"If you keep traveling, you should learn eventually. But there is plenty of time. I will send a dictionary in Crafter glyphs when it is written," Vesherti writes. "Do you have more questions about what I expect in the city?"

Well, he's expecting to get there tomorrow evening and pick a place to leave his house, and then in the morning he'll make a walker and wait for Vesherti or someone else in blue to come get him. He'll have as much crafting material with him as he can reasonably build into the walker, for tools for himself or things to give out, and he'll have enough water for himself for the day and seeds and dirt with him for food for himself, as a backup, or to give out. He might bring his dog with him in the walker depending on how she's feeling about everything, and there's a chance he'll judge it best for the new chicken to bring her, though he doubts it. He's not going to be able to aim for a walker design that can fit into their vehicles but he's going to go for a slim and agile design that will hopefully be okay in their buildings, and he'll have parts of it greyed to allow for being touched - is their red signal discrete enough that he can mark a greyed part with red for 'please don't touch this' without designating himself entirely not to be interacted with? He does want to get a feel for how big of a risk that's going to be for him.

In the city, they're going to see the food area - he'll have a light breakfast before they go, so it's fine if this doesn't go entirely smoothly - and hang out in public watching people and probably having some conversations with them or joining in on other activities if the option presents itself. He's going to want to see inside some of their buildings if that's on offer and doesn't have much of an opinion on which ones besides what he already said about their collection-places; he'll ask his guide what's available to go see when he's ready for that if they don't volunteer options as they come up. They'll probably have it set up for someone to talk to him and publish the conversation; he's assuming that's not going to be first thing in the morning, and even if they're ready for him then he'd rather have more time to see how they live before he tries to answer questions about the differences between their species. He's assuming he can let them know he wants to head home at any time and he's going to want to be back a few hours before dark even if the day goes well.

He's assuming that the guide will know where he's allowed and not allowed to be, and be generally authorized to take him places he's allowed to be, and that they'll understand not to touch him or to let people touch him or his walker in non-greyed spots, and that they expect to be fine spending the day with him or that they're prepared to find him another guide if they need to leave or go red for more than a few minutes. It won't be a complete disaster if he's left alone and has to find his way out of the city, probably, but it will be very stressful for him and he's depending on them to not let that happen.

"Yes, that all is correct," Vesherti agrees. "Since you're using a walker, I'll bring a personal transport vehicle too, so I don't get tired walking. I expect to be able to accompany you all day, and if I need to go I'll call for one of my colleagues first. We can be done whenever you want, but I'll plan on being done a few hours before dark. I don't know which buildings we will go in yet, but we'll ask overnight, and I'll know in the morning."

"I'm not quite sure what you mean by marking a grey part with red — do you mean leaving it grey so that it can be touched, but outlining it in red so that people don't touch it? Our red signal doesn't work like that, but you can make small parts of your walker red without people stop interacting with you. We're already telling people it's very bad to touch you; we can also tell them some more complex rules for color-coding if it is needed."

Hm. So the issue he has here, with the red, is - so for Crafters, if part of his vehicle is indigo-and-gold and part of it is grey, that means it's perfectly fine to touch or use the grey parts and the indigo-and-gold parts aren't available for other people to interact with, and if someone touches an indigo part he's liable to lose the whole vehicle. He wants some parts grey here so that he's at less risk of losing the vehicle, but he also wants to see how good the locals are at not touching his things without the instinct for it, so he doesn't want the 'it's just entirely fine to touch this' part of the greying, and he doesn't have a pre-established marker for that, he's trying to invent one on the fly. If adding red to the grey doesn't do it he's inclined to go with something in the Crafter model but he's not sure if he should be trying to teach the locals how Crafters do things or just going all in on going native, and if he's doing the latter he's not sure how they'd signal it - if he's going with the Crafter model he'd probably tint the grey with indigo and sparkles to a degree where it doesn't register to him as his but it's not properly public-grey either, or maybe go with grey spots or something if his instincts turn out to play badly with that.

Vesherti gets a look of understanding.

"I understand now. Since we don't have a strong touching instinct, we are going to need to tell people how to interact with you anyway. So any signal is okay, as long as once you tell us it stays the same and people can learn it. I think grey-with-red-spots would be easy to remember. I think tinting the grey would be less good because not everyone has good vision, and they might not see subtle changes."

Grey with red spots will be fine; that's unambiguous for him, too. Is there anything else?

He shakes his head.

