"I appreciate it. This new ratchet is a lot stronger than the one it's replacing, it'll let the robot get between more distant footholds, watch." The robot ratchets its way across her test chunk of climbing wall.

"But it is heavier?"

Normal robot-construction comes back after that. The genie never bothers to clarify that all the monsters it found were at least two blocks away.

When Margaret eventually checks the data-dump, she finds that results are inconclusive on whether areas frequented by genies and nature spirits tend to also get more monsters; apparently controlling for the human population is complicated. She concludes this genie at least is probably providing more protection than danger and carries on building and testing and refining and explaining without bringing it up again.

The genie doesn't bother to report any further on its daily sweep of the local area.

One day, some Spirit Bearers are flying over a neighborhood between the junkyard and her house, looking around.

Could be related, could be unrelated. She looks up at the spirit-bearers and appreciates the coolness of their raiment.

One has a ridiculously long flowy cape thing, like two long tails of cloth behind her, in pale white and green. It doesn't seem to be slowing her down. She's surrounded by a bubble of faint green light, which is carrying along a man in lots of brown and yellow, whose raiment is more like something out of an RPG - open coat, tons of bracelets and zippers and really elaborate boots.

The man is pointing where to go next. They pause and talk on headsets in midair, then head off to somewhere else.

That flowy cape thing is really cool, if hugely impractical. She watches them go, then sets off for home again.

The genie seems to be learning a lot. It rarely asks basic questions like 'what is a volt' anymore, though they still tend to be pretty off-the-wall and unintuitive.

School proceeds. Teddy is trying to develop a wish size scoring system.

Eeee learning! Teaching is fun. Margaret wants to hear all about Teddy's wish size scoring system. Is he scoping it to size of favors done for the spirit in question, or by frequency, or what? 

"Size of favors, but how the genie judges it, not how hard it is for someone to fulfill. It also seems like any particular genie has a limit to how much magic they're willing to do in a given time period, and a bunch of small wishes seem to match up to one large one in that regard."

"Makes sense. Spirit-bearers get worn out from doing a lot at once, maybe genies are the same."

"If it works like that, genie exhaustion works on a scale of months. I'm going to work out a table of wish efficiencies next. You can get four dementia cures for one limb replacement... Something like that."

"Sounds good to have. Are you planning to publish this stuff?"

"Probably. There's people who've worked out common favors and common wishes approximately but I'm trying to put numbers to everything and I don't think anyone else has done something like that yet. Or if they did I couldn't find it."

"Good. Even if someone else has done it, yours could be more useful or differently specialized or more findable or all three."

"Here's hoping. I think it varies by genie a lot, too - I've been separating my data per genie with a separate bucket for unknown ones or those who have only granted a few wishes, and the fit lines are different."

"Hmm! Is it just that some genies uniformly want more for a given wish, or do different ones seem to have different orderings? Either way it could be either a matter of preferences or a matter of capabilities."

"That's what I want to figure out. It's all just theorizing for now. Maybe when I think I know what I'm doing, I'll try to find a genie and ask it some questions."

"Maybe if the one in my basement sticks around after the robot's done you can ask them. Speaking of which, I could use some robotics advice."

"Oh, sure. Have to get this robot right. What do you need?"

She pulls her blueprints out of her bag and spreads them out in their library carrel. "So, if I put these motors in parallel, they'll each get more voltage, but I'm worried it'll drain the battery too fast."

"Hmm... I think that's a bad idea. More importantly, they'd all control in parallel. Really, you ought to have a dedicated controller for each motor - are these stepper motors or straight voltage motors? Steppers are real easy to control, but..."

They can nerd out in the library for a while, but eventually Teddy has to leave.

And Margaret has to go home and repeat the entire conversation to Basement Genie as close to verbatim as possible and then act on Teddy's suggestions.

"You got help from someone else? Who is it? Where are they?"

"His name is Teddy, and I don't know his address, but if you want to meet him maybe I could get him to come to the junkyard with me?"