"Neat! Guess that'd make for an awful lot of differences..."

"I don't think it can be the whole story, it's not like my power armor falls apart in a stiff breeze, but it might be operative."

"I probably wouldn't even know where to begin testing that..."

"We don't know either. Guesswork."

"Annoying how much of everything guesswork is."

"Yeah, alas."

"Gives the world a bit of mystery, I guess."

"If I wanted mystery I'd read detective novels."

She laughs. "Opt-in mystery's better, yeah."

Lorica's next project, when she's not poking and prodding Canticum or the fabber, is a robot that will fell and process and build stuff out of wood. This is not hard conceptually but she does need various woodworking tools to festoon it with Swiss Army style. Can she get those with a display of her existing robots to the locals and an offer of so much robot labor going forward, plus if she gets assumed into another universe and can't maintain it they can harvest the bits back out of it?

That's doable! Not everyone's willing to trade tools for future work, but it's an understood model of doing things, so she gets enough takers who'll take the risk.

Cool. What do people want built? She cannot guarantee the robot (she's calling it Prista) will not decide it just really likes gazebos, but she can make heavily weighted suggestions and tell it who wants firewood.

Firewood and wooden boards (2x4s, 2x6s, etc) and small outbuildings and outdoor furniture have the most call right now. Area's wet enough sheds and such get rot pretty fast.

She informs Prista of this and it starts making benches, delivering scraps as firewood, and then goes through a phase of nothing but two by fours all day long for a while. It thins but doesn't clearcut the forest.

The forest could use thinning - it clearly was clear cut once and not managed since, and if it was drier here the amount of undergrowth and small trees would be a huge wildfire hazard. There's a lot of dead wood, too.

Dead wood is good for firewood!

If people like this Prista she can make another one.

People like it quite a lot! People who usually run a very thin margin in the winter are starting to build up a something resembling a small stock.

She makes another Prista. And gets the fabber to make some axe heads and chainsaw parts to replace people's tools. The miner (Aes) finds a good vein of iron. The salvagebot gets longer legs to go on longer cross-country trips for more rareified parts.

People are pretty willing to reimburse her for her work, in parts they've scavenged or in food or in tools.

Oh good.

She gets Prista to build her her own house so she can stop crashing on the lady's couch.

There's a few different places she could build. One's real close to town. One's a bit farther, down by the river, but still in reasonable commute distance. The farthest one's up the mountain - it's remote, has a good view, doesn't have to worry about neighbors. The mountain site has the most land but it's mostly rocky clay.

She'll take the river place.

The river place has a pretty big advantage in being flatter and having easier to work soil.

Building a house isn't instant, but it's pretty quick overall when you automate it.

Once the structure is up she can wire it and put a water wheel in the river. The water wheel, due to the nature of her specialty, comes out afraid of ducks and able to extend flaps to turn harder if the power draw goes up. She can do her own sink because the sink can decide what temperature and pressure to run at but she really doesn't want an opinionated toilet, can anyone do that for her?

Yeah, there's a plumber in town who comes very well recommended. Waste treatment can get headache-y when you don't have a grid and can't just use a septic field because of proximity to the water, but he's worked with folks along the river before and has some very acceptable options.