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Alone at his table, Hector just tried to make himself comfortable. Despite all the people, the place remained fairly quiet, and no one seemed interested in approaching him. Garovel wandered around, eavesdropping on their hushed conversations.

‘Let’s see. These guys are talking about the food. Seems they’re enjoying it. Over here, they’re talking about the weather. Cold front coming in, apparently. Next, we’ve got a conversation about Madison Reach. This guy thinks she’s super hot.’

‘I don’t even know who that is,’ said Hector.

‘Doesn’t matter. Boring topic. Ah, these people are talking about you. Vigilante in Gray Rock. They’re scared. That’s too bad. What else we got? Hmm... Oh, here we go. This guy’s talking about himself. His buddy just called him Frank. Sounds like Frank used to be a carpenter. Strange. You’d think that would be a pretty stable line of work. Maybe he got injured.’

Hector continued listening for a while longer. After an hour, he wasn’t sure they’d made much progress. Most of these people were only here to eat breakfast after all, and that didn’t exactly require them to volunteer their life stories to one another. He and Garovel departed for Warrenhold soon afterward.

It was a ways back, and after armoring up, Hector took the opportunity to practice with a couple different methods of transport. The first was a kind of self-propelled, one-seater train. Essentially, he just materialized an iron track with a chair on it and then pushed the chair along by adding metal from the backend. From there, he could lay more track as he went while simultaneously annihilating the metal behind him.

He thoroughly enjoyed traveling with this method, if only because it allowed him to sit down and basically float toward his destination like a magician; but in practice, he found it rather unwieldy to navigate around pedestrians and cars. He tried doing it over the tops of buildings instead, but that meant constantly materializing bridges, which were not only more complicated but also required support structures, and he couldn’t very well create a metal column in the middle of a busy intersection. And apart from all of that, as a general means of travel, it was just slow. He hoped to improve on all of these things as his proficiency increased, but it seemed like that might take a while.