"What, like, if I make it a helicopter and then make it a cooler-looking helicopter?"

"Yeah. Especially if it looks like - the type of thing that should have powers? Doesn't necessarily need to be artistic, I've seen some tacky as hell work get knacks, but... 'Cooler helicopter' is definitely a right genre?"

"Not really my area but some of my stuff looks cool..."

"And people can collab on things, too, and still get knacks, if you want to outsource that."

"Ooh."

"Everybody claims something different about how well collabs work, but it's better than nothing if you've got a skills gap."

"I might want your help on a music robot, I don't know a lot about music."

"I'd be happy to help! Especially this time of year and winter, I've got less work to do - spring and summer I get busy with agriculture stuff."

"That makes sense. It's autumn now?"

"Start of it. It's September - leaves should be starting to turn soon."

"Good to know. How do you heat buildings?"

"Wood stoves and such's normal, though there's a bunch of designs for those."

"I'll put 'lumberjack robot' on the nice to have list."

She laughs. "People manage now, but I can definitely see wanting to skip out on all the fire work."

"It sounds time consuming! It's probably not efficient for me to put central heating in every building but a lumberjack robot could be shared."

"We've got like log splitters and some chain saws that're still working, so it's not hand axe bad, but I do bet most people'd appreciate not even having to do that much."

"I can probably also get it planting new trees as it goes."

"Fancy. And helpful. Not everyone's careful about not clear-cutting."

"I bet. If I'm here long enough I don't expect to be fetched I'm gonna want a fancy electricity solution, but I'm not yet sure how well my stuff can scale. Maybe mining and refining robots plus people making nontinker gadgets with it will go a long way."

"Big barrier to industry here is making stuff earthquake and tornado proof with a post-apocalyptic start - we don't tend to get hit by new Rages as hard out here, but 'high winds' and 'earthquakes' still happen, and I at least keep hearing that we lost a lot of specialist knowledge..."

"Out here compared to where? I can build in wind and earthquake tolerance."

"Pretty sure half of our earthquakes are, like, side effects from the fault line under Memphis, and places that were having more than rare tornadoes before the Rages are basically still uninhabitable. Dunno as much about the West Coast or the rest of the world, though..."

"West Coast's probably real quakey."

"Probably, yeah. We get any news from out there, but not, like, yearly earthquake reports, I don't think."

"What's the news?"