"I think that is everything we wanted to say. Thank you for talking to us. We covered a lot."

He'll see them the day after tomorrow, then.

He spends the rest of the evening getting the rest of the supplies stowed in the house; if they're still watching from a distance they'll see him construct a screw pump to move the water they brought into a collection tank with its intake on the roof. He has to go looking for his dog, walking his house along behind him, but she shows up when he's just a little ways away from where he'd been settled before, and they head in for the night after a little bit of gentle roughhousing.

The contact team piles back into the truck and returns to the airport.

And everyone else has a very busy next day.

Someone at the airport has a multi-meter to quickly test the wires with. But it's not sensitive enough to accurately measure the resistance of some of the samples, so they get shipped off to Largest City University, which has an electronics lab.

Close to midnight, a physicist stands in the lab, looking at a curl of wire suspended in place over a magnet.

"... it's very clearly diamagnetic," they note. "And the measured resistance is within measurement error. I know we're still waiting on the high-voltage electromagnet, but I will switch to social science if that's not a superconductor."

    "Well."

Elsewhere, someone is bent over a scribe table, carefully cleaning up a vectorization of a set of glyphs from the dictionary. The linguists are still arguing about text layout, but by the time the sun rises on Largest City again, there will at least be a font for Crafter glyphs.

And in Largest City, there are more specific preparations: picking out a good neighborhood to start with, making sure people everywhere know not to touch the alien or his walker, making sure that the streets will handle the walker, making sure the train station has a spot for him to leave his house, arranging for guards to help with crowd control if necessary, trying to make sure it's not necessary by making announcements, figuring out which apartment buildings are willing to be opened and which aren't ...

There's a lot to do, but that's how these things go. By the time he arrives, they'll be ready.

He's up at dawn the next day and on the roof not long after, quick-growing an ear of corn and some berries and tea leaves for his breakfast. An hour later he's out again, setting up a giant 'go this way' glyph on the ground in his intended direction of travel and doing a final check of the area to make sure he's not accidentally leaving anything behind. With that done, he brings his dog out and gets her set up to guide the house to its destination; the handhold he was using to bring it with him to find her last night does double duty as a pushbar for her to lead it as well.

He arranges himself and the new chicken on the roof once they're underway, adding a transparent inward-sloping guardrail to stop her from flying out, and settles in to spend the trip crafting whatever they've requested of him and taking notes on what he's seen so far for the book he's going to write about this experience.

When he checks, there's a letter from Vesherti:

Good morning,

We checked the wire samples — the one that was pure black was the most permissive of little lightnings. The others varied like this:

<diagram showing a nonlinear relationship between "conductivity" and "potential for static build up">

The pure black one was very useful; if you have time, we would like some larger samples of more material like that to examine. Ideally in shapes like this, and as strong and not wear out as you can:

<diagram showing a set of simple shapes, including a coil of wire, a torus, and so on>

Or if you could make crafting material that is like that but that can be moved like clay that does not dry out, that would be good too.

We're also interested in figuring out if a crafting material spinning wheel can help with our need for making little lightnings for our machines; do you think you could make a crank shaft with a large attachment plate, where all the parts are never wear out, and how fast it turns can be changed with a dial?

<diagram of a three-shaft crank with a large attachment plate clearly designed to hook into other machinery>

If you can, we should talk more about how big to make it; I do not think the ideal size would fit well in your house.

We have some more raw materials and the other chickens ready for you at the place that we will meet. I hope your journey goes smoothly.

We usually end our letters with our sound-based personal identifiers to show who they are from, but I can't write mine in Crafter glyphs, so:

- (Vesherti)
- Your greeter

The latter two diagrams are embedded 3D CAD models, and Traveler can spin them with his finger or a stylus. It's also possible to zoom in, although the gesture for that is probably less obvious.

And, in the air a mile or two behind him, there's a quiet ultralight drone gliding along, just to make sure he doesn't run into any trouble on his journey.

As his house walks, the first further signs of þereminian architecture that he will see are two enormous hyperbolic towers, just visible on the horizon as he comes over the first hill. They are releasing large amounts of steam into the cool morning air. If he looks closely, he can see that they're surrounded by more low-lying buildings and also fences. They're also out of his path of travel.

More parallel to his path is the train tracks — every few minutes, a train goes by from the airport (or returning from the city) at high speed.

