Okay, you know what? The dog seems to be perfectly capable of getting whatever it is she wants here without his involvement. He's just going to focus on his breathing, on the feeling of the seat under him, on the feeling of the cool night air.

The train doors swish closed, and the train pulls out of the station.

A moment later, his phone whistles to him in their private code: "Location monitoring — Unexpected observation — Intent: seek confirmation — Intent: call Kaðer"

He starts crying. He needs to update the coding for his contingencies not to point to her ...

"Deny — Sleep one hour," he whistles back, although it takes a few attempts for him to get a clear tone.

"Acknowledged — Intent: sleep one hour," the phone replies.

The crying doesn't surprise her. She's already right where she's supposed to be and doing what she's supposed to do about it, though. She'll stay put.

Not for an hour, though; she's patient but she's not that patient. Twenty minutes, maybe, if nothing else happens in the meantime.

It only takes perhaps ten minutes for his crying to turn to sniffles, and then to silence again.

"Some fucking days," he tells her. "I need to go to bed, and honestly I don't particularly care about making a bad impression on you or Traveler at this point. I'm going to move my feet."

He sort of falls sideways onto the bench and tries to wiggle out from under her.

She backs off and lets him up as soon as he starts moving, though she stays close to him.

"... oh, you respond to movement. Of course you do. I wish I knew what I was saying to you."

He's kind of worried that if he holds still she'll try to touch him again. But he has the advantage of having thumbs.

He stands on the bench, grabs the handholds on the pillar of the station, and hauls himself up to the little spot where the beams join the pillar.

"Query: time to train," he whistles.

"Heard: query — Response: 10 minutes," his phone replies.

She looks up at him for a few seconds, cocking her head as she assesses the situation, then moves off a little ways and sits with her back to him, facing the train tracks.

Okay, cool. He will wait and take deep breaths, then. Things are ­— well, no, they are not fine. But he has a plan, at this point, even if it is basically just "avoid the dog, get onto the train, get home, collapse in bed".

He can do that.

The train is on time. Six minutes later, it returns and opens its doors again, releasing a few early morning workers. They nod to Traveler's dog and head out toward their cars.

The man drops down from the beam and hurries into the train car.

She looks at him when she spots him moving, but doesn't get up or anything. When the platform is clear again, she trots back over to her person's house.

There's another relatively large group of people that make their way through a bit before dawn, around the shift change. But otherwise the night is quiet, disturbed only by the sound of steel rolling on steel as the train makes its unceasing journey back and forth.

A bit after dawn, Vesherti and some helpers come and wait in the field outside Traveler's house. They have brought breakfast, more items to be turned into crafting material, meat, and various other items.

They have chairs, though, and are perfectly content to wait, share breakfast, and drink some ginger tea for as long as it takes Traveler to be ready to face the day.

The dog is sleeping by the door when they arrive, but comes over while they're getting set up to see what they're doing and beg for bits of their breakfast.

And the Crafter heads up to his roof to gather his breakfast ingredients not long after that; he waves when he spots them waiting and brings his and the dog's breakfasts out shortly after.

Vesherti isn't sure whether to feed Traveler's dog; on the one hand, feeding your guests is polite. On the other hand, he's spoken to some people who raise herding dogs, and they said that generally the dog's owner has behaviors they want to reward and discourage, and interfering with that is rude. And he's not totally clear on how much the dog is like a tool, a pet, a child, or an adult with a communication disorder.

He ends up just setting a bowl of water down for her. And then, after checking the ingredients for things that are known to be harmful to dogs, a mug of lukewarm tea.

The diplomatic team did bring enough breakfast to share with Traveler, but if he prefers to make his own that's fine too.

"Hello," Vesherti greets him by way of a screen on a little rolling stand when he comes out. "I hope you slept well."

She seems enthusiastic about the tea, though still interested in their food - at least until her own comes out, at which point she goes and gets that instead.

He did sleep well, and he hopes they all did too. He also got a lot of material converted to crafting material during the trip yesterday if they want him to make the ansibles or crankshafts or anything else before they head into the city.

"If you don't mind, it would be helpful to have the ansible and crankshaft designs we sent you made for testing," he agrees. "We also brought more spare things for you to make crafting material with."

He points at the grey crates they've set in the field.

"There's no rush, we just don't want you to run out and I know the crankshaft our learning people asked for is fairly large."

