The villagers make understanding gestures.

"Okay — so having a packet copied, how does one use it with the construction template?" Ðani asks. She tries sort of guiding the packet into the first part of the bowl-template, to shape another handful of sand.

"That template wasn't designed to use bubbles. It's more for art and play than practicality."

"Ah, I see. Okay — then what should I do with this pattern? Or should we switch around until we've all had a chance to make and copy a pattern?"

"That was my thought. I don't think Genilha has had a chance to try the construction template either. And getting a feel for the light sensing template will also probably help with using the transformation template."

"Alright."

They switch around, and continue to explore the templates. It mostly seems pretty intuitive, although it takes a bit longer to get feedback from the light orb than to adapt to the others.

"Okay, I'll give you the transformation template now. This is the most dangerous template I've given you. This version has several safety features, so out here on the beach it would be hard to hurt yourself with it but as one example nothing stops it from pulling material out of a wall and letting a roof fall on your head. As another example it would let you pull material out of a tree and make it fall down or just die in place." She once more kneels down and when she stands up she has a piece of obsidian in her hand that shines a little in the sunlight. "Who wants to try it first?"

Ðani and Genilha exchange a glance, and then smile as they let Anþasta go first.

"Will it pull from bodies?" Anþasta asks. "Including from people without magic?"

She hands over the rock.

"No, magic protects people's bodies. You can't directly change other people's bodies and taking material from them counts. Your magic doesn't protect you from hurting yourself though so this template has a safety feature to prevent that. In the same vein, it will make sure you don't accidentally make poisons."

"Okay."

Anþasta kneels on the sand, so that the template will have plenty of sand to pull from.

She runs her magic through the template, feeling how it is structured. Are there steps, like the bowl-template? Does she guide it to the pattern, and then to the materials?

There are steps but in a slightly different way. Instead of entirely different bits of magic that interact this one seems to wait for certain conditions to be true and then loop until she pushes it into the next stage. The first thing it's waiting for is a memory bubble. After touching the one she gives it, she can tell it to accept it.

The second stage begins by copying the bubble and then transforming the copy somehow. Once it's finished she gets a sense a bit like from the bulb but with more complexity. It definitely feels more like when the bulb is in the dark then brightly lit though. Spreading this phase of the magic over the sand gradually brightens the feedback until it hits a stopping point and loops again.

The third and final stages is a lot like the construction template, it pulls the sand she's selected together into a copy of what she scanned.

Well that seems pretty intuitive, honestly!

A moment later, she has a copy of one of the sand-bowls.

"Genilha, can I have the scanner for a moment?" she asks.

What happens if she scans the duplicator, and tries to use it to duplicate itself?

She'll get the physical object but the template doesn't come with it.

That makes sense. She hands the tools over to Ðani to learn on, and then starts neatly stacking the various objects that their practice has produced, so that they don't clutter the beach too badly.

She practices making her own copies. With the safeties built into the template, it's pretty hard to use incorrectly.

"I can tell that the people who made this put a lot of thought into it," she comments.

"They did, it's been refined over the course of many years as people make small changes and share them with each other."

"If there are a lot of different versions, and there are sometimes updated versions that are better ... is there some way to identify them? Or a way to identify templates generally, actually? Obviously we can tell them apart because they feel different, but I wouldn't expect two different versions to be that different."

"People tend to pass notes with their new versions. There are also tools that help, they can unwrap templates into a form that's easier to understand or turn an entire template into a signature, a small bit of information that changes a lot even if the template only changes a little. That can help people match the notes to the version they correspond to if they're not sure."

"That makes sense. I'm sure the Archivists will have more questions about it, if you do end up going to see them," she mentions.

Eventually, everyone can operate the construction template.

"Actually, we sort of have more bowls than is really reasonable," Anþasta notes. "Is there any reason not to use the template to turn them back into sand?"

"There isn't with things this similar. Sometimes that doesn't work as well when you're trying to change back and forth between things that are really different."

Anþasta copies a section of sand, and starts disposing of extra objects.

"Could you elaborate on that, do you think? What makes things 'really' different from one another? How does it not work well?"

"So, this is getting into the science of what objects are made of. For our purposes there's roughly four levels of materials. The first level is mixtures, for example a loaf of bread or a handful of sand. It's not made of the same materials all the way through but the specific mix gives each object characteristics. Those mixtures are made of compounds. Compounds are pure materials they have the same characteristics regardless of whether you have a lot or a little.

"The transformation magic prefers to rearrange compounds without changing them into different compounds. If it has to though, it will break compounds into even more basic elements. The template I gave you stops there but it's possible to break materials even further down into particles. That last one takes a lot more magic though so it's not usually worth doing.

"To answer your question by very different I mean when the mixtures you're trying to change between have balances of compounds or even different balances of elements. Both of those cases can mean there's leftovers that aren't always easy to keep track of."

"Huh! Is there a way to tell what compounds something is made of? Or to see what leftovers the construction produces?" she asks.

"Even if it takes more magic, people might like knowing that they're not leaving unnecessary waste around," Genilha adds.