"Maybe athrai are artificial intelligences," suggests Cam, registering this feedback with the computer.

"I don't think so. Maybe! But it's just sort of conceptually similar, the way they make mistakes that aren't the same ones a human would make in the same situation. I think an athra would actually have a pretty easy time copying the style of the palace stonework."

"The thing with the computer generation is that it 'knows' when certain elements are combined but has no idea why, and it's not equipped to speculate," Cam says, "nor to tell by feel when something 'looks right' if it fits all the rules it derived from looking at its sample." He generates another instance. "How's this one?"

"Huh," says Tiro. "Yeah, I like that one!"

"All right, I will extrapolate enough square footage and export it to the house sim -"

And now the simmed house has pretty stonework all over it.

"It's so nice!" says Tiro.

"Yup! Anything else? Easier to change it now than later."

"Can you do the same thing with the window I like, or is there not enough of it?"

"Not really enough of it. I mean, I could try but you'd have to do a lot of pruning. I can copy it outright?"

"Hmm... nah," he decides. "Having exact copies of my favourite features of the places where I grew up would be too weird."

"I suppose turning it upside down or something wouldn't cut it?"

He giggles. "No."

"All right. It almost reminds me of these windows in this one demon's house -" He rummages around, pulls up a photo. "Ignore the rest of it, demon architecture is tacky, do you like the windows?"

"Wow," he remarks. "But yeah, I like those windows!"

"This is not the worst demon house ever," Cam says, snipping out the window design and adding it to the house sim. "They get real bad. We can make stuff but have no special ability to get rid of it. You get way too many things made of solid gold that way."

"There's a similar problem with the magic around here, I had to dig a bunch of new rooms to hold all the junk from my diagrams testing, but I think there's got to be some way to get rid of stuff or the entire planet would be one huge junk heap."

"There is, at least, some really thorough way to get rid of stuff," Cam says.

"Maybe they were trying to get rid of their junk and screwed it up and accidentally got rid of their everything," he speculates.

"Cautionary tale," nods Cam.

"I'm pretty sure they screwed something up. Like, it took me a while to notice, but this whole hill-house thing looks kind of like it was dug in a hurry, you know? And it's full of - I mean I don't know for sure that they're emergency supplies, but they sure look like emergency supplies. That seems more like 'suddenly everybody needed to hide underground' than like 'they died off gradually of starvation or plague'."

"And it didn't work," Cam says, "hence the skeletons and remaining supplies..."

"Yeah."

"How far away from the hill did you appear?"

"A ways. I wandered around for a while before I found the lake, and then I went around the lake until I found the hill with a door in it."

"This is a weird place," Cam opines. "...Anything else for the house? Wallpaper? Parquet? Swimming pool? This is like the painfully generic 'I got a demon to make me a house but I had no opinions on anything' baseline design here."