He's gone around the globe at least four or five times, at this point! Mostly more casually than that first time, though. He'd been out on his own for a few years at the time and was starting to get a little bored, and he thought that a journey like that with a goal that wasn't to see a specific thing or place would help him find more interesting and unexpected things, which turned out to be true.

"How do you go about preparing for a long individual journey like that? Especially the first time, when you didn't have existing experience to rely on?"

Most of it wasn't directly that difficult; he was seeing new places in a more intensive way than he'd done before but he mostly wasn't more than a couple days' travel from other people, so if he ran into trouble he wasn't too far from help. The big challenge was crossing the pacific ocean, which takes about a month and is the best combination of safe and comfortable to do by air, so he spent most of the trip experimenting with different designs for an all-in-one flying house and figuring out what he could do without to fit everything else into one.

"Some of our earliest attempts to cross the Pacific by air went awry because without landmarks to navigate by it's difficult to ensure you're on the right course. Was that a problem you had, or was your exact course less important, since you had your whole house with you?"

The course was important in the sense that he wanted to stay in the jetstream, but that's not too hard to figure out as you're going. It would definitely have been harder if he hadn't had his whole house with him; he wound up off course in his sleep a couple times on that crossing and had to work out how to get back to where he wanted to be, but it only slowed him down by a handful of days and that wasn't a big deal at all.

Þurvo shuffles through her list of questions.

"What do you keep with you in your house on a crossing like that? Or normally, when you're traveling between closer places? It seems as though you might just be able to keep an undifferentiated lump of crafting material and form things as you need them."

In large part that's how it works, yep. Flying is harder because the more material you have the bigger balloon you need to lift it and the more unwieldy it is, and some things can't be kept as minis and undifferentiated crafting material, or need more work to keep that way - most plants can be kept as seeds or grown in a compact form temporarily, but not all of them will survive a month that way, so he had to figure out which ones could and what to do for plants he wanted but couldn't keep that way, and how the logistics of keeping dogs and chickens would work - he was able to fish but landing for that traded off against making progress, and he didn't want to spend enough time on it to keep everyone in the household supplied that way, so he had to learn how to judge how long a frozen supply would last and decide how many of which animals to bring based on that. When he's traveling by land he more or less doesn't have that sort of problem at all; amount of crafting material is a constraint but if he wants half a dozen houses to hold everything he just needs dogs or something to guide them and that's usually not hard to arrange.

"How do you go about teaching a dog to do that kind of navigation work? And why aren't they suited to navigating while flying as well?"

He mostly wouldn't ask a dog to lead a trip like that, unless the route was very easy and obvious; he'd guide the leading house himself and ask the dogs to follow him, and that's intuitive enough that once they have the idea of pulling a house along at all they can do it. He's seen dogs guide flying houses but it's much harder for them to understand it, because it's not a natural form of travel for them, they have to think about where they want to go and what actions they have to take to go there rather than just walking behind someone.

"Interesting! How would you describe the relationship between you and the dogs you travel with? Do they get a say in where to go next or how to get there?"

They mostly don't get input into where he goes, but they have plenty of opportunities to leave the household if they want to individually do something else, and if he's in the mood for it he'll let them lead him places - they'll come get him if they find someone in trouble or something they want him to do something about, too, that's one of the things he can tell from their tone of voice. They'll warn him about bad terrain if he's traveling in an area they know, too, and sometimes they'll show him an alternate route, but that's pretty rare. Relationally they're friends and helpers, he plays with them and makes sure they have a warm dry house and good food and he patches them up if they get hurt, and they keep an eye on things around him and his houses to help keep them safe from dangerous animals and hunt with him.

"What's a place that the dogs have taken you that you might not have visited otherwise?"

A lot of her questions are about how Traveler interacts with his animals, because the world is doing a lot of thinking about animal rights at the moment. Largest Waterfall City has already granted the local elephants citizenship and is trying to figure out how to make them aware of their constitutional rights. But she wants to weave those in with questions about his travel, because people are sure to be interested in the different places on Traveler's world as well.

He's happy to talk about his travels and how animals have been involved with them. The most interesting ones, in his opinion, are the domesticated species and the talking ones; dogs and chickens and so on are very noticeably less smart than crows or elephants but they still learn from having Crafters tell them things, and they have opinions and preferences and moods and relationships and so on that are interesting to get to see and interact with, and they're always around, so they make up an important part of the background of his life. Talking animals have their own things going on - it's not unheard of for a crow to join a Crafter household or a Crafter to decide to live with a mammoth tribe, but it's uncommon - but being smarter and able to communicate with Crafters and each other means they can propose working together on things in a way other animals largely can't, so you'll see things like crows or parrots scouting terrain or relaying messages or mastodons helping haul things in exchange for food or other kinds of help, like nesting boxes or bridges set up where they want them or dangerous animals removed from the area; he's seen a couple places where elephants have whole big garden areas where they've gotten Crafters to set up food plants and maintenance systems and the elephants mostly do the upkeep on them themselves.

