"Because they wanted to borrow my stuff, or try to crack my diary cipher, or leave frogs in my bed, or hide from each other."

"...I think you grew up with bad people."

"I think they were pretty ordinary."

"How many co-prentices did you have? I only have two siblings."

"There were usually a total of six of us. Sometimes five for a while if the oldest one left and our teacher took a while to replace them. Five right now, I don't think he's replaced me yet."

"That's a bunch, but if he's not treating them like they're really his kids I guess it's not so much."

"And his wife had three or four. It was a big house. Not a lot of workshop space, though, we did most of our work on shines because you don't need a lot of room or equipment to make and program them compared to golems or automata."

"What did his wife do?"

"Makes shoes."

"That seems like it would take up space."

"There was workshop space, just not enough for seven people to all make large golems."

"Oh. I don't know how big golems are."

"You can make little ones, but you have to write all their programming on their surface area, so they can't be complicated if they're little, unless you make them out of paper, which is a good way for your golem to last about a week."

"So you program everything, not just shines?"

"No, it's just shines, automata, and golems. Pets and puppets don't get programmed."

"Pets are a kind of thing like golems and shines?"

"Pets are animals that get turned into servants, and then you can give them verbal instructions. I don't have any right now - I had a rat but she died a few years ago and since then I've been focusing on programming."

"How do you make an animal into a servant?"

"You hold it and concentrate on it. It takes a while and it's kind of hard to do the first time - that's why I had my rat, I needed one for practice to call myself a real servantmaker. It's easy after that though."

"You can mind control animals!?"

"...Uh? Sort of? It only works on animals, some nasty people have tried it on humans and it doesn't work. ...Well, on our kind of humans, I don't actually know if it'd work on you, but I don't think it would and I'm not going to try."

"I was just surprised. That's so weird. Animals don't have the same kind of mind that people do but they still have minds."

"They still act like themselves if their masters don't tell them to do anything specific. I made sure my rat wouldn't chew on my stuff or make messes in the house, and I had her bring me things and sit on my shoulder, but mostly she did whatever she wanted."

"Huh. We have pets where I'm from but they're just trained animals mostly, not mind controlled."

"People train animals the long way in my world too but it doesn't seem to work as well, it's just most people aren't servantmakers. Although I could make a decent living if I wanted to turn animals into pets and then tell them to do what others said. More if I did it with exotic animals that don't domesticate. I'm better at shines, though. I picked up most of my money the past couple years doing lights for a theater."