"I haven't heard of it, at least."

"It's an oil from underground that you probably have if this planet's had life long enough which it's possible it has not."

"How would we be able to tell?"

"I'm sorry, I haven't a clue, this would be more useful if you already dug it up sometimes and had a word for it and could just be alerted that it was a useful direction."

"Well, I can certainly spread the word if you give me a bit more of a description - "

"It's... black? Hazardous to one's health? Uh, I think sometimes it's under pressure, under the ground, and squirts up if you puncture its location."

"How is it hazardous?"

"It might give off fumes? It is bad in some way to get it on your skin. I have never actually been in a room with the stuff."

"So probably nothing we can't just copy off the effects of - I'll let appropriate people know."

"It's used to power early engines and stuff in addition to making plastics."

"Noted.  What else?"

"I'm coming up fairly blank on things even as explainable as that, unfortunately."

"We may have more ideas tomorrow after we've slept on it."

"This morning you mentioned mass production and you haven't elaborated on that yet.  - If you were attempting to leave politely I'm not angling to keep you here longer than you want to be."

"Uh, mass production in general is just the basic idea of making lots of things identically - screws that all take the same standard sized holes, and drills that make those holes, say, and then if people want screws enough it's worth making specialized equipment that can't do anything but make screws in those sizes, but with that equipment the screws are much cheaper and less labor intensive to make. The printing press is an early form of mass production."

"We definitely have that in some areas; I wasn't sure if you had more to elaborate on."

"One of the consequences of mass production is that fewer people have to work in manufacture so I don't know a lot. Uh, do you have conveyor belts?"

"Not that I've both heard of and remembered?"

"Conveyor belts are cool and might work without electricity! You get a bunch of rollers -" He can draw the designs of conveyor belts he's seen.

Conditional on his permission, she'll take some notes on top of it.

That's fine.

And then it can go in this afternoon's stack of notes!

"Let's see, what else are reasonable first-day things besides tech - we should check the time conversion; we could start you on learning Cretari - I've been assuming that if you were close to running out of money you would have mentioned it earlier but it seems prudent to ask . . ."

"We've been budgeting pretty aggressively but it'd be good to know on what schedule to expect a stipend."

"I think most jobs with stable pay do it weekly, biweekly, or seasonally; does one of those sound particularly convenient for you?  - Or possibly tri-weekly or semi-seasonally; I think that one is also common."

"Biweekly's good - and how much?"