"The robots are apparently perfectly mundane technology, actually."

"Huh."

"Is tinkertech not?"

"I mean, sort of, we need parts - usually, anyway, some biotinkers can do stuff with their bare hands and own bodies - and there's usually a mechanism behind whatever it's doing, but no one else understands what we're doing except for other tinkers with similar specialties, no one else can reproduce the tech - whether they just literally can't or no one has ever been exact enough in following the assembly steps, I don't know - and no one else can maintain the tech. If I make you an ash-cleaning robot it will suck electricity out of your wall or live on the ashes it eats up or something, and when anything goes wrong with it, it won't work, and you won't be able to fix it, but if I did invent one maybe Bar could make it even though it's almost magic?"

I can only sell things that are in some meaningful sense 'available for sale' somewhere. I might be able to find an object with similar effects, and if you made and sold at least three of the same design and did not construe them as being limited edition when so doing I could perhaps sell copies. It doesn't count as magic but almost always does count as too unique.

"What I actually meant was that their invention wasn't accomplished using any kind of inventing things super power."

"Huh. Non-tinker robotics is mostly confined to industry, not warfare, back home."

"Thankfully we don't actually have Sentinels, those being the killer robots, back home."

"I don't think we have any kind of military robots back home. I could be wrong. I'll have to check."

"Is 'inventing things' usually a viable power option? Because it isn't in my world," Helen says.

"It is for my kind of cape. One day I got a taste of my worst nightmare, the next day I started building little doodads to fix my clumsiness and designing my own computer from scratch."

"Oh, you had that too? Mine went away when we turned sixteen and our basics came in; gemini are peak-human physical condition and coordination from that age on. But we don't have tinkers."

"Our world has the occasional engineering genius, and sometimes there's strong evidence that the genius is a power, but the stuff they make still works like normal stuff, you can teach people to fix it and make it and stuff."

"Yeah, we have nothing like that."

"Not even, like, Edison and Tesla, or nobody who you think it might be a power?"

Snort. "Nobody who we think it might be a power. We had Edison and Tesla."

"If I think about it too much tinkering is actually very bizarre. It's sort of like a really, really supercharged version of... noticing how much linguistic information you know just by being a native speaker, or being able to sing a song in a different key even if you couldn't figure out the transposition on an instrument. But that's too - passive, in addition to being too trivial. That's something that happens without you noticing. I definitely notice when I'm tinkering and I'm actively directing myself, but simultaneously it's sort of like a trance state, people call it 'tinker fugue'..."

"That sounds very strange."

"It's so weird. But it's amazing for getting a lot done in a short time. When I let a fugue get going I don't have the slightest impulse to slow down until I'm done. My software bot reminds me to eat and sleep, but I don't waste time playing video games or anything."

"Sounds like really good flow state. On meth."

"Yeah, that's a good way to put it. You can watch me do it if you want to fund Flicker's little ash robot. I think I can keep the whole thing under two thou if I can borrow tools without buying them, even less if Bar has good alternative materials suggestions."

"Sounds enlightening. Sure. Bar, whatever she needs to build the ash robot is on me."

"I suspect it's remarkably lucky that while Bar doesn't allow arbitrage there's no such restriction on various worlds one can visit through her."

"What do you mean?"