"Mostly it's personal stuff, letters and all from people's family, but they've still got a society and everything and are rebuilding in safer areas."

"Makes sense. Man, I bet surviving historians are very frustrated."

"Yeah. The libraries are trying to preserve what they can, but most people think other stuff takes priority."

"Well, if you're at near-subsistence agriculture that's a reasonable outlook."

"Yeah. Big argument is short term versus long term, I guess, though we're not so close to subsistence we can't afford some people whose life's work is the long term."

"That's good."

"Of course could always be better."

"I'm on it. We'll see what salvagebot can find me."

"Unfortunately I dunno much about making salvage more efficient..."

"I can iterate on it - maybe get it knackier, maybe just patching its software. And eventually I'll be able to do my own manufacture if I'm here that long. Raid a landfill for metal and plastic and make it whatever shape."

"That sounds good, yeah. I'm - super hoping you can get home, but, like, with back and forth ability, we could kinda use the help."

"Depending on how expensive transit is and whether knacks persist out of world I could see a lot of people wanting to come here to build stuff."

"Industry tourism! Especially whenever we figure out what's up with the Rages..."

"Yeah. Or at least have a way to predict them."

"Yeah, even just an early warning system'd make a huge difference."

"They start up like normal weather, right, it's not just, bam, tornado, it'll spin up and travel around in typical tornadous fashion?"

"Earthquakes are pretty sudden - but, yeah, I think tornadoes are normalish weather, though they last way longer than natural ones."

"Earthquakes are normally sudden. At least to casual observation."

She nods. "I dunno if seismographs pick up pre-shocks or whatever with the Rages, though."

"Maybe I can make one. Might be hard, too straightforward for my specialty..."

"That's autonomous software, right?"

"Yes, but the way specialties work is that a tinker only has stuff-building superpowers while working within that specialty. It goes on the fritz and I resume being a teenage girl with no engineering training if I try to make something that isn't autonomous enough. It was really hard to make a calculator app because it doesn't by default make decisions. A seismograph might be the same."

"Maybe something that chooses whether to alert people, or has a bunch of different things it's monitoring and it's making decisions about, like, triaging what's the biggest emergency?"

"Yeah, something like that would be the way to go, unless I had enough parts to try to make something that could attempt to cancel the waves of the quake."

"That sounds tough to get right..."