"And now you have - not the whole thing but a snapshot."

"Yeah. Thanks."

The next day Lorica takes her remaining parts back out to her temporary workspace.

She passes a girl who's a bit tucked away from the main thoroughfare, playing a guitar and singing softly as weeds grow and sway noticeably around her.

Wave.

She stops playing to wave back. The weeds stop when her music does.

"Hey!" she calls.

"Hey. Your guitar grows plants?"

"My music does. Well, that song. Other songs do other stuff."

"...huh. I thought the only weird thing in this universe was stuff having knacks. There's also magic songs?"

"This universe? And, yeah, music's hard and only does temporary knacks but it's still crafting. Especially if you wrote the song yourself."

"I'm from another universe and got here by way of a third."

"Sounds pretty wild. Switching universes common where you're from?"

"Nope, highly irregular."

"Do you guys not have knacks, then?"

"We do not. Some people have superpowers, and I have one of those which is a little bit like a talent for making certain kinds of knacks, but different underlying system."

"A world without knacks sounds like it'd be pretty weird."

"Well, there's also no Rages so I think it'd come out ahead on net except superpowers make a mess of things."

"Probably, yeah. I was born after they started, so I don't really know what our world was like before the apocalypse came knocking."

"Legit. I was born after superpowers started but we have, uh, more surviving media."

"We've got some, but I'm not big into most of it."

"If writing your own songs works better magicwise I can see why."

"Yeah. Takes a lot of time and attention. I listen to music in my genre and all, but not much else."

"What's the genre called?"

"I started out in bluegrass and folk songs. Been listening to some swing for inspiration, though, and I found a record of like really early vaudeville blues that I liked. So I guess my genre and stuff I'm blending into it."

"Fun. I'd have my robot play you some music from my world but I turned it off because I don't want it to knack its way into personhood."