. Guns? Already invented and really expensive to make, and only safely usable inside demesne because Iridescence growing in the propellant makes it really, really dangerous to set off. Mayonnaise? Ancient and common, though they called it yolkoil, and he hated the stuff anyway. Soy sauce and tofu? People had been fermenting and trying to find a way to make new foods of everything since forever, because safe growing space was limited and markets were competitive, so they had something like that too.

Radio? Well… uh, he'd made a simple crystal radio with his brother when he was younger, but it wasn't like he knew how to make a receiver. And the radio had come from a kit.

It was why he was always so happy when he and Lori experimented, despite how fast she expected him to write down notes. Thank goodness he had experience with highschool teachers who couldn't seem to grasp how to use a blackboard during lessons. There was just something about redrawing the boundaries of what he knew of reality in a repeatable, quantitative manner that tickled the kid in him who'd watched all those educational shows about how the phone had been invented, how the Wright brothers had built their plane, and of course that show about those two guys in San Francisco who kept running remote-controlled cars into the same fence. It made him want to grin and cackle like a mad scientist.

Research like this… it was the closest he could get to doing magic. Perhaps if they learned enough, he'd… well, he wouldn't be able to make it, but he'd be able to design something that would let him use magic. Bound tools were a thing, after all, and humanity, whether here or on Earth, was a tool-using species. The end goal would be, of course, finding a way to fly, but right now that seemed a long way away. Not even Lori could really manage it at the moment, even with infinite MP…

Well, life goals! Lori wanted her monopolies—which was a noble and honorable goal, especially when you were the one who had it—and he wanted to fly: the dream of everyone who'd ever been stuck for at least two hours in traffic!

Well, flying and riding a dinosaur.

Though he'd admit, it wasn't exactly the two days of doing experiments that had him humming pleasantly as he did his job as a tool of the colonial overlady.

"Good morning, Yllian," he said, taking care to pronounce the man's name properly. The key was trying to say it with the same accent the northerner had. "Did you have a good time while we were gone, or were the children misbehaving again?"

The man smiled. It was a small, grim smile, but given he didn't used to smile at Ryan because he thought Ryan was some sort of evil manipulator, best to take it as a win. "They're quiet but surly. None of them needed to be spanked."

"Oh? They're learning? Do you think they're responsible enough to be left at home without burning the house down?"

"Let's not be silly."

Ryan sighed theatrically. "Well, we've got food in the hold, and ice-like things for the cold box. Let's get those unpacked and we can talk about whether or not I need to worry about anything. Same as before, no one's to touch any of it with bare skin."

They didn't have gloves, but they did have rags. They used the rags to keep from making direct contact with the frozen meat, lest the cold make their fingers stick to it and give them freezer burn or worse. Lori kept the food in the cold room very, very cold so she'd have a long time between topping up the liquid nitrogen, liquid oxygen, dry ice, and whatever state-changed atmospheric gasses she was using as coolant.

It worked, but Ryan couldn't help but think things would be so much easier if she just made a tub to put absolute zero ice in if she was worried about it melting. She already had little tubs for the liquefied gasses… Ah well, he'd deal with that when she got around to changing her mind.

Once the food had been safely stowed—they had to leave out some to warm up so that they'd be able to eat it tomorrow, or possibly the next day—and the Coldhold was off with its crew of cheerful sailors, hunters, and conscripted hunters—nowadays they seemed more resigned than surly—Ryan and Yllian made their rounds. It mostly involved walking around the demesne, checking out the crops and the terraces being made, and then checking out the mine-slash-shelter-slash-pantry-slash-freezer as they talked.

The inspection was something Yllian had to do anyway, and let Ryan get a general sense of the demesne's state… usually from how swept the ground was. The fact the dome was a living thing—even the tree whose trunk had been shattered during a dragon and had needed Lori to basically put a stone cast on it to keep it aligned with its own stump—meant that deadfall from branches tended to fall inside the dome.

Looking up, Ryan saw branches that needed to be cut. Shana usually took care of that, to his horror, taking a hammer—she still wasn't allowed sharp objects—up to the branches to prune the dead wood and any that threatened to block out too much sunlight by smashing them. She was the only one who was both light enough and good enough at climbing the tree to do the needed work. River's Fork technically-former Dungeon Binder didn't just spend all her time waiting for people to injure themselves or hanging out with Karina.

Yllian followed his gaze and grimaced as well. Ryan heard him muttering "Colors, Koshay," undoubtedly complaining about his late friend's design choices.

"Nothing to be done about those right now," Ryan said. "Hopefully she'll be coming with us next time and can take care of it then."

"Why isn't she?" Yllian asked mildly.

"Lori wanted her to stay, for some reason. I think she's going to try having Shanalorre do some of my duties while I'm gone so she doesn't have to raise another lord or lady to do that job." At Yllian's look, he shrugged. "I told you, Lori doesn't see Shanalorre as a child. A Dungeon Binder is a Dungeon Binder is a Dungeon Binder, and everything else doesn't matter." The idea should have been morally outrageous to him but… honestly, he'd seen more messed up. And it was a form of utmost respect, in Lori's own particular way. "Speaking of which, how are the children. The actual children, not the ones who act like children…"

Ryan supposed that, if one looked at it from a certain point of view, he was living the dream. He was senior management at a company— no, better still, he was the second-highest official in the government! He owned his own house (built and paid for by the government, literally), the government paid for all his expenses, he got to travel for work, the government had given him a fancy state of the art personal vehicle, he had not just one, but three girlfriends who he was sleeping with, now no longer simply literally…

It's just that except for that last, it all… well, didn't seem all that isekai-y. Maybe not even that last, he had known someone who had a lot of live-in fuckbuddies with benefits—

Oh God, that's where he was now, wasn't he? Argh, now he wished he'd paid more attention to how the man had done it!

…

Okay, just relax, just relax. He… well, he probably had a very delicate conversation to have when he went back home in a few days, but that was a few days from now! So don't worry about it until then!

No matter what Lori said, procrastination worked!