"That makes sense," Terrance agrees. "I'm not sure who might be best placed to do experiments like that, but ­— with your permission — I'll mention the possibility to a few of my correspondents, and see what they think. It really would be nice to have easier transport through the forest and desert."

"Of course." She pauses for a moment. "It's a very long term thing but I still feel like I should mention it. If people burn too much material over too long a period of time it could change the weather on a long term basis to make things hotter everywhere. It's really hard to get to that point with just wood and easily accessible oils but there are other fuels in the ground that make that easier."

"Huh. Well, it's something to keep an eye on, certainly. When you say long term, how long exactly do you mean? There's a big difference between what people who only live a few decades mean by 'long term' and what people who live a few centuries mean by 'long term'."

"It depends on how much people are burning of course but even as we burned more and more every year it took over a century before it became a problem. The issue is that we got used to burning things to power everything so people weren't willing to stop even when it became really obvious it was making things worse."

'Over a century' meaning 'it will be a problem for Terrance's nephew, at the very least', he thinks.

"I can only hope that people here have a bit more sense than those in your homeland, as unlikely as that may be," he says.

"Although that does make me curious — you've seen a bit of how my city runs, in your time here, yes? Have you spotted any mistakes we're making that your people have managed to avoid?"

"Nothing obvious. I haven't been here for long though. I'm a little surprised by how much things cost relative to each other but a lot of that is probably based on how hard things are to make or obtain being different. Books for example are a lot cheaper where I come from."

"Oh, if only!" Terrance complains. "Good, high-quality paper can make a book last for a few hundred years, but it's also quite expensive. Plus the labor of getting people to do the copying. A decent chunk of my discretionary budget goes on maintaining the library — I have the largest mobile collection in the world, you know. Although the stationary library at Polar University is larger," he grudgingly admits. "Mostly philosophy and history, though, so I'm not really sure it should count."

She adopts an exaggerated joking tone for clarity. "I don't know history and philosophy are pretty important." She laughs a little. "On a more serious note, I don't know the details but we had ways of turning wood into paper using massive machines. We also had ways of printing the same text onto sheets of paper over and over again so making a hundred books wasn't much harder than making one."

"Oh, now that sounds worthwhile. I don't suppose these machines were prone to exploding too?"

"Nope printing presses are entirely stable and the concept isn't too complicated either. The core idea of the simplest ones is that you carve out wood metal or clay so the shape of the text you want is standing out and then you cover that shape with ink and press it onto paper.

"The next update to that was that you carved a bunch of letters that were a consistent size and then you can just rearrange them which is much faster than carving out a whole page of text from scratch every time."

"I see! That does sound remarkably straightforward. I know that there are artisans who use stencils for applying even carvings to furniture and so on; I suspect they would be able to carve these pages as well," Terrance muses. "Of course, it's a lot slower to carve than to write, so it's not worth it to make only a single copy of the book, but if we were able to undercut other providers to recoup the costs ...."

He cogitates momentarily as only an experienced mercantile turtle can.

"Yeah it's mostly useful for when you want to print a lot of copies of something. With moveable letters there's a lower investment but one of the early common uses was to print either books that hundreds or thousands of people wanted copies of or things that were only a couple of pages so the upfront investment was low."

"The Merchant's Association might be willing to fund the experimentation — they run at a loss making their flyers and advertisements, and make it up in membership fees," he explains. "I'll ask the chair of the association to come around later and discuss it."

"Well I'm happy to try to remember more details if that would be helpful. I'm staying at the Silver Boar. I..." she paused for a moment. "One of my incredible powers might help but it's a bit disruptive. I can duplicate anything I've held and also create things out of nothing if I understand them well enough. There are some limitations but I've already used it to make copies of some books for one of your librarians."

"That is ..."

His mind spins through the possibilities, first mercantile, then industrial, then magical, and then dangerous.

"... a talent that I think you should keep inside your shell," he informs her. "There are a lot of people with unique artifacts who would want to get their hands on you, if they knew."

"Okay," she says a little faintly. She hadn't really considered being targeted for that power but maybe she should have been. "I'll try to keep my uses of it restrained."

"I'm not trying to scare you," Terrance adds. "And my Watch will come down hard on that sort of thing so long as you're here. But it's still better to be cautious."

