The other major issue is what to do with the humans we're teleporting. My original plans called for housing facilities and supply caches formatted in a relatively familiar way but I hadn't figured out the details and perhaps you have a different general idea.

That can be changed after we've had a chance to talk to them, can't it?

Yes, but I can't quickly change an area they're occupying so they need at least a temporary place to live while we design something more customized.

How temporary?

I did mean 'while we design' nearly literally. I can do the actual building under heavy time dilation.

Well, we're under dilation now and can still think normally; the input has to be fetched from the humans within their own time stream but the design can be responsive to that without necessarily requiring all the design from them.

That's true, I don't expect the humans to rapidly be able to agree on their preferences though.

Do they all need to be close together? Are there space constraints?

Adding separate areas like this hexagon takes between half an hour and four of outside time depending on size. It would take more time to create an area larger than this one.

So the initial receiving area needs to be habitable for hours, but not necessarily comfortable for days. I don't know about humans but Elves can tolerate uglier, more cramped conditions for short periods than would be sustainable longer term.

What do you mean by that? I'd imagine cramped conditions would be unpleasant but I'm not sure how they would be unsustainable.

Elves can actually die of confinement. Not of ugliness, but it's stressful. Orcs and Dwarves don't so humans probably don't either, but in general the principle probably holds that they can tolerate adverse conditions relative to their preferences for short times.

That makes sense. I'm still uncertain that it makes sense to ask the humans to make such choices as soon as they arrive. I would expect it to be a highly stressful time and my people at least are not skilled at making good long-term decisions when stressed.

I suppose that might depend on the humans. Obviously we should try to get as close as possible in the initial design.

Then we're in closer agreement than I thought us to be. Your comment about hours seemed to suggest that we need not have facilities suitable for long-term residence when they initially arrive.

It means that we have affordances for different mistakes. If they were definitely going to be unable to make design changes right away, even if the problem were as obvious as 'it needs to be prettier and bigger' would be to Elves, we'd need to be very confident in a lot of details. If, should there be some kind of emergency, it's fixable in hours, we have more flexibility and don't need to be as conservative in some ways.

That makes much more sense, thank you for clarifying.

Of course. She's read all the titles and is poking through random promising books now.

Is this location causing you stress due to the size or the decoration?

I might want a little more space and a prettier area to stay in eventually but I'm not in immediate distress.

I'll leave it up to you then. There is plenty of compressed time if you want to take a break to design something more to your liking though, and given that we are in compressed time I can't build it in negligible subjective time.

It would take me a lot of subjective time I could be spending on these books to design something new, but my house looks like - She lobs mental images at Sapphire.

I can build that, or something very much like it at any rate. I'll add it to my list of background tasks.

Thank you.

I added a rough summary of human architectural styles to your computer. The low-fidelity scanning that I'm doing means that color and lighting isn't likely to be very accurate but it should provide a good sense of the structure and layout humans tend to use. They have a great many styles.