"Doesn't need to be indefinitely, just until the great winter lets up. Steam cores. Invented seven years ago by a true genius. Precise mechanical actuators, programmable control schemes, and steam control systems in one compact package. Many of the buildings the Lords made us design for this winter use them, as do automatons. We can't make more. The equipment to do so is too bulky and heavy to move up here. We might find some in abandoned installations, hopefully."

"Oh, will it not be very long?"

"D'you have materials? Maybe I could copy some."

"-Oh! That will be useful. There's some rare metals in steam cores. Alloys. We might be able to produce enough of the relevant things, or figure out replacements. Something to look into. And, er, we don't know how long the great winter will last, so it would probably be prudent to prepare for the long haul, yes."

"If you want to give me something simpler to try and copy first at some point, see if I can do that, I can try it out. Can also maybe scry for some, if you think they're around somewhere."

Might be able to make alloys, if you have the metals and don't need much.

Why does a greenhouse need that, anyway?"

...Yes, that would seem rather a good idea, preparing.

"Why are there abandoned installations?"

"It wouldn't, except for the extreme cold and also the lack of proper sunlight. The steam cores help distribute fertilizer, regulate temperature and humidity, and provide electric lighting. We could probably rig up a greenhouse that doesn't require them, but it would be much less efficient. There are abandoned installations because the people who were sent up here to build things were not prepared properly for the true scope of the freezing. The predictions of what it would be like kept getting worse and worse. Abandoned camps, empty factories, and wrecked boats are going to be the norm. I have to say, if only you two had come here a few months earlier..."

"Less efficient seems like it would be - still better than nothing."

"Well, not exactly something we control, one way or another.

Not prepared like so they left early?

If they're not too far and you want to do supply grabbing I can probably scry and teleport over."

"I'll be looking into it once we have made some progress on our new city. I don't know all the details of the scout corps and pioneer teams, much less what they're doing now... But it seems likely that many of them are tragically dead. We can get to that later. There are quite a few things I'd like you to scry, actually. And teleporting the others here from the boats. But neither thing is urgent on a scale of hours at this point, I think."

"Is there something that is?"

"Building proper homes, a cookhouse, an infirmary, setting up workshops to get all our technology and construction properly established, building the Beacon so we can send out teams of scouts and guide those walking inland to the city so you don't have to do it all yourself, clearing away all the wreckage and debris, setting up a source of coal and a source of ongoing supplies of timber and steel. In descending order of priority for important tasks over the next few days."

That seems far overmuch for a scale of hours; she is reassured on that when he says 'days'. 

"Nothing urgent on the scale of hours, then?"

"Happily, no. Merely lots of things that are urgent on the scale of days."

"Well then. You wanted to tell us about technology?"

"Right. So, it's rather complicated, but the general principle that most of it works off of are that gases under pressure exert force, and that when heated water turns to steam, a gas. Pressurized steam powers all sorts of equipment. Motorized saws, elevators, drills, vehicles. We can also turn it into another sort of energy called electricity - which is related to lightning, but might be a bit hard to explain for now - and that's useful for a lot of other applications. There's a lot more to technology than that, immense amounts of specialization and specific techniques. There's also medicine, surgery, chemistry which is the science of materials and how to change them from one thing to another, meteorology which helps us predict the weather, metallurgy which is about making and making use of all sorts of metals, and dozens of other such subfields."

The concepts behind electricity are very interesting, if not exactly something she currently understands very much.

"You can change materials into each other?"

"Only some things. Compounds. Elements, we cannot change. But with electricity one can separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, for example. Or turn carbon ash and other materials into useful things, like solvents and lubricant."

Electricity is just increasing in interestingness, here.

A lot of those concepts are unfamiliar, and while the translation method helps (if not entirely sufficiently) it's still rather overwhelming.

"...separate water?"

Impromptu chemistry lesson! Periodic table of elements!

He does enjoy teaching.

This is fascinating and she wants to play with it at first opportunity. 

"Er... Chemistry isn't necessarily safe. There are a lot of ways to make things explode, make acids, acutely toxic compounds, and so on. Please take some lessons before you start messing around with it. Chemists are known to kill themselves by accident, after all."

Goodness.

"I am very unlikely to kill myself by accident. In the 'I can set myself on fire and be fine' way, not the 'I don't think I need lessons' way. I would love lessons! Between whatever else I'll be doing."