The area he actually travels through is mostly empty, although as the day wears on he will come across the first roads: first little more than dirt tracks winding through fields of grain, and then switching to smooth black asphalt. The roads see a steady stream of trucks and busses headed to various outlying locations, but they do stop for him whenever his path takes him across a road, or slow down significantly if his dog pilots the house along a road with them.

The dog leads the house alongside the road rather than on it; traveler doesn't want to try sharing space with vehicles that fast. She doesn't mind the towers, but the trains bother her; after the first couple she stops startling away from them but he still opts to come down and move the house to the opposite side of the road. He has to come down to bring it across the cross streets' asphalt, too, when she balks at it, which slows them down considerably the first couple times; after that, he pauses for a few minutes to relocate himself inside and make a window on the front of his house, and then when he needs to come out it's at least somewhat faster.

Well, they can't do much about the asphalt. But it continues to not bite her. Or do much of anything other than lay there on the ground, really.

The area slowly gets denser, with occasional one and two story buildings, although there's still plenty of room to walk. Cross streets get more common, unfortunately. There are occasional people who stop to look at his house as it goes by, before going on with their business.

Eventually, following the same general direction as the train tracks brings them to a large, open building. It has no walls, but it does have a roof held up by supports. There's a large expanse of asphalt filled with dormant traveling machines, and beside it a large grassy field in which someone has put up a sign:

"Space for Traveler's House"

As they arrive, a much slower train departs from the building and heads into the city proper, which is through a thin band of trees from here. The tallest buildings are visible over the trees.

He eventually takes over for the dog, and guides the house through the densest final bit himself; it's late afternoon by the time he gets there, humming cheerfully to himself and looking around at everything. He gawks at the pavilion only a little before settling the house into the field a little ways from the sign.

He extrudes a sunshade from the side of the house and brings out a chair and side table to sit and watch the comings and goings.

Since they're pretty sure Crafters are more solitary, and he has plans to meet up the next day, Vesherti is not waiting at the train station.

... but a group of thoroughly briefed people in blue robes are hanging out at a table talking near one end of the station, just in case Traveler does feel like having some conversation.

Other than that group, most of the people passing through here are commuters. The areas north of the city are largely used for industry, so at the end of the day this mostly means people coming back from jobs, either being dropped off by company busses or (for smaller companies) driving cars. Then they wait on the platform, file into a train, and are whisked off to the city.

There are a few people going the other way, however: a few people who live outside the city and are returning home, and, when the right hour approaches, the evening shift.

People are generally not very talkative, although a few friends do run into each other and make conversation while waiting for the train. People do stop to stare at Traveler's house a little bit, but a person in purple robes quietly keeps anyone from coming over to him unsolicited. Several people do hold up their phones in his direction for a moment, before moving on.

Even with such a limited number of people (by city standards) passing through, he'll see a lot of variety. No tails or other genemods that might be expected from a Crafter population, but he'll see people holding hands, eating food, sitting alone, talking, signing, bobbing their heads to unheard music, and more.

Well, you know, he's watching them, it's only fair that some of them watch him back.

After a while he brings the dog out to sit at his feet and crafts up some grey chairs and puts up a sign: People can come and talk if they want; no more than three people or one group of up to five at once, please, and remember that Crafters are not to be touched.

This is obviously exciting. A large group of people forms up on the side of the station facing him, and the person in purple says something to them. Then everyone does something mysterious with their phones, and three people start making their way over. Two of the people (one in plain blue and one in blue decorated with clouds and birds) are holding hands; the other person is wearing a partially open powder-blue outer robe over a tight purple garment.

The woman in plain blue pulls a tablet out of her bag and slots her phone into it. A moment of fiddling later, she flips it around to show Traveler.

"Hello!" it reads.

They settle down in the chairs, being careful not to approach him too closely.

Look at all those people. He has perhaps made some sort of calculative error. Oh well, it's fine.

He replies with a sense of warm welcome, and that he thinks this new situation is quite exciting. Do they have questions for him?

They say a few words to each other. The woman with the tablet has apparently been selected as their spokeswoman, because she flips it back around and taps on it to respond.

"Yes!" she flashes at him. And then, composed with more hesitation and less grammar than Vesherti displayed:

"Do you find it bad to live with an animal? Or is it better because it is a thinking animal?"

The dog is pretty clever but dogs aren't talking animals, if that's what they mean. He likes having animals around, though; they're good company in addition to being useful. His dog guided his house here mostly by herself today, for example, after he explained that he wanted her to follow alongside the road with it.