All right, he'll ask around about cow and deer meat. He's familiar with turkeys, too, but they're not really in season right now, he doesn't expect anyone to have any on hand. Where she's from has meat plants? That's very impressive.

Shining-pebbleclinker is outside, if she wants to meet them when she's done. No rush, though, they brought over a project to work on and aren't bored at all.

(It's taking a fair while to compose responses as she flips back and forth in her notes and starts working on something to at least try and auto-translate for her.)

Yes. Not quite meat plants but it'd take a while to explain.

(Well, she's glad she has the Core in for this. She's actually excited to meet the local nerd but they tend to be exhausting about their specialties and she should know, she is one.)

Does he mind if she takes out [this thing] like she took out the drone? Wakeup-drink-maker. But she only has enough wakeup for maybe 5 drinks.

Sure, she can do that. They have a local wakeup plant, too; he can show her if she thinks she can tell if it'd be safe for her.

She can tell by tasting it just a bit, thanks.

Out comes her instant coffee brewer and a paper packet of instant coffee. Soon it is burbling into a ceramic mug she also appears.

He gets a canister out of a cabinet; the contents look, smell, and taste like roasted coffee beans of the type she might have had coated in chocolate back home.

She thinks that's the same thing as her wakeup, just not processed! That's great, she really likes coffee.

It's strange how they have the same kinds of plants and animals if they're not quite the same kind of person, with territory and not taking actions in unfamiliar places and uncertainty other things.

It's a little strange, definitely. Some other species are really similar to each other, though, it's not that weird as a concept, just weird to run into all of a sudden.

Yeah, there's convergent evolution and things. Maybe two legs, two arms, and a human head is just the ideal civilized-tool-user form or something.

She picks at the remnants of the meat some.

Red do important work at home.

Community hurt community possibility uncertainty?

Community hurt community, uh...

Oh - different communities, right? That pretty much doesn't happen here, not among his species. If it's a risk from hers they'll want to be careful about that.

"Yyyyep. Yes."

Negation(community red hurt community blue) likely.

Person like Red "Human". Person like blue-

She erases that.

Create new writing uncertainty?

Community number of people uncertainty?

There's a few ways to refer to his species in writing - 'crafters' and 'the ones with hands' are both common, he can show her the glyphs for those.

There's no, like, formal membership in a community the way there is in a household, it really depends on how you count - there's about sixty households on the local network and maybe a couple dozen who aren't on the network but are close enough for him personally to trade with; figure about two of his species per household including kids, maybe a bit more.

That's good enough for an order of magnitude, maybe a hundred households in a "community", so order of 200...

"Town" is community of communities in number of people. 4000 humans. She glyphs it with the square-and-spike she used before.

"City" is small community of towns. More than 100000 humans. She glyphs it with a tall rectangle filled with a grid of dots.

"Arcology" is large city guarded from danger. She glyphs it like "city" but within a big circle.

She brings up a huge panoramic view of the Perth arcology's interior biodome with its false-sun walls and roof, including the massive central residential spire, with "City" and a short arrow pointing to it. It's mind-boggling even to her just how big the arcologies are, so it should be impressive.

Yikes? What kind of danger are they dealing with that it makes sense to do that to themselves?

Humans (mostly) like it that way if he means [the spire]. They are closer to other humans and food and fun and tools and resources.

The danger is not-human people. She glyphs them as a stylized blocky 'A', with a danger-ball in place of the hole.

Antagonists don't talk to humans. They don't seem to have bodies other than- ([this thing], a gleaming angular swept-wing stealth bomber in black, silver, and blue. Or this one, a tank. Or that one, an AA-missile launcher. All gleaming metal and menacing.)

Antagonists arrived at human home without talking. Antagonists hurt all cities.

All humans hurt all Antagonists. All Antagonists hurt all humans.

Red was learning to hurt Antagonists. Red emphasis emphasis emphasis dislikes Antagonists.

It seems pretty reasonable she hates them if they're hurting her people. He still has no idea about transportation to where she's from but if they figure it out maybe one of the crafters can go try to talk to them, if the humans haven't managed it? That might not work but it seems better than them killing each other.

Maybe a crafter could try it. Humans have tried lots of ways like sound and light and other things to talk to them, but not crafter speak. The crafter might die even with strong human guards.

She doesn't know how she got here either aside from - she does a little bit of finagling to get the idea of 'experimental weapon technique' across - going wrong and hurting her instead.

