"Can human vocal apparatus handle it?"

"Not, like, perfectly? But intelligibly. And of course my vocal apparatus is not strictly human." 

"Of course."

"--Can you do things to your larynx? It wouldn't be visible but what sounds you can make is an aesthetic too." 

"I can but I won't be any good at it without references, especially since it's not visible."

Nod. "I don't think Rubbery language is important enough to put effort into experimenting with right now, even if it is beautiful to my ear...and the Correspondence isn't simply a matter of the larynx. Not important right now, probably." She flips to another chapter, frowning at her book. 

"They've got spaceships," reports Xander. "I'm seeing the Chinese thing in this book in places but the main text is all English. The bunny rabbit city doctor has some very fancy looking stuff but the cat cop has a normal looking gun."

"I guess it's sort of hard to improve on 'tiny explosion propels a chunk of metal down a tube at speed' without getting into destructiveness you don't really want to hand out to random police officers." 

"I'd been hoping for fancy stun weapons."

"Can't you just hit someone over the head for that? I guess it's hard to do at range."

"Also that kills people and causes brain damage?"

"Oh. I might be miscalibrated about how much harm various amounts of violence do in the absence of ambient mountainlight." 

"I guess try not to injure anyone then? We have fiction where people get bonked over the head and wake up fine later but in real life it doesn't work like that reliably."

"Better for me to be miscalibrated than someone who enjoys hurting people, I suppose."

"Lot of recreational head bonkers in the Neath?"

"Yep. Most notoriously the Game of Knife and Candle, which at least has the virtue of putting people who haven't chosen to play off-limits. A merry game of murdering each other. Much less of a terrible idea in the Neath than on the Surface but, uh, that's not a high bar, at all."

"That's fucked up."

"People do fucked up things all the time! I try to stop them, but, uh, Knife-and-Candle only hurts people who consented to it and all the hurt is stuff I can fix so I haven't invested a ton of energy into trying to convince them-in-particular to cut it the fuck out." 

"I wasn't saying, like, you personally shoulda done something about it, just that it's fucked up."

"Yeah, I just--if 2006 is actually just a lot less fucked up then what I'm used to then that's definitely a good thing, but, that's actually kind of not all that fucked up compared to some things I have discovered and either dismantled or failed to do so. Yet." 

"I think things have become less fucked up over time but I don't know as much about parts of the world I didn't grow up in and also your world has a bunch of extra stuff going on that complicate things."

"Yeah, definitely, like, Seeking wouldn't even be possible without, uh, lotsa complicating stuff, and also some people being stupid, uh, Seeking is, it's complicated but it's incredibly self-destructive and destructive of others and only possible because someone decided to murder someone else with a knife made of Mountain-stone and then feed them to some people." 

"That's also fucked up. Though 2006 doesn't have a gruesome murder rate of zero."

"Yeah, but it sorta limits the damage one murderer can do, probably," she sighs, totally ignorant of the Holocaust and other industrialized atrocities that haven't happened (yet?) in her world. 

"Yeah, lone actors don't get that far, I assume arson's been invented in the nineteenth century and guns got fancier but there's still a soft cap on what one dude acting alone can rack up in body count." She sighs and turns back to her science book.