Yeah, they should definitely keep him supplied with material to convert, the total mass of crafting material on the planet is going to be the limiting factor for a lot of things. Fortunately he prefers the kind of conversion where he can do it all day, not the kind where it gets boring after a few hours, and the stuff they've been bringing has mostly been good for that.

Anyway. He wasn't sure what density they wanted for the crankshaft or what size or density they wanted for the other things, but if they can clear those questions up he can make everything now, to the limits of how much mass he's got available.

Vesherti has had a whole day to prepare. So he happens to have some samples with him that are exactly the density the scientists wanted for their various tests, to side-step the whole unit translation problem.

He sets the samples on the table for Traveler, and points out which one is which.

He goes in to get the crafting material, rolling it out of the house in big heavy spheres.

Behold: Objects.

Vesherti smiles at him.

"Thank you. This will be very helpful."

A few members of the team collect the created objects and roll them up onto the platform to be sent out on the train (which was equipped with a cargo car this morning for the purpose).

"I am ready to accompany you to the city whenever you are ready to go," Vesherti tells him. "We can go wherever you'd like, but I was planning on a park near the edge of the city where you can see people interacting and have space to hang back or get close to them, as you please. After that, there is a building with lots of small territories in it that the people living there have said you can come see, to see what our houses are like. I remember you said you wanted to get some sense of how people interact with each other in the city before going anywhere more specific."

The park sounds good to him; the idea of going into strangers' indoor-spaces is strange to him and he's not sure he'll be comfortable with it even with clear permission, but he is curious, if they're comfortable with giving it a try. (For the reciprocal curiosity, he's planning on making them a small translucent copy of his house once he has enough crafting material and fewer urgent uses for it.) He's also interested in trying some of their food today; he was talking to some people from the train last night and they mentioned a preserved dill carrot thing that sounded interesting.

He nods.

"The park has some shops — centralized places for trading for a particular kind of thing — some of which have food and two of which have carrot pickles. You can both see how trading for them works and try them," Vesherti informs him.

"While we travel to the park, there's an idea that we use for living in groups that I want to prepare you for in advance, because it is invisible and Crafters don't seem to have an equivalent. Do you ever run into a situation where three Crafters each have something one of the other Crafters wants, in a triangle shape? Like, person a is a dancer who wants a new seed; person b has that seed and wants a library ansible; and person c has a library ansible and wants to learn to dance?"

He's seen cases like that, yeah. Crafters have a few different approaches to setting up that kind of group trade, though it also doesn't come up all that often.

"If you have more people, living closer together, and with more things that not everyone can just make, the situation comes up more," Vesherti tells him. "The average person living in the city runs into three to six situations like that every day, sometimes involving many more than three people. So we have a system for handling group trades smoothly called 'money'."

"The idea is to add something that everyone always wants — money. That way, any two people in a situation like that always have a trade they can make. So person a can trade money to person b for the seed. Then person b can trade money to person c for the ansible. Then person c can trade money to person a for dance lessons. They don't have to all meet up, or even all agree, in order for the group trade to work. And, once everybody is familiar with that idea, that actually gives them a reason to want money. People want money because it is easy to trade for things ­— if you have a little, you can trade it for what you need without lots of extra work, so it is convenient to have."

"We don't use the money system for everything, but it turns out to be pretty useful. For example, everybody on the planet wants the things you have to trade. But if they all tried to come talk to you individually, that would be inconvenient and overwhelming. So what happens is that they have traded some of us money in exchange for our time working with you and making things go smoothly, so that you will help us get Crafting, new seeds, and so on. That's why we're willing to get you a bunch of things and arrange the things you ask for — not just because you're interesting and because we want to be good hosts, but because the specific people who are having to do work for your visit are getting money for that work from everyone else, which we'll be able to use to trade for the things we want."

"So it's better for those of us who are working to make your visit nice, because we get the things we want by doing things we're good at and know how to do. And it's good for everybody else, because they each only need to trade a little bit of money for their share of whatever Crafted things we're able to get. And it's better for you because you can deal with only a few of us, instead of all of us, and you don't need to worry about being unfair, because we're making sure everything balances in the background. The idea doesn't work perfectly for everything, and there are more details, but that is the general idea. It works well enough to enable big, complicated group trades that would otherwise be hard to arrange."

Huh, clever. Crafters use crafting material that way sometimes, since it's at least a little bit useful to almost everyone, but not everyone will accept it - he usually won't, it's too much trouble to transport - and it's usually not a very good trade for the Crafter offering it. He sees how it'd be handy to have a version without those issues.

(Also the obvious glyph for that is 'value-object', like this.)