It's easier for Helen to imagine light as a physical object than most people, and she is very careful about how little light she obscures. Nevertheless, she isn't having any luck.

"If you haven't done it in six hours you will have taken longer than anyone I ever heard of, but some people do take that long. Up to you if and when you decide you just can't."

Helen is very, very patient when she really wants something. She still isn't having any luck after a few hours.

Lu has only a few other things to try - "tug of war" apparently helps some students, with them and a teacher or elder student trying to take the shine in opposite directions at the same time; other students have better luck with using their non-dominant hands; Lu has even heard secondhand that someone prefers to make shines on wet surfaces, and Bar provides a shotglass of water to spill into a puddle under the lens. But after a certain point she can't help. She borrows a book too.

"I don't think I can do it," Helen admits sadly after it has been a bit more than six hours.

"Well, I can still teach you to program them, if you want to bring home a bunch - that's the least I can do, I'll trade you for my collection of solid ones."

"Sure. It's certainly better than nothing, at least. Oh, I can make barriers with touching edges--they register to my senses as separate barriers but I can form contiguous three-dimensional objects with them. It might be worth doing to see if you get one of those as the whole thing or just one of the component barriers."

"Ooh, let's try it. Maybe I could even bend the hinges."

They're slippery enough that the cube Lu needs to push rather than pull, but presently she has them both shined. And will it bend...?

They sort of feel like they might be able to bend, but all the verteces have to remain attached and neither can bend without at least one join coming undone.

"They won't come apart, but that does seem to be the limitation, it feels like trying to twist a puppet farther than it can go. I think I could bend a single hinge, or a line of them."

Helen makes a line of hexagons in a zigzag shape.

Which Lu shines, and can then waggle through the air quite freely. "The possibilities of these are huge. Especially if they support weight -" She pushes the cube down to see if it will do that.

It will absolutely do that! One of Peerless's most iconic uses of barriers was herself and the rest of Vanguard standing on a shimmering platform in midair.

"I want so many of these. I might have to turn around and bring them all home to avoid tromping around with a flock of them between a dozen city-states, but they're more important than checking any given Aydanci possibility right away given that I won't be able to make more without you."

"I'm half-tempted just to move to your world," Helen admits. "I'm not going to--Marie would never go for it, and I'd miss the technological infrastructure. But going our separate ways feels so inefficient. Well, I'll get started making them--I imagine you'll want some to specific specifications, but if you want as many as it is sane to want just generating a ton in a variety of different shapes can only be useful--and you can start teaching me programming."

"Why wouldn't she go for it?" Lu wonders. "Oh, and, Bar, can I get a Shines, Shades: Subtle Servants?" She receives a book.

"Despite maintaining a policy of misanthropy because I'm guaranteed to outlive just about everyone I interact with on a daily basis, I have managed to accumulate some loved ones other than Helen. And I would also miss the infrastructure," says Marie, who is still reading her book but not so deep into it that she doesn't notice when someone says her name.

"What about the infrastructure? Here, Helen, read the intro chapter, it's better at this than I am."

"Remember the global communications network I mentioned? Mostly that," Helen says. "It's very...pervasive. We probably could adjust to living without it but it would be an unpleasant adjustment period."

"And I suppose it would be really hard to build one even with books from Bar?"

"...Yeah. It's the result of more than a hundred years of development. And it's not just the technology itself. There's almost a hundred years of culture surrounding it and content posted to it and stuff like that. It would be a little like trying to replace a library by building bookshelves, even if you could do it."

That...sort of works. It's tricky. At least to start with she'll get a just plain ordinary shine at least two times out of three.