"I bet it will be. I was hoping that we could compare the stars in order to figure out what direction your planet is in. Let me look some of those stars up on our maps."

They fiddle with their phone.

"... okay, so the ones you said moved are some of the closest stars. The missing one I can't find any mention of, which makes sense. The new ones ... I'm not sure. Depending on when you looked, one of them might be a structure in orbit, but the others are too northerly for that. So maybe your planet is quite nearby?"

Oh, he's pretty sure it's the same planet - the continents are similar, too, and the big differences all look like water level changes.

"Huh. But the stars aren't exactly the same, which is weird. Unless ... do you think you've traveled in time? Maybe you're from the future?"

Or the past, it's not strong evidence when someone could have taken it as crafting material but they don't have anything that seems like it could be the remains of a city. Neither of those would explain why one instance has crafting and the other doesn't, though.

"I was thinking that it seems harder to lose Crafting than it is to gain it," the person points out. "Although I guess that depends on how Crafting is transmitted. But if the continents aren't different enough for the cities to have been erased, it's definitely a little weird that you haven't seen any."

He's not sure crafting is transmitted, though of course he's going to try anyway. But at home the only time you find a Crafter who can't craft or a talking animal who can't communicate is when they have really serious cognitive impairments.

"Well, what do you know about the history of how new kinds of animal develop over time?"

Vesherti silently hopes that Traveler won't be too off-put by a conversation with what seems to be a focused-person. Then again, if Crafters don't really do names, the fact that they didn't introduce themselves might pass without notice.

Genecrafting has some interesting implications for that but he hasn't put much thought into it personally, why?

"Oh — I was thinking that the most recent common ancestor of all the thinking animals you've listed was a long time ago, so if Crafting were genetic, rather than environmental, it should be seen in more species than you listed. Unless it evolved independently multiple times, which is possible, but less likely a priori. But I hadn't thought about genecrafting; maybe some ancient genecrafters transplanted it to a bunch of different species."

They adopt a considering expression and start thinking about alternate theories.

Huh.

No, it seems extremely implausible to him that talking animals are someone's megaproject, or even a group one - getting a change into one species is a megaproject, and there's a couple hundred kinds of parrot all of which can talk, plus how did they figure out that dolphins and manta rays are smart enough for it and why did they bother with them? Not to mention the difficulty of getting the great apes to sit still for it. And that's assuming they figured out the genes for it in the first place; Crafters don't know of there being genes for crafting at all, so that would have been very hard even if they assume it's possible somehow.

"Okay — so if it wasn't genecrafted in, then it either evolved multiple times, or isn't genetic," they surmise. "Hmm. Maybe transmitting Crafting depends on something environmental? So it went away world-wide at some point and you are from the past?"

It just going away doesn't seem to him like something that could happen but he doesn't have evidence for that, just the feeling that it wouldn't. - also if he was from their past he'd expect them to have some indestructible crafted things around, even if it was long enough ago for everything else to have weathered away, that just occurred to him. Maybe they do and he just hasn't heard about it yet?

His interlocutor crosses their arms in a gesture he might recognize as "no".

"We don't. If we had those kind of things, they would be common knowledge. This is really puzzling!"

It really is! He's hoping people in his world will be able to find some clues about it.

"Comparing star charts more precisely is probably a good first step. Maybe we can narrow down a time difference based on those, and that will give more ideas of what to look at."

They blink.

"Oh — I'm Xenife. It's nice to meet you."

It's good to meet them, too. Do they want an ansible so he can share a copy of the star chart once he gets it?

They sit up in excitement.

"Yes please! Won't I need crafting material to use as feedstock, though?"

No; he'll need feedstock on his end to run the printer and get the book from the library, but once he's got it he can bind it up into one object and copy it onto the ansible, no feedstock needed. If they want to get any other books or things with the same ansible they might want to make their own copy from there with local methods first, but he doesn't know much about that.

... huh. Okay.

"I can get access to the library's high-resolution document copier for this, yeah. Okay, that sounds great."

He makes an ansible pair and turns one half over along with a heat pen, crafting up a long-handled net so that neither is them needs to get up for it and explaining that they can write on the ansible in its current form if they have any questions or requests later. (He writes 'star map' on it, himself.)

"Thanks!"

They take the ansible and tuck it into the little storage compartment below their seat. It can't carry much, because of the axle, but it's big enough for this.

It's no trouble at all! Do they have any more ideas of things to check? People here know so much more about how the world works, he's not confident at all that he's thinking of everything he might want to check.

"Um. Probably. I'm not actually on the ... megaproject for understanding the implications of your arrival, I was just thinking about it and then there you were and I could ask. I do record keeping for a making-things-place, not discovering how the world works."

They turn and exchange some words with Vesherti.

"He says they're putting together a list, but there are so many unknowns that it's hard to know where to start. The discovering-how-things-work folks are mostly hoping that once they make an attachment for your library ansible that you're okay with we can just request all of your factual books and start comparing them to your own."

"That said, writing just for myself, I'm curious how the continents seem different. Does the sea seem to have risen or fallen?"

They've risen, he's pretty sure; the big difference he spotted in the coastline is that the low part in the north of Europe in his world is underwater here. There's a couple big lakes that have moved around or appeared or disappeared, too; actually the area he grew up in is near one of those, it's near a lake at home and isn't here.