Ari Enna-Branse is at work, or possibly at play, teaching a dozen children experimental design in the school chemistry lab, and her husband is out of town at a conference.
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!"
"Experiment!" Ari agrees gleefully, then breaks the two halves of the maplespinner apart and holds them out for inspection.
"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.
"Yes. I want to see if I can find any difference between this and one you didn't make."
"Experiment..."
She trails off confusedly, but then shakes herself a little and flumphs onto Ari's shoulder. A cozy perch.
Awww, sweetie. Ari can stand perfectly still for twenty minutes. What a precious baby.
💤
After a little less than twenty minutes, she's up again.
"Make-from rock!" she announces, and goes to do that. The same one she got the initial pebble from, in fact. It yields a second identical pebble.
Ari goes and finds a different rock! "If you make-from this rock and make-from that rock will they merge with each other?"
Caaaaarefully smoothly sitting down on a bench. Mental note to bring the box of blankets down next time.
And after a little less than twenty minutes she's up again and harvesting the second rock.
It produces a different-looking pebble. "Merge no," she concludes.
"Huh, okay." What's a good next thing to try out of all the things she wants to try? Putting a little dab of paint on a rock to see if its 'products' are mergeable from before and after should wait until they have at least three from that rock already so as not to waste effort. Checking two maple seeds from the same tree is a good idea but also a bit labor intensive . . .
Okay, the idea she's just had is going to bug her until she checks. Probably the answer is no and there isn't anything to worry about.
"Could you make-from that bird, if you wanted to?"
"Good." So she almost certainly can't make-from people either and that can of worms can just stay closed. "What do you want to do next? More words? Make more things?"
Once they've accumulated three rocks, Ari offers them all to Petal and points out a flat bit of dirt she could merge them on, then watches eagerly.
Petal moves the rocks, one by one, to the flat bit of dirt. They make a neat little triangle.
She nudges one of the rocks into the other two.
The result:
...a slightly bigger, slightly prettier rock. Where the component pebbles were a very ordinary pebbly grey all over with only minor variations, this one has sparkly bits, arranged loosely into a pretty spiral pattern across its surface.
Petal drifts away from it with the air of an experimenter standing back triumphantly from their result.
It's floating about half an inch above the dirt, seemingly unsupported by any active intervention; Petal has never shown the ability to levitate objects besides what she's personally carrying, and she isn't carrying it, and it's already farther from her than anything else she's ever lifted.