The greens are SO fascinated. Doesn't it limit the writing system a lot to require colors? It does add a useful dimension but sharply limits the media you can use to write.

It does, and it makes it harder to preserve if you use dyes or paint, but writing is high art and getting things just right is important and a very satisfying feeling. The precious metal colors are sometimes used interchangeably with red, blue, green. (Copper, silver, gold - white can be made from mother of pearl, black from obsidian)

That just makes writing expensive and technically difficult.

Originally at least half of the point of the writing system was to make written things Treasures. Treasure is perfect and lovely and the root of most good feelings, and anything you wanted people to pay attention to and emulate had to be appropriately shiny. Over the last two centuries most writers in the world agreed to change it up a bit for practicality.

It's still pretty impractical. Maybe they could have a monochrome version with little diacritics to symbolize colors.

He bets Draak wouldn't like it, it sounds like that be much less pretty and more importantly less Song-analogous, but he'd be interested to show some readers and see what they think if these linguists come up with something.

It's not urgent since no one needs to write Draak in monochrome right now and anyway they are trying to learn, more than influence, the script; they were just wondering what the design constraints that produced this system were.

He thinks Treasure-likeness and intuitive readability were the two big goals. And paper doesn't last but metal dripped into engravings does.

He has a copy of the first written thing in this system! It's engravings copied from cave art, a mythologized and illustrated history of the creation story of Draak and the first war against humans.

Ooooh the greens want copies.

They can take photos. Or if someone wants to pay a bunch of money for this one that works too, he remembers it perfectly and can always make another.

His is a copy anyway, they'll settle for photos.

Dang, he wants money to buy shiny tech toys. Well, Amseli said he'd get paid a little bit for this anyway.

Oh yeah, their universities are footing the bill.

Fun fact! This writing system uses base ten numbers because Draak have five claws on each paw. Lucky correspondence, or convergent evolution? Probably a lucky correspondence, he thinks.

Yeah, five doesn't seem that special. And some Amentan cultures used to use bases eight or twelve in spite of having five-fingered hands.

There are a lot of them, it makes sense that people would try nonstandard things once in a while.

He gives some more vocabulary and mentions that they're having a bit of a difficult time fitting new technical jargon into the system.

"It does seem limited that way. Some of our character-based languages will squish existing characters together."

We already combine characters a lot so that's what we've been doing, mostly. We don't have much of a spoken language and trying to create an alphabet for thoughts sounds... Impossible, so characters may be the best we can do for general use.

This makes sense.

He happily continues to lead them through exercises of arranging simple thoughts into dense colorful combos.

Elsewhere, Bloom tells Ruan, I am going to Tapa. I emailed the Seeker and he is coming to get me. You should too. I suspect you know more about my progress than any other blue.

"All right, I'll book a flight. To that conference they're setting up?"

Yes. I have to talk to them. I'm sorry about the delays to the work but I really must go talk to my kin. There are more Enkindlers there too. I recognize at least three people from that video... Though it's strange to see their bodies and not see their spirits.

"I guess that might be disconcerting. I'll meet you there."

She waits for Seeker's ship to show up and climbs in. They're back at the conference in Tapa in a few hours. She makes a speech to the other Draak.

...She appears to have started some kind of argument. A lot of them gather in a big circle, and there's some unsettled growling and other noises. Lots of Draak stop talking to their corresponding Amentans and go listen.