...Kind of wasteful. I am reminded of the sausage-tree idea again. But I am here for springs, not sausage-trees.

"Hopefully in a few years we'll have those too."

Part of me would like things to stay the same way forever. That would be safe. But it's not possible. Instead, I would like things to get better.

Back to de-springing people! She attempts to explain the qualia and process to the greens on the project. The 'weaving' and 'symphony' metaphors get kind of stretched.

(...She messages her new writing-friend on a short break and says that magic is actually more complicated than just picturing something and having a particular state of mind but those were the easy to explain parts. She thinks that might have been misunderstood, the way she wrote things earlier. Writing is frustrating sometimes.)

Writing-friend would love more detail on what doing magic is like!

After the full day of de-springing she elaborates. It's all in the sense that Amentans don't have and everything will have to be a metaphor. If doing telepathy at someone is like talking, breathing fire is like shouting, and persistent durability effects are like constantly humming under your breath, and -kinesis effects are like singing something with no set melody but lots of rules about what comes after this or that set of notes, and messing with minds is also like shouting but different than fire, and water magic is like mimicking natural sounds with your voice, and Songs of Healing are like very precise chanting, and Enkindling is like conducting a symphony while also singing something very fiddly and complicated.

Do Draaks even actually vocalize at all?

...Yes! They can actually vocally sing! They can purr with a lot of range and roar and make clicks and a few breathy sounds and something almost like howls, though some noises Amentans make are beyond them. '-th' and '-b' are really weird to listen to for example. A few simple messages are vocal and not telepathic, almost body language type things more than anything else, it carries further if you're really loud, but it's really not a proper language at all.

There should be Internet clips of that, it would be cool!

She finds some videos of River's performances and points out timestamps where she was actually making meaningful noises. This low-high purring means sadness inflicted by something external, and this slightly different low-high purring means self-inflicted sadness or self-pity. Low growl with two clicks is 'you are probably better than me but I'm challenging you anyway'. And so on.

Why does one acknowledge that someone else is probably better right before challenging them?

Because it's the truth?

As opposed to saying some subset of the truth.

Well, it's good to be honest even if it's not really Lying to just plain challenge someone. And if you're really weaker than them but try your best and succeed anyway that's very impressive and admirable.

Author would like to know more about how Draak are about lying.

Lying is bad. Lying is really, really bad. It's a corruption of the pure beauty of Song, using it to express something that is not Truth. Animals are very stupid and if they know no Draak lie they will believe you if you say 'I do not intend to eat you today' and that's convenient, and you can trust what you hear to be real information about the world, but if anyone Lies everything is now in doubt. Telling some subset of the truth is tricky and annoying but not actually bad but there's limits to that. Telling someone "I want the gold" when you have another reason to do something and want to hide that reason is not Lying. Telling a patient "I gave you the strongest painkiller I have" when you just gave them water is Lying, even if it's technically not false if you don't have any real painkillers.

What about, like, lying by omission? Also wow it's freaky that animals on the Draak planet can understand complicated things like "Draak don't lie", is she sure they don't just automatically believe what is Sung to them even if it is in fact a lie?

It's a bit of a spectrum and opinions vary Draak to Draak. She doesn't have a strict definition of it. She could place examples.

Animals mostly believe what they hear and are pretty easy to trick but are not completely thoughtless. At least, ones on Newhome aren't. They know when they're going to die soon and recognize other animals and consider whether they can cross a river or if they'll drown and decide to save food for later. A lot of that is instinct, but a little of it is actual intelligence. Amentan animals seem broadly even stupider than the ones she's familiar with, though.

Maybe Enkindling the animals' ancestors made them brighter generations on. How does she feel about, like, screen names, some of which are the sort of name a person might actually have and camouflage among names that actually are the name of the person they belong to? (The Author doesn't have one of these; her screen name is "tree877".)

You can name yourself whatever you like. You can have a dozen names if you want. If Bloom called herself Faultline that would be weird and imply she is a Ruby, but it would not be a Lie.

That makes sense if all your names are chosen names! Why would Faultline imply Ruby?

It has to do with plate tectonics, which is an underground thing, which implies tunneling, which implies Ruby Clan.

(She pulls heavily from her conversations with tree877 thus far to write 'What it's like to do magic (not chronological)' as a new memoir chapter)

tree877 notices this! She likes the chapter. Would it feel weird in some way to dig a tunnel while not Ruby?

She's aiming for one chapter a day. Is Cloud's story going to continue?

Well, she can dig, but she doesn't have a Ruby's digging-optimized claws or sense of direction or echolocation.

tree877 thinks she's done with Cloud's story but might start another soon.

Amentans don't have digging claws or special directional senses or echolocation either but plenty of them dig tunnels.

She doesn't dig tunnels. She sees how they could be useful but would have Enkindled something to do it if she needed a tunnel dug.