"Huh. Why?"

"I don't know, why not?"

"I mean, it makes sense to identify yourself by a famous ancestor, in much the same way it made sense for the Vair(Duke) of Baian to identify himself as Estern vai Baian, 'cause it makes sense to let people know if you're a duke or the descendant of a famous person, but, like, if your specific ancestor is some random guy whose name no one's going to recognize, what's the point of going around telling people you've got an ancestor with some random name?"

"Because one of your parents or some of your children are probably going around identifying themselves by the same specific ancestor, so there's continuity, it's a way of telling who's from the same family. And it's useful when there's more than one person with the same name in the same place, like, if there's two men named Keron in the same village they could call themselves Clumsy Keron and Keron the Tall or they could call themselves Keron se Parva and Keron se Arlin."

"Or, like, Keron the Smith and Keron the Cooper, I think that would make more sense, but okay, cultures do arbitrary things sometimes."

"Those are valid bynames too, sure, but if it was all by jobs then what happens when you have two smiths named Keron?"

"I think it would be a little weird if you had two smiths with the same name in one village? If you did anyway then you could call them by, like, distinguishing characteristics of their smithys, and if they weren't you could call them 'Kerron of Villagename'."

"Bigger towns also exist and contain smiths, some of whom are named Keron! 'Keron of Villagename' sounds a little weird to me, like he's implicitly claiming to be the most important person from whatever village it is, and I don't even know why you'd reach for distinguishing characteristics of the smithies when the people are right there having distinguishing characteristics of their own..."

"I guess! But at that point I'd still go for Tall Keron and, well, probably something kinder than Clumsy Keron, let's say this Keron is, um, you can't go by species, what hair colors do humans have?"

"...People use bynames, they're just less formal than ancestral names. 'Clumsy' is a little unfortunate but it's not the worst I've heard."

"It's less arbitrary than a bunch of stuff at home, I shouldn't be picking at it."

"Okay."

"We got distracted, how's the house coming?"

"Kinda isn't. I'm almost starting to get a feel for how the diagrams actually work, and knowing which colour is Structure helps, but I still really don't have enough information to guess which diagrams will let me build a house. Actually, I guess it's possible that there's a diagram somewhere in here that literally builds an entire house on the spot, but I'd need a huge drawing plate to get a result that big, and I haven't seen any diagrams that look complicated enough."

"Can you do lumber? Or any plants large enough to cut down for same?"

"Well, we're going to need some more tools than we've got if we want to build a house out of fast-grown apple trees."

"You mean like axes? Because axes we've got covered."

"You do?"

"Did you wonder how Luvei and the others buried Dakker? Frost giant magic. Luvei's good enough to freeze shapes as fine as 'shovel' or 'axe'."

"I saw the shovels, I just don't know if ice is going to make good construction tools, partly because I don't know what the characteristics of a good construction tool are."

"Intense quantities of stubbornness?"

"That'll work for cutting down the trees; I'm not sure it'll work for assembling them afterward..."

"Yeah. There seems to be enough room for everyone in the existing structure for now, but..."

"But there won't be forever. Well. I guess I'm going to do a lot of diagram testing."

"And we could experiment with construction methods."