"Cream and yogurt are both different ways of preparing milk. In this case milk from a cow, although people also use milk from goats or other animals sometimes," Vesherti explains. "Not everyone likes them — some people, their stomach gets upset if they try to eat things made from milk after a certain age — but most people think they taste good. Cream is rich and fatty, with a fairly mild flavor. It's usually used in sweet dishes. Yogurt has a more pronounced taste. It's kind of tangy. Both kinds are also good for making spicy food a bit less spicy."

Huh, that seems weird for the cows. He'll try it sometime when stomach problems won't ruin his day so badly, he thinks, and get a muffin for now.

"Well, it's no weirder than using eggs is for chickens. The cows produce more milk than they need, and get unpleasantly full. So they learn to come to us to get milked," Vesherti replies.

He is glossing over some details there. But cows are generally pretty content, given that free-range agriculture is the norm.

The phone interface is unfamiliar — but it's also pretty straightforward. So Traveler shouldn't find it too hard to order a muffin to be delivered out to him.

He's nursed some babies himself, he's pretty sure he's right on this one. He doesn't mean to make a big thing of it, though, it being weird doesn't mean it's a problem.

Anyway: Muffin. He orders a chocolate chip one, because chocolate is new and it sounds tasty, and declares it to be pretty good.

"I'm glad you like it; chocolate is a fairly popular spice. Personally, I like chocolate mixed with honey and spicy peppers."

Vesherti leans back in the seat of his cart, looking around for people to point out to Traveler to help with his project of learning more about how they interact with each other. It's a bit hard to pick, honestly — there are people playing a game in the park, a few couples walking hand in hand, a group of people having a discussion in front of a cafe, someone scaling the building beside the breakfast place, a man dancing down the street with headphones on ...

Oh, that actually works perfectly.

Vesherti points out the dancing man.

"You see that man there? I'm pretty sure he's listening to music, because he's dancing. But he's doing so using those ear-covers so that other people can't hear his music. That's one of the compromises we make, living in a city — making noise is fine, because it's how we communicate, but making repetitive loud or distracting noises would distress people. So people who want to listen to music will usually use ear-covers, unless there's a large group of people who all want to listen, or they okayed it with the people living nearby first."

Huh. The ear covers make sense - Crafters who want to do something loud in a shared space will put up a temporary soundproof building to do it in - but where's the music coming from?

"A tiny-lightnings based machine inside the ear-covers," Vesherti explains. "If you rapidly turn on and off the flow of tiny lightnings, it can shake nearby magnets; do that fast enough, and they shake in a way that causes an audible buzz. Vary the speed at which they buzz, and you can make music. Then control all that with a lightning-based pebbleclinker, since it's too fast for other machine techniques."

"We use the same design to send voices, for communicating with distant people, or to record music and listen to it again later."

Clever! You can make things vibrate in a sound-producing way with crafting, too, but it's way too tedious for most people to bother composing music that way, and as far as he knows nobody knows how to record it with crafting.

Vesherti gets a thoughtful look, and then searches for pictures of old analogue gramophones.

"I think this design should be pretty easy to make with Crafting," he remarks. "See, this bit here turns, which makes this needle wiggle a little as it follow this groove here; this lever amplifies the wiggle, so that the vibrations get loud enough to hear through this horn. Recording works the same way in reverse — you use a softened plate and a sharp needle to scratch the wiggles into it as it turns."

Huh! He hasn't figured out how to get things out into being common knowledge back home yet but he's sure they'll appreciate knowing about that when he figures it out.

"Communication with everyone on your world must be hard, without groups-of-groups," Vesherti commiserates.

Just the fact that people probably don't get early warnings of storms is actually a big deal. But it's also not something that he can help with unless they do a big import of technology, which isn't really feasible at this point.

Yeah. Although he'll be surprised if this in particular doesn't turn into a group megaproject, eventually. His middle son who helps edit his books is thinking about - well, probably not personally leading it, he doesn't have that much tolerance for being around other people, but getting it set up for someone else to.

