"Well, the rocks invariably come out yellow, right?"

"Sure, but the plants also come out green and I don't think there's a part of the diagram specifying the greenness of plants, I think green is just the colour plants happen to be. Yellow might just be the colour glowing rocks naturally come in."

"I don't think glowing rocks have a natural version. I guess I could be wrong."

"Why wouldn't they?"

"Because I've never heard of them and given that you have bacon plants I don't think it's necessary for any given thing this magic can create to come in 'has a natural version'."

"...I'm not sure I follow your logic."

"Bacon doesn't normally grow on plants."

"That's true. But, hmm... bacon plants might not be natural, but there's still a natural version of bacon and a natural version of plants, so in a sense there's a natural version of bacon plants and it's whatever you get when you combine those in the most straightforward way you can that ends in a functional bacon plant?"

"Yeah, but it seems statistically unlikely that a random thing I observed on the way in is the least natural kind of thing the system offers."

"Maybe it's the word 'natural' that's the problem? I don't necessarily mean 'ordinary and unremarkable', I mean more like... 'default'? It would surprise me if these diagrams specified everything about all the stuff they make, because there's just... there are too many things to specify, that way. So some things have to be going unspecified and just coming out whatever way they happen to come out in the absence of specifics."

"Are the rocks all the exact same shape?"

"No, actually! They're all about the same shape and size - and about the same shade of orangish yellow, for that matter - but no two are identical that I've found."

"It just doesn't make sense to me that there wouldn't be some reason for the yellow."

"What constitutes a valid reason for yellow?"

"It's not about validity, it's about causation. Might be that the cause isn't on a level that's amenable to being naively messed with with the magic but it has to exist."

"For all I know it's as simple as 'it's pretty close to the colour of the ink that represents light'. I mean, it's not the same, but they're both shades of pale yellow."

"That would be a cause," she acknowledges.

"And I'm sure there's a way to make differently coloured glowing rocks, I just don't think it'll involve isolating a 'colour' section of the glowing rocks diagram and tweaking it."

"Fair enough. This place is nice but it could stand to be prettier, given the givens."

"Sorry I haven't really been optimizing for aesthetics."

"Nah, the relevant givens include me."

"All right. Go ahead and prettify."

"First I shall acquire relevant resources, such as knowledge of magic that involves things other than genetics."

"Good plan. So okay, these are all the diagrams I've tested so far..."

Pile of dirt. Pile of cloth. Pile of glowing rocks. Pile of fluffy white feathers. Pile of bacon plant seeds. The volume of the result is proportional to the size of the diagram; on the standard plate size, you get about a cubic meter of the diagram's output. This one does plain water, which is good for watering plants without having to haul water up from the lake, but he doesn't want to get too stuck in that habit before he figures out how to replenish his magic ink supplies. This one produces a mysterious green dust that makes plants grow stupidly fast if you dump water over it so it soaks into the ground they're growing out of. And it only takes the brilliant blue ink that's central in the basic colours diagram, and he tested it with the stuff from the collector plants and verified that it works, so it looks like the collector plants are producing real magic ink and not just something that looks coincidentally like it. But he can't figure out how to make other colours out of it or how to solidify it into those nifty spheres that let the paintbrush sponges in but appear solid to everything else.

He is right that the diagrams aren't nearly complex enough to be encoding all possible information about their products.

She listens attentively!

"Do the spheres visibly decrease in amount of ink contained? They probably do...how is it that you can get the ink out with a sponge but it doesn't drip out, I wonder, can you refill an existing one even if you can't make them..."