"It's like flow on steroids."

"...part of me really wants to know what that's like but another part is scared of wireheading. Although you and other tinkers seem to be pretty functional and not suffering from withdrawal all the time."

"Withdrawal takes a while to set in and feels sort of like wanting to, like, go for a walk, or pick up a book you had to put down in the middle of a good part."

"Does it get better or worse if you spend longer without doing it? If I spend a while without picking a book up eventually I kinda forget about it, or just don't think about it much."

"Plateaus."

"Well that's not too bad, then. And at the end you have a shiny new thing made."

"Yeah."

"And what does it feel like, actually making the thing? How does the knowledge—appear? I don't even know what questions to ask about it. And this time I did look it up online before asking, but I'm curious about a first-hand account."

"What does it feel like to - assemble a sandwich? You already know what things go in sandwiches, you can vary which things you put on a sandwich depending on what you're in the mood for and whether you think relish goes with turkey, you won't usually have hilariously wrong ratios of mustard to bread or put all of your lettuce on one side, and at the end you have a sandwich. It's like that. Only more so."

They blink again. "Well but, like, a sandwich is, I mean, you can just look at one and see the things that are in it, and I'm not completely confident I'd invent something that's exactly a sandwich if one didn't exist and wasn't available before."

"If I had to think of something that you would invent that nobody else has invented before, we'd be here all week."

Pause. "Okay, point, but still, tinkers have specialties, and the particular way you do things is different—but okay, I guess as far as subjective sensations go, I'm starting to get the picture."

"That's the idea."

"Changing subjects, you mentioned you don't like talking much to your branding person?"

"Not especially, no. I mostly convinced her to leave me alone after she consulted on my color scheme and have her seventy-five percent convinced that it would make me completely inoperable to make any aesthetic concessions that don't come to me mid-fugue, and don't want to remind her I exist."

"Does she have much input on other tinkers' aesthetics, like, say, Armsmaster's?"

"She mostly leaves him alone too, I think, except to occasionally complain about the beard."

"...seriously?"

"What?"

"I dunno, it just sounds incredibly... Well, you know, when you think of heroes, the Protectorate, saviors to us all, yadda yadda, you don't really think about someone nagging Armsmaster about his beard."

"Well, no, because that's not part of the brand they have us project."

"That goes squarely to the cons list."

"I'm sure."

"Not that they'd want to touch my image, of course, even when I'm covered from head to toe I'm gorgeous. But still, it's the principle of the thing."

"They'd definitely have to have a conversation with you about it even if they decided your costume was fine in the end."