"I didn't check with any of my alts whether we have the same fingerprints or not but I doubt it, even identical twins don't have the same fingerprints."

"Easy way to check." Lorica pats the object. It bleeps. "Same fingerprints as far as the ash-eater can tell."

"Okay, I'm surprised. Ah well, dimensional bullshit, what can you do."

"Also the entire thing came in under budget, Bar had some good alternative materials suggestions in several cases!"

"Well, that's good. Bar's good at that kind of thing."

"Yup." Lorica returns all her borrowed tools. She hands Flicker the robot and then asks for a piece of paper to write up a user manual on. Bar provides; Lorica scribbles.

Marie also returns the borrowed amplifier.

"Your robot feels interesting and strange."

"Oh?"

"Oh, I get sensory feedback from my magnetism. I've never even seen some of those metals before."

"Oh yeah, I can't do a thing with exotic materials myself but some Tinkers are all about it and they come up with wacky metals and plastics and whatnot! And I can use them even if I wouldn't have the first idea how to force them to exist in the first place."

"Nifty. Hey, Bar, what kinds of exotic metals are there from her universe?"

Bar produces an extensive list, indexed by originating tinker or other metal-generation power.

"Ooooh, nifty." She begins browsing the list.

"Emily's quite fond of new kinds of metal. Apparently there are few enough kinds of normal magnetism-responsive metal that novel sensations along that axis are hard to come by in the normal scheme of things."

"I heard about a tinker in Kansas who made a teammate something to magnetize nearby non-ferrous metals."

"...Bar?"

Only one was made. I can't reproduce it, in the same way I could not reproduce specific art projects you made in grade school.

"I could make one! I'd have to tweak the design and it'll be more expensive than the ashbot but I could totally do it!"

"Hmm. I don't actually have any fixing-things magic myself, so I'm not sure it would be wise..."

"It ought to last for years, I didn't mean to imply that tinkertech falls apart at the drop of a hat. If your fine control is really good and you have a memory to match, I can just make it almost entirely out of metal and you can hold it in place if it tries to snap?"

"Oh, that's a good point. My fine control is excellent, but I'm not sure on what scale you're talking...I did this bracelet," she shows it to her. The detailing is really intricate and some of the details are small enough to be difficult to make out. "But I can't, say, pull the iron out of a piece of liver. Yet."

"I'm not expecting to incorporate liver into the design. Uh, I could make a mockup but I don't have my computer, still, and it's sort of hard to just describe what I'm thinking without something to actually interact with."

"And for a wide variety of reasons the solution we use when I have that problem won't work."

"What?"