"If we do find a middle ground that'll be lovely for the future but I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to put everything on hold until we do."

"Oh, not 'put things on hold', I'm thinking like 'invent powered flight'."

"...Well, I meant in terms of 'my sister and your brother shouldn't have to postpone their trip' not 'the engineers shouldn't have to put everything down'. But that would be a cool solution."

"Bet you could do it, too."

"Probably eventually! There's no obvious route there from what I'm currently working on..."

"What's that again?"

She describes it. It's mostly theoretical stuff having to do with certain properties in various substances.

"None of which are showing any signs of taking flight?"

"None! I mean, theoretically this one could be used to push something off the ground but you wouldn't be able to get it very far off the ground under any reasonable circumstances and you'd have to have, like, specially treated iron right underneath it anywhere you wanted it in the air..."

"I confess to having no idea how it could be done, but a suspicion we'll get there eventually. Well, you lot will."

"Eventually, yeah."

"You have friends in the city I could drag over to cheer you up?"

"I have friends who aren't my sister, yeah. Might make more sense for me to visit them more often, honestly, considering how often I'm not really interruptible-by-visitors."

"I think learning to pace yourself is one of the most important things to get out of an apprenticeship with my father and one he is not always well-equipped to teach."

"That, and this whole thing started when my sister got bored while waiting for me to be visitable and decided to prank your brother!"

"Ah, so there are practical reasons to be more visitable! Lest your friends prank a brother less amenable to it!"

"Most of my friends are less inclined to that kind of behavior but I don't really want to find new and exciting failure modes, so."

"Perhaps some sort of bird-powered mail system is more tractable than powered flight."

"Possibly! I don't really know much about birds, though...you know, this sounds like the kind of project Tyelcormo could actually be really useful on."

"I will bring it to his attention the next time he is willing to entertain mine."

"I'm not sure what if anything I could contribute to a project like that but obviously if you can use my help let me know."

"Of course."

"You're good at that kind of thing. Not that you didn't know that, or anything."

"I am gifted with a people it is easy to coax into doing interesting work."

"That does seem a significant advantage, yes."