(The prince giggles.)

"They don't have to do it that suddenly. Water slows it down - if I freeze part of a glass of water it takes a little while for the rest of the glass to feel cold."

"And you care about not messing up the plants more than you care about seeing how much you can freeze at a time?" says the prince. "What about seeing how cold you can get things, have you tried that? How cold or how warm, I guess."

"I don't have a good way to measure how hot or cold a thing is. I can freeze and boil water," shrugs Kiri. "I can burn wood."

"Can you melt stone or metal?"

"That I haven't tried. I don't have any metal I don't want in its current shape and if I can melt stone I certainly need to do it someplace other than this entirely stone room which is intended to be safe for doing fire things in."

"Well, I'd think so, but there might be a limit. I'd be pretty nervous about going to stand in a volcano or whatever."

"I could lose a whole hand doing that if it turned out I couldn't."

The prince shrugs. "Well, yeah. And you care more about that than I do."

"Yes."

"Uh, who exactly would not care about losing an entire hand?"

"I'd care some," shrugs the prince. "But I'd still try it."

"Well, I'd rather find someplace where I could try it at a bit of a distance, and approach it slowly," snorts Kiri.

"Of course you would," he says, grinning.

"Yeah, I don't actually think I could get Valdin and Alser to put my hand back. I'm pretty sure they can't."

"...huh," he says thoughtfully. "I wonder if they could, though - I mean, if you got all the... body primes working together, if they could do things like that. Have they tried?"

"If they messed it up it might be worse than if they didn't try. If there's ever somebody dying and they're all there though maybe they should..."

"Or if there was somebody who wanted to see if they could get their lost parts back more than they cared if it killed them trying."

"Maybe. If you find one let me know. I'm not sure if Nerine would work with Valdin but I'm not sure you'd need her to rebuild something like a hand? Maybe you would, but maybe it would just fill up with blood by itself if Alser did it right..."

"It'd probably help to have the coru prime there. Otherwise, I dunno - flesh dies without blood, doesn't it? It might help to have you there... it'd kind of be the next best thing to if they could read each other's minds and make sure they were all working together right."

"Yeah. I wonder if Jerist would be useful for a hand. He'd be handy if you were doing a lung probably."

"I guess, yeah. Or if somebody drowned. Coru to get the water out and elay to get the air back in," he giggles.

"Yeah. I kind of wish there were more people who could do our stuff, and then there would be somebody who could put out a fire when a house went up, and people would have chances to try fixing hands or drowning people or whatever, but instead there's just - five of us, and we're not usually going to be where the best places to learn things and help people are."