If they're people at all crafters should be able to talk to them; communication just works, that way. It's trickier if it's dangerous to get close but he bets someone very old or sick would be willing to do it, most people prefer a useful death to a pointless one and that would definitely be useful, even if it doesn't work out.

If she can explain how her weapon works someone might be able to help her figure out what happened with it - shining-pebbleclinker is a good choice for that, too, actually, if it's not their kind of thing they'll know whose thing it is.

Good idea. It involves the impeller field and lots of math.

She wants a little bit more to eat, please, and then to go talk with shining-pebbleclinker.

Sure; more dove, or something else?

Once she's fed, he shows her the walking stick he crafted for her last night - identical to his in most details, though the edges of the top curl are crisper on hers and it's a reddish-brown rather than green - and leads her outside.

Shining-pebbleclinker is sitting on a chair made with similar design sensibilities to the trundlecart, leaning in to adjust something on the cart-mounted contraption they've brought with them. It seems at first glance to be a marble maze, with the marbles and chutes scaled down to a fraction of the size that's standard in her world and dozens if not hundreds of marbles in motion through it, some plain and some glowing; if Wanda watches, though, she'll soon notice that they take relatively short paths before reaching collection points, where they're passed on or lifted back to their starting points when they're joined by another marble; a little more observation makes it clear that the collection points are in fact logic gates, reacting to the glow of the marbles.

Beans with spices would be good. And eggs, she doesn't like 'em THAT much but needs food in her. She appreciates the walking stick!

...That's kind of amazing!!!

She begins the discission by finding and opening this computer science learning program that lets you click and drag logic gates around and pulling up a full-adder, one of the most basic units of modern computers, pointing it at Pebbles (as Wanda is thinking of her) and running some examples. The gates light up on activation, on screen.

Oooooooh. How does that work? Pebbles has never seen anything like it before. It's showing... an adder? Works a little differently from the one she has at home (which does more digits, too), but it's recognizable.

She can't talk like that, but she is learning to write!

It works with millions and even billions of switches like her marbles! So small you can't even see them.

You can put a bunch of these adders together like... This! And add arbitrarily large numbers!

Yeah! Millions, really? In something so small? That's super impressive and she wants to know all about it as soon as Wanda can write well enough to explain!

If she's not stopped, pebbleclinker will spend the rest of the day bringing Wanda up to speed on the state of the art in crafter computing; they haven't developed multipurpose computers, even at assembly level, and the size limitation of working in pebbles is pretty significant, but they've got arithmetic down, and the network, and some simple robotics, and automated use of crafting gadgets like shrinkers and scanners and so on; she's currently working on a multipurpose cooking system that will let someone make food for someone else via the network.

It also turns out, as she's demonstrating, that the 'shining' part of her name isn't just from the glow of the marbles; she can also make her fingertips glow, to work with the logic gates without having to finagle as many marbles into place.

She knows a bunch of computer science (binary search is pretty basic, but how about this lovely elegant parity checking algorithm for making sure you have no errors when transmitting your data! It hardly even consumes much of the data's space!) but is kind of limited in explaining it. You can make really tiny logic gates with some rare materials and specialized tools. Then you can make machines that make the same thing over and over and over again and bootstrap from there.

What are all the things that crafting can actually do?

'Rare' seems to be beyond what Wanda can communicate with the vocabulary she has; pebbleclinker makes some guesses, but gives up before hitting on it. Her computer science is super cool, though.

Crafting can do lots of stuff, and people are inventing more all the time - the basic action of it, once you have crafting-materials to work with, is to impress traits onto your materials, like 'glowing' or 'producing heat' or 'moving in a particular way', and then you combine those to make whatever thing you're trying for, like her cooking machine uses a self-heating cooking surface and a robotic arm with a bit on the end that can morph into different tools to fry things. Any physical trait can be changed, though this can be dangerous; there's a few ways of changing materials' traits that don't seem to do anything but actually make the materials harmful to touch or unhealthy to be around. (Fortunately it's always possible to reverse a change if you know how it was made in the first place, and visible changes are generally not subtly dangerous like that.) It's also possible to make something that has the trait of changing other materials' traits via crafting; the second material has to already be crafting-material and it's clumsier that way than doing it directly, but this allows for a lot of complicated machines. And you can 'link' two objects and have them able to affect each other at a distance; this is a relatively new discovery and led to the invention of the network.