"Yeah! Like—" He tracks down his favourite section of mountain, a nice little forested valley in a particularly naturalistic section. "There?"

"All right, let's design you a house!"

He's got a "plain" default house design for nondemon residents stored somewhere. It has things like indoor plumbing and electric lights.

"Fancy amenities," comments Tiro.

"Pretty bare-bones for my world's tech level," Cam says. "Feel free to suggest tweaks!"

"Yeah, the design is a little... bland. And I'm used to way different architectural styles. I'm not that good an artist or I'd just draw you a picture... actually I guess you could just make, like, a tiny model of my childhood home if you felt like it, right?"

"Yeah, sure -" Now he is holding one that is just slightly outsize for the palm of his hand, he hands it over for Tiro to point things out.

It was a pretty big childhood home and they are going to have to squint to get some of the details, but Tiro is happy to talk about the difference in architectural styles. He's not actually an architect but he can point out things like the customary shapes of windows and the way the roofs have that particular profile and the open awnings with the decorated columns that go over all the main doors... Haelahar architecture is overall very pretty.

"Oh, the palace, too, that has some really good stuff," he thinks to suggest. "But you might need to make it bigger for us to, like, see the windows."

"How big?"

"Let's see..." He moves some things from one side of his table to the other. "That should be enough space. There's two sets of walls, see, and the really old stuff is mostly inside the inner walls and the newer stuff is mostly between inner and outer, and I'm a fan of both."

"Gotcha." Scale model!

The palace of Haela is huge and gorgeous. The inner fortifications are blockier, the construction techniques less refined, but their entire surface is decorated with beautifully intricate carvings, mostly abstract curves and lines, a little weathered but still clear. Between the inner and outer walls, the interconnected buildings are a little more elegant and modern in style, looking more like Tiro's childhood home and less like an ancient and forbidding castle. There is an enormous beautiful garden surrounded by charming colonnades. Tiro smiles wistfully at it.

"Pretty," Cam remarks. "What do you want to copy from here?"

"How hard would it be to copy, like, the style of the stonework on the inner castle without actually copying the exact designs? And there's a huge window somewhere around here that I really like," he hunts down the huge window and points it out, "yeah, this, that one." It's latticed diagonally in the Haelahar style, small individual panes of glass held securely in a wrought-iron frame, but unlike previous examples the frame has been crafted to look like a huge climbing vine instead of being a simple crosshatch of straight bars. "Isn't it great? I used to climb it as a kid until my mom caught me. Literally, I fell off and she caught me."

"I might have something that can procedurally generate more in the same style if I give it enough to go on," Cam says. He shoos his simulations, looks through his application library, finds something promising, starts scanning the model.

"Computers are so cool," says Tiro.

"They're great!" Cam agrees. "Okay - you're gonna want to prune what the program spits out, it can do silly things sometimes regardless of how great it is that it can do the things at all -" The program produces an example of a "more of that" based on the stone carving.

Tiro examines it. "That doesn't look so bad, except this corner is kind of messed up... it's weird the kind of mistakes it makes," he says. "Like, if this was calligraphy I'd say it had great handwriting but really iffy spelling, d'you see what I mean? Almost reminds me of athrai."

"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?"