Someone at the airport has a multi-meter to quickly test the wires with. But it's not sensitive enough to accurately measure the resistance of some of the samples, so they get shipped off to Largest City University, which has an electronics lab.

Close to midnight, a physicist stands in the lab, looking at a curl of wire suspended in place over a magnet.

"... it's very clearly diamagnetic," they note. "And the measured resistance is within measurement error. I know we're still waiting on the high-voltage electromagnet, but I will switch to social science if that's not a superconductor."

    "Well."

Elsewhere, someone is bent over a scribe table, carefully cleaning up a vectorization of a set of glyphs from the dictionary. The linguists are still arguing about text layout, but by the time the sun rises on Largest City again, there will at least be a font for Crafter glyphs.

And in Largest City, there are more specific preparations: picking out a good neighborhood to start with, making sure people everywhere know not to touch the alien or his walker, making sure that the streets will handle the walker, making sure the train station has a spot for him to leave his house, arranging for guards to help with crowd control if necessary, trying to make sure it's not necessary by making announcements, figuring out which apartment buildings are willing to be opened and which aren't ...

There's a lot to do, but that's how these things go. By the time he arrives, they'll be ready.

He's up at dawn the next day and on the roof not long after, quick-growing an ear of corn and some berries and tea leaves for his breakfast. An hour later he's out again, setting up a giant 'go this way' glyph on the ground in his intended direction of travel and doing a final check of the area to make sure he's not accidentally leaving anything behind. With that done, he brings his dog out and gets her set up to guide the house to its destination; the handhold he was using to bring it with him to find her last night does double duty as a pushbar for her to lead it as well.

He arranges himself and the new chicken on the roof once they're underway, adding a transparent inward-sloping guardrail to stop her from flying out, and settles in to spend the trip crafting whatever they've requested of him and taking notes on what he's seen so far for the book he's going to write about this experience.

When he checks, there's a letter from Vesherti:

Good morning,

We checked the wire samples — the one that was pure black was the most permissive of little lightnings. The others varied like this:

<diagram showing a nonlinear relationship between "conductivity" and "potential for static build up">

The pure black one was very useful; if you have time, we would like some larger samples of more material like that to examine. Ideally in shapes like this, and as strong and not wear out as you can:

<diagram showing a set of simple shapes, including a coil of wire, a torus, and so on>

Or if you could make crafting material that is like that but that can be moved like clay that does not dry out, that would be good too.

We're also interested in figuring out if a crafting material spinning wheel can help with our need for making little lightnings for our machines; do you think you could make a crank shaft with a large attachment plate, where all the parts are never wear out, and how fast it turns can be changed with a dial?

<diagram of a three-shaft crank with a large attachment plate clearly designed to hook into other machinery>

If you can, we should talk more about how big to make it; I do not think the ideal size would fit well in your house.

We have some more raw materials and the other chickens ready for you at the place that we will meet. I hope your journey goes smoothly.

We usually end our letters with our sound-based personal identifiers to show who they are from, but I can't write mine in Crafter glyphs, so:

- (Vesherti)
- Your greeter

The latter two diagrams are embedded 3D CAD models, and Traveler can spin them with his finger or a stylus. It's also possible to zoom in, although the gesture for that is probably less obvious.

And, in the air a mile or two behind him, there's a quiet ultralight drone gliding along, just to make sure he doesn't run into any trouble on his journey.

As his house walks, the first further signs of þereminian architecture that he will see are two enormous hyperbolic towers, just visible on the horizon as he comes over the first hill. They are releasing large amounts of steam into the cool morning air. If he looks closely, he can see that they're surrounded by more low-lying buildings and also fences. They're also out of his path of travel.

More parallel to his path is the train tracks — every few minutes, a train goes by from the airport (or returning from the city) at high speed.

The area he actually travels through is mostly empty, although as the day wears on he will come across the first roads: first little more than dirt tracks winding through fields of grain, and then switching to smooth black asphalt. The roads see a steady stream of trucks and busses headed to various outlying locations, but they do stop for him whenever his path takes him across a road, or slow down significantly if his dog pilots the house along a road with them.

The dog leads the house alongside the road rather than on it; traveler doesn't want to try sharing space with vehicles that fast. She doesn't mind the towers, but the trains bother her; after the first couple she stops startling away from them but he still opts to come down and move the house to the opposite side of the road. He has to come down to bring it across the cross streets' asphalt, too, when she balks at it, which slows them down considerably the first couple times; after that, he pauses for a few minutes to relocate himself inside and make a window on the front of his house, and then when he needs to come out it's at least somewhat faster.

Well, they can't do much about the asphalt. But it continues to not bite her. Or do much of anything other than lay there on the ground, really.

The area slowly gets denser, with occasional one and two story buildings, although there's still plenty of room to walk. Cross streets get more common, unfortunately. There are occasional people who stop to look at his house as it goes by, before going on with their business.

Eventually, following the same general direction as the train tracks brings them to a large, open building. It has no walls, but it does have a roof held up by supports. There's a large expanse of asphalt filled with dormant traveling machines, and beside it a large grassy field in which someone has put up a sign:

"Space for Traveler's House"

As they arrive, a much slower train departs from the building and heads into the city proper, which is through a thin band of trees from here. The tallest buildings are visible over the trees.

He eventually takes over for the dog, and guides the house through the densest final bit himself; it's late afternoon by the time he gets there, humming cheerfully to himself and looking around at everything. He gawks at the pavilion only a little before settling the house into the field a little ways from the sign.