"That makes sense; is there anything that we could do that would make it easier for Crafters to set up that kind of megaproject?" Vesherti asks. "I'm not immediately coming up with anything, but maybe you have a better idea of what makes it hard."

He doesn't know much about the details; he's never been involved in a megaproject before. One hurdle is going to be letting people know that there's a megaproject to join, though; writing something up about this world and what might be accomplished for people here and there by the project would be a good start on that.

Vesherti taps at his phone.

"I can ask people to make a write up. Is there a particular format that is easier for you to send with your ansible?"

Not particularly; mass is a limit, as always, but that ansible has a fair bit of it. If they're writing something up length is going to be the limit more than mass, people aren't mostly going to be willing to read a whole novel and mostly won't need to, either, to know if this is the right sort of thing for them.

"That makes sense. I was imagining that we would put together a single-page summary, and then later there could be a longer document with more details just for people who are interested."

A few pages would be better, it's hard to fit enough into one page to let someone know that something is worth uprooting their household and moving it across the world over. And a mid-length document aimed at the travelers who'll be distributing the pamphlet would also be good - maybe a dozen or so pages for that, written on the assumption that they'll mostly skim it rather than reading the whole thing; the goal there is to let them know what sorts of people will want the pamphlet.

Vesherti nods and notes this down.

"We should have a draft written up for you by the end of the day," he promises. "Although I might want to go through it with you to see if there's anything that you think should be included that we overlooked."

That seems like a good plan, yeah. They don't need to be in much hurry with it; there are some travelers set up about a day's walk from his son's territory, but it doesn't seem like they're planning on leaving soon and even if they do they already know enough about the situation to send any other travelers they run into his way.

This is, frankly, a deeply inconvenient level of communication infrastructure for the Crafters to have. But it is probably to be expected when they don't appear to have either an economy or a government. And more to the point, it's not something he can do anything about.

So he just nods in acceptance, and looks back out at the city.

"Unfortunately, a lot of our most interesting megaprojects are inside buildings, to protect them from the weather," he remarks. "We don't have to do it today, but ... what would strongly inviting you to enter a place look like? Would it help if we got some grey carpet to roll out in public areas that you're visiting?"

That might be worth a try if it's convenient for them, but it's not something he's used to at home so he's not confident it'd work. The usual way of doing it is for the territory owner to specifically invite the guest in - some Crafters need their hands held to cross the threshold into the territory; he can usually do without that but generally needs it to go into a building; he'll need to explain how touching works between Crafters before they do that - and then the territory-owner will stay with them so that they can see from their body language that they're still welcome, or drop them off in a greyed or guest-colored outbuilding if they need to separate for some reason. He suspects that here it won't specifically need to be the owner of the building; since it's body language based he expects that anyone who looks confident that they're allowed to be there and have guests will be able to do it for him.

"Ah, okay. That makes sense," Vesherti agrees. "Since you mentioned needing invitations when you and I were first talking, that was one of the things I'm prepared to do ­— I am, indeed, very confident that I can tell where I can bring you, since I'm familiar with the city and how it is designed. So I am perfectly happy to help you across thresholds and stay with you."

"How does touching work between Crafters? I've been assuming it was completely off limits except between family, because of your instinct."

He wishes it eased up for family - it does ease up for kids, specifically, up to about twelve or thirteen years old the instinct doesn't really apply to them in either direction - but it's actually based on being able to tell that the other person wants to be touched; not just that they wouldn't mind, but that they'd actually prefer it. For invitations usually one person will offer their hand and the other one will take it and the territory owner will gently tug the guest in and that's good enough all around.

Vesherti cocks his head.

"That's interesting. Do you think my lack of Crafting will be a problem for that? Because I can tell you with writing and body language, but that seems like it might be less intuitively obvious."