Cam doesn't usually take summonses during live performances but it turns out that Amriac's buddy's ex-bandmate's whole deal is REALLY not his genre, and it seems slightly less rude than physically exiting the theater. Besides, it's intermission. He grabs the next one.
"Uh, sure, stand by me, yell if you see anybody aiming a projectile. Anyone else need rescuing?"
...okay, he's going to create and start a machine translation system on the corpus of that language now, even though it'll take it a while to be ready. He puts it over there behind a tree. "Talk slower?" he asks the nearest coherently-wordy person. "Simpler?"
"I certainly did not!" she says. "They kidnapped me for ransom!"
Simultaneously - "She is a prisoner, hostage for the terms her traitorous, lying kinsmen made!"
Meanwhile, the guy in armor who is partially encased in titanium says, also in excellent (if somewhat more flowery) Qalmiri, "This is a nest of thieves and robbers, o excellent one -" this appears to be a stock title of address "- which we were sent to destroy as just punishment for their brutal and unprovoked assaults on the iron road."
Does this look, now that it's less on fire, more like a village village or like a thieves' den.
Cam's not an expert in preindustrial thieves' dens? They've got women and children and animals and crops and old people. The village did have a wooden stockade around it (mostly burned down before Cam arrived), and the swell of the land gives it reasonable concealment? But, you know, there's multiple explanations for not wanting to be found, when being found means people attacking you.
The children really seal the deal. "There are kids here. I don't feel like letting you burn down a bunch of kids' houses. What is the iron road?"
"Okay, so they were doing... what, sabotage? Highway robbery? Train heists?"
"All three, as gives them the chance to pillage and steal and scorch the land, taking what better men built like the savages they are."
The local person who is speaking for the locals will spit at the invaders' boasting. "They call us thieves, but their sole work is the theft of the world and all within it! Liars and oathbreakers, who know not the laws of men or gods!"
"Okay, so you're torching the place because they heisted your trains, and you did that because you don't like them. Where does the prisoner here come into it?"
"The lands the train tracks are on? I don't currently have an opinion on its ownership, but I can enter into the record that this factored into your stated train heist motives." He will conjure up a little legal pad and jot that down in appearing ink. "Who's the Traveler?"
"Alien... sorcery... and... dark... armies," says Cam, unnecessarily slowly, as he jots that down. "Sounds scary, I can see how you'd get spooked. Is this place where we are standing part of Profectus?"
"I'll just write 'disputed territory'. So you guys are Profectus soldiers, and you folks are... and you, rescuee, are..."
"Would that I could have made all your acquaintances under better circumstances. Is Laukera yet a third political unit?"
"Okay. So we've got three political entities here. Profectus builds a train track. Kina Basar doesn't appreciate this, heists trains. Azlisa was on a heisted train on her way from Laukera to Profectus for... business or pleasure? And then Profectus is like, hey, that was our train, and sends an army to torch a Kina Basar village. Have I got that about right?"