Lorica's salvagebots get a lot more work so they can go further afield in the hopes she'll be able to do her own mining and refining, but that's hardware intensive and a ways out. Canticum gets most of the rest of her attention the rest of the week, singing whenever she isn't tinkering on it making it cleverer and knackier.

Jonabeth works hard on her music, spending some time performing the first day - whatever she can do cold, which is mostly party songs and agriculture songs - and then comes back the next day with lullabies and work songs and learning songs and task songs, and the day after with ones she's tweaked heavily - she manages a fairly rough learning song rolled into a good at singing song into a general 'grow well' lullaby by the end of the week, and tweaks an agricultural song so it can be sung in harmony with the new song.

Jonabeth harmonizing with Canticum also works pretty well, though it seems to give Jonabeth more feedback than it does Lorica - still, it lets her know how to tweak her own songs.

Canticum mostly has small effects over the week - plants grow noticeably, and Jonabeth winnows her repertoire down to a modified work song without a mental component that Canticum can sing. The effect's noticeably smaller than when Jonabeth does it, but it exists, mostly making Lorica get tired more slowly and hungry and thirsty less. It doesn't have a noticeable interaction with her power, though Jonabeth starts muttering about changes that might do something about that.

The learning song Jonabeth writes is effective - there's a pretty statistically significant jump in the effectiveness of any songs harmonized with it, and Canticum starts getting better in leaps and bounds.

The knacks it develops seem to mostly improve its ability to learn music - not just messing with recordings, but having the building blocks that can be rearranged improvisationally, including changes to both the instrumentals and lyrics. It starts rewriting the songs Jonabeth feeds it slightly, changing words up, moving entire lines around, using different instrument sounds than what Jonabeth has been demonstrating on, making soulful songs upbeat and upbeat songs slow and twangy, apparently experimenting with what works best for different tasks. The songs aren't necessarily better than what Jonabeth writes - Jonabeth's clearly been at this longer, with a more thorough musical education - but 'objective quality' doesn't actually seem to be the most significant factor in how well a song works.

What a promising little Canticum she has.

Finally - finally, she has a little miner robot, which can find sites and draw wire and wind it onto a spool inside itself as it eats through ore. She sets it loose, not expecting it back for days.

There's non-zero iron and copper nearby, though it looks like what used to be rich veins have been plumbed dry of anything the industry considered worth going after. 

Little miner robot does not need industrial quantities and is prepared to go through landfills.

Landfills are overall richer, though the metal's spread out somewhat more. Still, a profusion of metals can be found and processed.

While it's gone she's working on her part-cleaner. She needs something that'll print chips and radio components to really bootstrap up.

The part cleaner gets a few minor knacks, but nothing exceptionally useful beyond being better at its job.

Then when it has cleaned a suitable backlog of parts she disassembles it and starts over on a dedicated fabber.

Fabber mostly is just very quick and efficient, with a low error rate, at least initially.

She'll take it. Next time the miner is caught dropping off its stuff it can be taught to feed the fabber.

Very slowly, it starts becoming apparent the things the fabber makes are extremely basically knack-y, with the effect more apparent in more recent things. Mostly just in the 'unusually effective and unlikely to break' genre rather than outright blatant magic.

Ooooh. She reports this to Jonabeth next time she sees her.

"Huh! That's really neat, and I haven't heard of someone managing that before..."

"Yeah, I'm gonna keep fucking with it. Usually there's diminishing returns to continuing to refine anything other than my main bot but not so much here."

"Yeah. Dunno what the ratios are on effort to reward, but nice knacks usually need more effort..."

"What do people who aren't tinkers even do to get objects more knacky? Decorate them?"

"Fiddling with it, decorating it, undoing some parts and redoing them better - decorating's big for people who wanna modify an item they don't know too much of the workings of."

"Huh. So I might be doing unusually productive fiddling, which might help."

"Yeah. Knowing what you're doing helps a lot, too, I think? Or having a good sense for stuff. Hard to get effective songs if you're tone deaf, and all that."

"Makes sense."

"Wonder how much your power's interfacing with knacks... Like, for knowing what to do."

"I think my power is not naively aware of knacks but is able to take an emerging one as feedback on how a design's going and lean into it."

"Yeah. That makes sense if it's at all aware of the world..."

"It is, I think, a major guess about how idiosyncratic tinker tech is is that our power leans on facts about the conditions under which we build it."