"You know...I just might. How far do you suppose your knowledge of celestial engineering generalizes to celestial biology?"

"I suspect about equivalently to the plague doctor operating on a vague suspicion that washing things is important but not knowing precisely how or why."

"Hm. It's not nothing. What can you do with stellar engineering, besides maintaining a bad life-support system on an artificial star?"

"Mmh. Stuff with optics and glass, tricks with mirrors - dangerous things, mirrors - build very large and tough void machinery, perhaps even incorporating Correspondence into devices without everything exploding. We had a lot of Correspondence in the deeper mechanisms. I don't know why it all worked, just that it did. It was more art and intuition than logic at that point. I wonder if I could spool your light like Hours..."

"Ooh. I can do Hours, but I had to look at them being done for a while first. If you could figure out how to do that that would be amazing." 

"Well, no promises. Light is not the same as light."

"Well, yeah. But I can do time-light." 

"Mountainlight is a lot more impatient than timelight! I don't think it'll take to crystallization well. I could go look for my old things at the Royal Society and try this and that, perhaps..."

"Impatient?" 

"Time is surprisingly good at waiting! It lingers until it is expended. Your light does things right away and then is gone."

"Hmm. That's true. I can just keep making it, though. A river is harder to work with than a pond but not impossible." 

"Mmmmmhhh. I want to watch you making Hours. And then I think I'd like to be dropped off at my old room in the Royal Society for a while, with a glowing shard. Maybe with some food and water and paper as well. I'll have a better idea if it can be done after that."

"Sure, I can do that. Why don't we stop somewhere and you can watch me make Hours and when we're done with that we can go back to London and I'll sell the hours and get you set up with supplies." 

"Sure. Sure. There's a little twist to them. Some alone time will do me good, you know..."

"Everyone needs time to themselves." 

She finds a good spot to land and puts down the engineer and turns human and pulls on her dress. 

The engineer isn't really present enough to respect any notions of modesty. The tattered remains of a rubber sun-suit aren't particularly modest either.

"...I just realized. I don't remember my name."

"Concerning. Do you remember which room at the Royal Society is yours? We might be able to find something there with your name on it." 

"501 Babbage Hall. It's in the Gardens. Top floor, excellent view."

"Okay, excellent. Hours first, though, I think." 

She gets out her contraption and switches over her light and sets to spinning Hours. 

The nameless engineer peers so closely at the process her nose is almost touching it.

"So that's- Huh. Huh. Tell me how you do it? In Correspondence. I can stand it, probably. I've gotten used to it."

The sensation of producing time-light. The peculiar ontological shift to one's fingers which allows one to manipulate time-light, in relation to the ontological shift of pronouncing Correspondence which distinguishes between pure communication and the act of reshaping reality. The patterns which congeal time-light into a stable solid. 

"Oof, a bit of a whammy. I think I see it. I think you'll need something between the two shifts- See, it's about the side-ness, same magnitude but different direction. Time is sticky with more of itself like cotton thread and you're sort of - of weaving it- But that won't work with mountainlight because it's like wind or water... I always have trouble picturing anything more than three spatial dimensions. The human mind's not built for it."

"...I think I see what you're saying," she nods. "So to get it to stay put I'd have to--hm, I think I'm starting to understand some things I've seen before from a new angle. So what we'd want is something like Amber, but more accessible to humans--did Amber make it out of the Neath? Naively I would expect no but I could be surprised." 

"It works a bit differently now. And only happens in Eleutheria." She waves vaguely. "You need something for it to stick to. A potion with enough metaphorical weight might do it, a sort of - condensing thing. Hesperidian Cider existed. More efficient than that. But it really doesn't want to be still, so at least, some sort of stable oscillation. Something like those damnable impossible mirrorcatch boxes."

"Those things are tricky. Hesperidian Cider existed, and the way that worked was that--Mountainlight doesn't want to be still, but it does like the dynamic equilibria in living things. So it pooled in the apple trees and the apples and you could process the apples in a way that kept it. But the process is pretty lossy, you're right that we'd want something more efficient...maybe something involving something alive but fairly amorphic, like--heh, fungi--or algae..."