He extrudes a sunshade from the side of the house and brings out a chair and side table to sit and watch the comings and goings.

Since they're pretty sure Crafters are more solitary, and he has plans to meet up the next day, Vesherti is not waiting at the train station.

... but a group of thoroughly briefed people in blue robes are hanging out at a table talking near one end of the station, just in case Traveler does feel like having some conversation.

Other than that group, most of the people passing through here are commuters. The areas north of the city are largely used for industry, so at the end of the day this mostly means people coming back from jobs, either being dropped off by company busses or (for smaller companies) driving cars. Then they wait on the platform, file into a train, and are whisked off to the city.

There are a few people going the other way, however: a few people who live outside the city and are returning home, and, when the right hour approaches, the evening shift.

People are generally not very talkative, although a few friends do run into each other and make conversation while waiting for the train. People do stop to stare at Traveler's house a little bit, but a person in purple robes quietly keeps anyone from coming over to him unsolicited. Several people do hold up their phones in his direction for a moment, before moving on.

Even with such a limited number of people (by city standards) passing through, he'll see a lot of variety. No tails or other genemods that might be expected from a Crafter population, but he'll see people holding hands, eating food, sitting alone, talking, signing, bobbing their heads to unheard music, and more.

Well, you know, he's watching them, it's only fair that some of them watch him back.

After a while he brings the dog out to sit at his feet and crafts up some grey chairs and puts up a sign: People can come and talk if they want; no more than three people or one group of up to five at once, please, and remember that Crafters are not to be touched.

This is obviously exciting. A large group of people forms up on the side of the station facing him, and the person in purple says something to them. Then everyone does something mysterious with their phones, and three people start making their way over. Two of the people (one in plain blue and one in blue decorated with clouds and birds) are holding hands; the other person is wearing a partially open powder-blue outer robe over a tight purple garment.

The woman in plain blue pulls a tablet out of her bag and slots her phone into it. A moment of fiddling later, she flips it around to show Traveler.

"Hello!" it reads.

They settle down in the chairs, being careful not to approach him too closely.

Look at all those people. He has perhaps made some sort of calculative error. Oh well, it's fine.

He replies with a sense of warm welcome, and that he thinks this new situation is quite exciting. Do they have questions for him?

They say a few words to each other. The woman with the tablet has apparently been selected as their spokeswoman, because she flips it back around and taps on it to respond.

"Yes!" she flashes at him. And then, composed with more hesitation and less grammar than Vesherti displayed:

"Do you find it bad to live with an animal? Or is it better because it is a thinking animal?"

The dog is pretty clever but dogs aren't talking animals, if that's what they mean. He likes having animals around, though; they're good company in addition to being useful. His dog guided his house here mostly by herself today, for example, after he explained that he wanted her to follow alongside the road with it.

This causes some surprised expressions.

"Your dog depends on you — and she isn't smart — how—"

They break off into a brief whispered argument about grammar, before dragging the symbols around into a more coherent order.

"If (your dog isn't smart and she depends on you), how do you cope with her doing things near you when you're feeling bad? Or does not everybody can tolerate a dog?"

Most Crafters like having dogs around! They'll leave you alone if you ask them, unless they're really desperate for something, and if that's too much you can make tools to give them the things they need automatically, he does that for his chickens since they can't come get him if they need something. Some people do like to house their dogs in a different building so they can have time away from them but that's not common, it's not like having another Crafter around where it's always a little stressful.

... huh. They confer again.

"That is strange. I think we have the opposite thing because if my partner—"

She gestures from the glyph for partner to their joined hands.

"— were mad at me, she could tell me. So if she's not telling me, I know she's not mad at me. But if I had a dog and it wasn't telling me, I wouldn't know, because it can't tell me. That's why babies are so stressful until they learn to signal somehow."

Oh! Dogs are expressive, they just aren't smart enough to communicate with Crafting. If she were mad at him she'd avoid him or refuse to do things he asked, and he'd be able to tell from her body language. She's happy right now, he can tell from how relaxed she is. And also from knowing her, she likes long runs like she had today and she likes getting to hang around with new people.

They look a bit dubious, but none of them has actually had a dog, so they have no real reason to doubt that you can learn how to read them with practice. One woman points out that if the dogs are smart enough to learn how to read sheep, they can probably also learn how to be read themselves.

"It's good she's happy," the woman with the tablet writes, while her partner and the other woman discuss. "We have more questions, but maybe you want to ask us things in between our questions."

He is curious about what kinds of things they're hoping to get out of him being here, in whatever sense is interesting to them.

The woman taps at her lip. Her partner says something, and she writes it down.

"The (all the people on the planet) want to get having new neighbors to trade with, and new books to read, and new learning about what is true. And crafting. Probably the purple people have talked to you about that plenty."

"The three of us want to learn interesting things about you and share them with friends, and also to have a story to tell."

Huh. Crafters don't do much trade, really? They do some, it's not an unfamiliar concept or anything, but it's not in the first four or six things he'd wonder about when he was meeting someone new. He does intend to do crafting for them but that's more to do with an impulse toward neighborliness than an expectation that he's going to get something specific in return.

Maybe they have questions about what he can do with crafting? If they'd like a little souvenir he can make them something small.

"Yes, please!"

The un-partnered woman digs in a pocket, and comes out with a metallic blue cube with a cylindrical rod through it so you can hold the rod and spin the cube around it. She spins it demonstratively.

"Can you make a very dense thing that spins silently, but it is hard? Can you really make things that will not wear out?"