Oh, neat! Alien dog sign language! It makes sense that they'd use body shapes instead of hand shapes, since she has paws.

They throw the disk in a long pass to get things started, and everybody takes off running.

Oh boy, playtime!!

He watches for a second to make sure there are no immediate problems, and then heads back toward the presumable interviewer, commenting on the way that he's definitely going to need to write something up for them about how animals work.

"I think people are erring on the side of treating her like a person, since you've shown us that the smart animals are closer to that than we thought," Vesherti observes. "But that's not really something we've done before. So having a written guide sounds useful."

The interviewer has put "Hello, Traveler!" up on her screen, but is otherwise comfortable waiting for him to come over and get settled before they start.

He does take a moment to get settled, adjusting his walker so that he's on the same level as her and, when she doesn't seem to be in a hurry, growing a small micrantha bush to snack from while they talk and offering her and Vesherti fruit from it as well if they'd like.

They both accept a fruit curiously.

"I'm going to sit over there and take a break while you talk," Vesherti tells Traveler. "But if you need anything, just telepathy me."

He can only project about thirty feet but he can also go get him if need be, that's fine.

(The micrantha fruit look like tiny green oranges and smell and taste like limes, but sweeter.)

The spot he picked is within that radius, just off to the side. It's far enough away for city-based þereminian social instincts to read it as 'uninvolved in the current conversation', but perhaps Traveler's intuitions have different notions of how far 'far' is.

"It's good to meet you!" the interviewer writes. "I'm Þurvo. Before we start, I just wanted to explain a few things, since you have less context for this than the usual people I talk to."

She is pretty good with languages, but still so glad that the computer interface people have got an assisted typing mode up so she doesn't have to try and hand-draw all of these glyphs.

"I have a list of questions I want to ask you, but you don't need to answer any questions you don't want to. That includes retroactively — if you answer a question, and then decide that you don't want me to share that answer, just let me know and I'll leave it out. I've made a promise to always record everyone's answers accurately, to the best of my ability, so you don't need to worry about being taken out of context. Also, my questions are just intended to guide the discussion and make sure we have things to talk about, but we can talk about whatever you want to talk about. Once we've had our conversation, I'm going to translate it into our language, and cut out any parts that I think are less interesting to make a condensed version. Then I'll share that condensed version with the people who like to read my conversations with people on the lightning network. Does that all make sense? Is there anything that you want to discuss before I start recording the conversation?"

That makes sense to him. He expects to be fine talking about anything that isn't too personal.

She nods.

"I suspected as much, but it's good to make sure everyone has an understanding. Alright!"

She pulls the microphone over, and starts taking audio notes of what they both say, since she can't record Traveler in the normal way for a podcast.

"Traveler, it's great to meet you. I wanted to start by asking you to describe yourself, to give our readers some starting context. That could be a physical description, or it could be a description of what you do or who you are — whatever you think is most important about yourself."

He'll skip the physical description; they can come back to that if they wind up talking about fleshcrafting, since all the interesting stuff needs that context. As far as the type of person he is - he's a traveler, he writes books about his travels, he's helped raise three sons; compared to other Crafters he's more gregarious and handles change better but he's pretty much just some guy.

"What kinds of things do you write about in your books?"

He writes about whatever seems interesting, really. The main thing he's trying to do with his books is capture the feeling of getting to travel and see and learn about all sorts of things, for people who can't or don't want to for whatever reason, and there are lots of different aspects of that and ways to approach it that he tries to express in different books.

"Is there a particular book that you've written that stands out as capturing that feeling particularly well?"

Different ones do it for different people, is the impression his fanmail has given him, but his personal favorite for that is one of his earlier books, from when he'd settled into the traveling lifestyle enough to feel confident in it but he still felt like there was a lot to learn about that rather than just about the places he was traveling in, and he wrote about that in parallel to the first time he traveled entirely around the globe, so he got to write about both how his abilities and resources let him do that difficult thing and how it felt like there was a lot of the world left to explore, too. His later book about visiting the great ape territories is pretty similar in those ways but he was more experienced then, it was also a challenging expedition that stretched his capabilities but he'd lost some of the sense of the whole world being new.

Þurvo raises her eyebrows.

"You've traveled all the way around the globe? That sounds like a difficult journey indeed. How did you decide you wanted to attempt it?"

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.