" - Wow, that's a risk?"

"I think so. It's pretty close already and it self-trains all the time."

"Huh. I'm not the robots sibling or anything, but... Sounds unpleasant to have to worry about, though."

"It'd be a perfectly nice person but I don't, uh, want kids."

"Yeah, hundred percent valid."

"I'm Lorica."

"I'm Jonabeth. Good meeting you, Lorica."

"Nice to meet you too. And I'm gonna go make a salvage robot."

"Okay. Good luck. I'll probably be here for a while, but if you wanna meet up again I can tell you where I usually hang out - ?"

"Sure, why not."

Hang out places! This mostly seems to be a specific area in the park, with here as a backup and morning spot.

"Cool. Maybe if I'm here a long time I'll pick up magic music."

"It's good for anything temporary. Like, I can make plants grow, or make someone happy or awake, or make someone think faster or recall stuff better that they learned during the song or were trying to remember during the song... Myself included. Can't make people heal faster, but there's, like, myths of people who can."

"Are the plants going to - shrink -? Like I can see the category you're sketching but I'm not sure I'd say 'temporary'."

"It's - stuff only happens while I'm singing. They'll stay like they are plus normal plant stuff. It's more like... I gave them a temporary growth superpower? And then they grew, and then I removed it."

"Cool. I will quiz you more about that later."

She goes off to tinker.

It takes a bit longer for the salvage bot's knack to become obvious, but it seems better - it has a sense of which path to take to objectives, and where things are hidden, even lacking the relevant sensors or any data from Lorica or its sensors what paths are safest and most efficient. It's initially unclear what this sense's range is, though, and objectives it can track like that are initially pretty limited.

Ooh, that's a good one. She can design its non-knack pathfinding around that, let the knack tiebreak and give it some weight in decisionmaking without leaving the salvagebot helpless without it.

This seems to work pretty well.

Good. She makes sure it understands the flag convention but it doesn't need to make its own flags; it will collect stuff fast enough that it shouldn't come up.

The finding stuff knack gets a bit more broad in what it can consistently find by the time she's done, but doesn't otherwise alter.

She sets its return point to the house she's been working in and its round trip time to sixteen hours and sends it out.

It encounters no problems setting out initially, and seems to be moving with some level of purpose.

Good. Back whence she came for food.

She doesn't pass anyone exceptionally interesting, and the food's much the same as it was before.