He hasn't met all the terrestrial talking species he knows of - there are lots of kinds of parrots - but he's taken a pretty good survey of them. He wouldn't be surprised if there's a reclusive great ape species he's never heard of or some species even less interested in talking to outsiders than prairie dogs that nobody has picked up on yet. He's also met manta rays and a few species of dolphins and whales, for aquatic talking species. They vary a lot in what kinds of personalities they have; dolphins in particular tend to be more ruthless than he likes, and it's easy to get on the wrong side of great apes since they have a more aggressive territoriality instinct that Crafters can trigger. Crows are great, though - he wouldn't call them domesticated but they're not far off, they're more common than dogs in a lot of places where Crafter live and that's saying something - and manta rays are really cool, though living on the ocean is really not for him, he gets seasick too easily.

Þurvo is fairly good at her job, and keeps the conversation flowing. It helps that Traveler has seen some genuinely very interesting things.

"What kinds of things vary between Crafters in different regions, as opposed to being individual to a specific Crafter or nearly universal?"

That's a good question. It's mostly interpersonal and aesthetic things that vary like that, and of course some practical ones relating to living in different climates or near different animals or things - different games and styles of singing and designs of territory marker are common in different places because of how people pick them up from each other, and different kinds of vehicles are more common in places where they're more useful, and people develop different kinds of dogs and approaches to hunting and keeping themselves safe depending on what their surroundings are like. Another one that varies that isn't quite regional but also not quite individual is things that are done or designed by experts - if someone wants a particular body modification or a particular feature designed for their walking machines or something like that, and they can't do it themselves, they'll usually get it done by someone who's close, so you see regions where a particular stylistic quirk is more common just because that's how the local expert likes to do it, or because a previous expert liked to do it that way and the designs are still around.

"Body modifications must be pretty common to be able to identify regions like that. What kinds of modifications do people get, and how popular are they?"

He expects that most Crafters have some sort of modification - maybe six or seven in eight, as a guess, if you include things like improving muscle tone but don't include healing injuries - but invisible functional and medical ones are a lot more common than visible ones; a lot of Crafters feel strongly about keeping their natural appearance, himself included. He'd say that maybe one in four or one in five Crafters have an obvious physical modification, and among those it's pretty evenly divided whether they have just one or two things versus extensive changes. Color changes and simple add-ons like fur or horns or scales are the easiest to do and the most common; basically everyone knows how to fleshcraft a color change and most people know how to do the others, too, they aren't hard to figure out. Custom glands under the skin are a more intermediate change; that's a very common one to get for reproductive purposes (which he's counting as a non-obvious mod since people usually put them in subtle places) but he's seen people do other things that way - he's met a few people with perfume glands and someone who had a gland for a glowing fluid that they'd decorate themselves with and use to mark their path so they didn't get lost. Improving muscle tone and generally getting organs back into a better version of their natural state is also intermediate; you don't want to mess with it without guidance but you don't have to pick up the whole specialty to learn to do a few things on that level. The dividing line for when you realy want a specialist is when you're moving things around or adding new things to existing systems or making new systems to integrate with the existing ones; you need to know what you're doing in order to do that safely. And of course there are gradiations in complexity among things the specialists can do: tentacles with tasting patches are easier and more common than extra arms or eyes, which are easier and more common than entirely new sorts of limbs or sensory organs.

He doesn't want to be overwhelmed with requests, but he can do simple mods and the reproductive gland one for people.

That answer momentarily stuns Þurvo, but she recovers quickly.

"Wow; that's a lot of variety. Are there any limits on the kinds of changes that fleshcrafting can make, or is it all down to the skill of the specialist?"

The changes do have to be physically possible, the same as with other crafting, and some ways it's physically possible to be aren't possible to survive, but other than that it's all down to the skill of the specialist as far as he knows.

He should also mention that the Crafter territoriality instinct applies to fleshcrafting the same way it applies to everything else, so acting on someone against their expressed preferences is just not possible. A fair number of Crafters who learn fleshcrafting have trouble using it for anything medically complicated, even, because they can't work on people without those people making more specific requests for things than non-experts can do in a medical situation.

... there are going to be so many more unsolved murders. Or everyone's going to move to the asteroid belt and become voidforms. One of the two, probably.

Þurvo takes a deep breath. That is not her job to plan for or deal with right now.

"How well can people adapt to controlling new limbs or using new senses? Is there a period of adjustment, or does fleshcrafting help with that somehow?"

There's an adjustment period, yeah. Tentacles are the most difficult to get used to and they take several months to a couple years - he's been told that operating them is like having an extra tongue, more or less.

Okay, so at least that means they aren't fleshcrafting brains. Or not much. Or they just don't have enough science to know how, and Crafting is going to turn every neurosurgeon into a potential mind-controller.

This still isn't a helpful line of thought. She goes back through her list of potential topics.

"Earlier, you mentioned leaving a physical description of yourself until we were talking about fleshcrafting. If it's not too personal to ask, what body mods have you gotten? Did you have to go on a journey to find a specialist for them?"

Not a long journey, but a bit of one, yes. He figured out pretty early that he wanted to be able to bear children, which is something fleshcrafting can do, so he had that done.

"How do you go about finding a specialist who can do those sorts of things, if you don't have global communications?"

Word of mouth, usually. In his case the person who raised him for the latter part of his childhood knew of a fleshcrafter they thought would be able to do it, and that one couldn't - there are two versions of the modification and he wanted the more difficult one - but told him about someone else further away who could. (He's pretty nostalgic about the whole thing.)