"That makes sense." She agrees still a bit subdued compared to before. "And if there's ways for me to be helpful to you I'd be happy to help. Aside from what we talked about most of my abilities are focused on understanding people and helping them find their best lives."

"Whoof."

Terrance lets out a sigh, and the wind rustles the grasses as it races away in front of him.

"That's a generous offer. I'll have to think on what you could best help with — although please feel free to suggest something, if your understanding provides an insight. I'm half tempted to ask you to duplicate a sample of my favorite tea; I do go through a lot. That seems like a frivolous request, though."

"I don't mind frivolous but I also expect it would need to be a lot of tea for you to taste it. I haven't actually tested how fast I can make things."

"It would, yes," he agrees. "I buy it by the bale from the travelers when I pass near a port. But if it's small things ... tell me, have you heard the tale of the mountain-queen's jewels?"

"I haven't, what's special about them?"

"Well, please remember that these are folk tales, so I'm not sure exactly how much truth there is to them. But the story goes that back before the forest grew, when the world was young and everything was possible, the king of the desert fell in love with the mountain-queen. He dove into the sands, and surfaced with three beautiful rubies as large as a fairy's head. He folded them into a love letter, and tied them to the leg of a seagull, who promised to take the letter across the plains to the home of the queen."

"But seagulls are treacherous creatures, and work for the sea. So the letter was lost, and the king of the desert thought his love unrequited. Eventually the mountain-queen, curious as to the cooling relation between their peoples, and eager to avoid a war, sent her champion, Harrat the Just, as an ambassador to the king of the desert. She learned of the sand-gems, bright like fire, and told the king of their loss. He charged her to recover them, and see them safely delivered, the animosity between the two kingdoms to mend."

"So Harrat searched the land for a year and a day, from Dragon Mountain to the coldest reaches of bear country. And not one trace of the gems did she see. She ended up sitting on the sea side, lamenting to the world the hopelessness of her task, when along the shore came a traveler, with his green skin and his bright blue hair, and asked her what troubled her so. Harrat explained her task, and the traveler pointed out that, though she had searched the land, the gems might still be found in the sea, and offered her a place in his cart to take her to the city where the mermen dwelt."

"Over the course of the journey, they fell in love, and Harrat later gave birth to the first dolphins — creatures of the sea that nonetheless breathe the air, and show their ancestor's kindness in helping lost sailors — but that's not the important part. The important part is that she did eventually recover the sand-gems, and returned to land to present them to her queen."

"But when she arrived, she found the continent engaged in a bitter war, for she had gone too long, and relations between the kingdom's had decayed. Seeing the pointless slaughter, she turned to the sea, and accused it of causing this strife. For five days and five nights she exhorted, and her words were so beautiful and persuasive that around her the battle stopped, and peace spread out over the land once again. At the end of her speech, the sea itself was so touched by her words that it made a solemn vow to never again touch the gems that she carried."

"Over the next months, she saw the gems delivered, and a lasting peace brokered, and the demilitarized zone between the two kingdoms was left fallow, and eventually grew up into the forest. And from that day to this, the sea has kept it's promise, and whoever carries the gems will see the waters draw back from them, letting them walk directly where few land-creatures have seen. But the sea is as fickle as its gulls, and though it keeps its oath, it promised only not to touch the gems, and one gem alone is not enough to see it part."

"And in my treasury, in the most well-guarded vault, I have exactly that: one of the mountain-queen's gems. The other two are lost to time. One is known to have been eaten by Torgelps, the mad Dragon. Of the third, nothing is known, save that nobody claims to have it," Terrance explains.

"I have fond memories of swimming, as a child. Of diving into ponds and lakes where my mother would stop. But obviously I can't do such things now — it would be most dangerous to my citizens. But if I had another of the mountain-queen's gems, I could expand my wandering, and take people to see the land under the sea..."

He trails off, a bit wistful, seeming to have forgotten his audience.

"Well I'm certainly willing to try but I don't know if it would count to just duplicate one of the gems. I'm curious if the story of dolphins is something that's literally true. We also have dolphins in my world but we have a very different explanation for how they came to be."

"It's, ah, hard to be sure," Terrance tells her. "Certainly new species have to come from somewhere, and intelligent people of different species can have children, but they normally end up taking after one parent or the other, not becoming a completely new thing. Or, at least, all the accounts of that sort of thing come from very old stories, and not from something like a historical census."