"Before building a new one, or before learning to travel to them? Either, I suppose."

"Well, it'll probably be easier!"

"I expect so!"

"I wonder if it'd be easier to make a new one or terraform an existing one, if one suitable for terraforming is available."

"I don't think I know enough about planets to say."

"We can figure it out!"

"It's good to have projects!"

"Yeah--I think I'm going to want to write down every story I know well enough, if you can make paper, in my spare time, so I don't lose the entire corpus of literature in my world."

"Good idea. I haven't found a paper recipe yet but there's bound to be one, or a plant that grows it, or something."

"I know you can make paper from just wood but I'm not totally clear on how."

"We can figure that out too."

"Yeah!"

...Gosh that's a pretty smile.

Tiro is unaware of this assessment.

"Anyway, what was I going to do when we reached the hill - right, show Delsmiar all my recipe books," he says. They reach the hill. He gets out all his recipe books.

Delsmiar points out which is the correct one.

"'Structure'. That has interesting implications. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

He starts flipping through the recipe books, trying to guess what the various Structure recipes might produce.

"What's the significance of 'structure', here?"

"It's one of the sixteen basic colours of magic ink," he says, flipping to the back of the book to show her the diagram.

"Recipe diagrams are almost always painted using a subset of these sixteen colours. The ones I've been working with mostly use these four," he points at the brown, pale blue, orange, and blue-green circles that connect to the big red one in the lower right corner. "Structure is this one," he points to the bluish one on the upper right edge between black and green. "I don't understand the diagram completely yet, but if I'm guessing right about some things, the five big ones are the basic basic colours and each of the smaller ones is made by combining whichever two big circles it's in the middle of - so Structure is black plus green, and the one I think might be Air is red plus black. The bright blue one in the very middle doesn't fit the pattern, though, and it seems like all the other colours can be made out of it somehow but I don't know how yet."

"Almost always? When do they not?"

"There's a whole list." He turns the page and shows her: the sixteen basic colours appear first, but there's at least a few hundred, spanning several more pages, all neatly labelled. "Some of these are only in the book twice. I'm not sure they're all in the book at all, I haven't gone through and checked every single one."

"Oooh."

"Isn't it fascinating?"