He's not happy, as he sketches out the signs and sigils. He generally isn't, these days.
He ran out of better options with the last of the cows.
He finishes the circle.
"Yup. It's very convenient. Well. Wilbur, you want something to eat and maybe a night of sleep before we attempt resurrecting Benjamin Franklin?"
Wilbur has much better de facto tablemanners than his sister but it's not hard to figure out that he hasn't been eating enough lately.
Cam makes her a big tub with surfaces a cleaner robot will be able to handle and fills it with lasagna.
Not being a discrete object, she doesn't eat it as neatly as she ate the cows, but the mess that exists until she's managed to scrape all the sauce off herself and lick it off her tentacles is much less gory, at least.
"That," she sighs afterwards, "was the most delicious thing ever."
"I'm glad you liked it! I'm gonna make a little robot to wash the tub out so future dinners can go there without cross-contamination. Even if not getting sick also applies to food poisoning it seems the way to go." He sets a Scrubba™ on the rim of the tub. It scrubbas its way down.
"Then a good thing the future has cleaner robots." He makes it a charging dock and a cleaning solution refill station for it to find when it's done in the tub.
"The thing rolling around in the tub is a robot. Which cleans, hence being a cleaner robot. A robot is a machine that behaves autonomously according to a program. The stuff over there is where it will go when it needs more soap and water and electricity."
"It does!" Cam makes himself a cup of coffee and looks over the steps of the resurrection ritual again more closely.
Cam is going to hunt up... all the other written material that was in the author's house at the time the first draft of this book was written... and see if there's any useful notes or primary sources.