"There is no word for make-from because only you can do it. Ari cannot make-from, Plasma cannot make-from, Petal can make-from. So the word is whatever Petal wants!"

"Make-from," she declares. "Word make-from."

"An excellent word!" And sufficiently different from the word ordering in e.g. 'jam is made from fruit and sugar' that no-one will be confused. "You can make-from rock? I'm surprised; I didn't know."

"Can yes!"

She finds a rock, and... flops on top of it for a nap. The maple seed settles down next to her.

Aww. That doesn't look very comfortable but it was clearly deliberate and Petal is the expert on her own preferences.

Ari leans against the tree with her interruptibility bracelet set to "no" and reads a book on her handcomp. A woman with a dozen facial piercings leans out one of the ground-floor windows to cut some rosemary from her window-box and politely ignores her.

A little more than twenty minutes later, Petal yawns, stretches out her tiny limbs in all directions, levitates up off the rock, and does the make-from action to it. It doesn't rustle like plants do, so it's a little harder to tell, but she's bobbing slightly in the air the same way, and has the same expression on her tiny face.

After a few seconds, this process yields a round little pebble, about the size of Petal's round little head. She holds it proudly, then tries to pick up the maple seed too and accidentally drops the pebble, then chases the pebble as it rolls off the rock and accidentally drops the maple seed... it is possible she will need a little help with this.

Tiny stretches are very cute. Also she seriously needs to get on that tiny backpack plan. In the meantime: "Very good! Do you want to put that in here?" she asks, indicating one of her belt pouches.

"Put here yes!"

She holds open the pouch for Petal to put it in. "Oh, hm, can you make these?" she asks, tapping one of her brass fingernail-caps with another.

"Don't know can make," she tries to say.

"You don't know if you can make it? Okay." She tries to come up with a way to say 'I want to see what happens if you make two more rocks and then merge them' that's comprehensible and not overly pressure-y and runs into a different question. "Do you want to make some things more than other things, or are all things you can make-from good?"

"Good make petals," she says, unsurprisingly. "Good make... things. Make things, good make other things. Good make things, good merge things."

Well, that's very convenient because Ari wants to see more making and merging of things! "What does merging things make? Do you know before you do it?"

Tiny headshake. "Don't know. Merge thing, see thing, know thing."

"Well, we can merge more things and find out, then!" She also really wants to take apart some of the merged seeds and also try planting one, but both of those seem like big asks when it's so tiring and the latter should wait for something fast-growing.

On the other hand, maple seeds have two pieces. She picks up the maple seed and asks, "If this broke apart into two pieces," careful and nondestructive miming, "could it still merge?"

Wide-eyed blinking. "Don't know!" she says. "Find out? Experiment!"

"Yes! Let's experiment! Can you make another and then we'll have more than three bits?"

Thinkythinkythinky. This is a complicated situation, and she may need to delve into the dreaded realms... of verb tenses.

"Experiment:" she declares. "Ari will break apart seed. Petal will look at bits. Petal will say merge yes no! Petal will..." hang on, she's hit a snag. "Experiment: Petal will sleep. Ari will break apart seed. Petal will look at bits. Petal will say merge yes no. Petal will make seed from tree. Ari will break apart bits. Petal will put bits on floor. Petal will merge. Find out merge!"

"A very good experiment! I will wait while you sleep."

She flops cozily onto the floor.

A songbird hops over to investigate, cocks its head, hops away again, and goes on eating bugs nearby.

Slightly more than twenty minutes and she's up!

"Ex" (yaaaaawn) "periment!" she says excitedly.

"Experiment!" Ari agrees gleefully, then breaks the two halves of the maplespinner apart and holds them out for inspection.

Petal peers carefully at both of them, then shakes her head. "Merge no," she diagnoses.

"Alas. I will not break any more. But I will cut this one up later and look at what's inside." And send it and a control sample to a gene-sequencing-by-mail outlet, but she doesn't have the vocabulary in place to explain that.