Maybe crafting-material can be made into semiconductors, (which are the tiny logic gate material) but she's not sure where to start explaining the properties they have to have. Maybe she can guess what's dangerous about the dangerous states if she hears a little more? They've discovered lots of dangerous things.

Her people would probably really like crafting-materials even set up for simple things like 'being really REALLY hot and put in a safe container to heat lots of stuff at once', if there's enough to go around.

The weirdest ones are the one that hurts to touch and will make sparks and set things on fire if you give something too much of it and the one that glows and makes plants and animals super sick if there's too much of it - they think it makes them sick if there's less but it's around for too long, too, even if it doesn't glow. And then things like changing the temperature something evaporates at, that's less weird than those two and lots easier to figure out what's going on but it's still not great to breathe a bunch of material in all of a sudden.

Basic changes like making things hot aren't hard at all; they're not quite as enjoyable as making basic crafting materials, for most crafters, but Wanda's people shouldn't have a hard time setting up trades even if they can't learn to do it themselves.

Yeah that sounds like electricity, pretty dangerous if not handled well but actually what her computer uses, and radioactivity, which is SUPER DUPER DANGEROUS if handled poorly, and useful in some niche cases.

She tried doing it herself a bit and couldn't get anything. Is there a right way to learn?

She should probably start by trying to figure out how to communicate like crafters do, it's basically the same sort of mental motion - you're putting your thoughts in someone else - and much easier. It's definitely weird that she doesn't already know how, though, even clever animals can pick it up and pebbleclinker definitely would have guessed that anyone who could write would be able to do it.

She's been reading and writing since she was 5. This is new.

Can pebbleclinker think the mental motion at Red?

...maybe? Give her a minute to think about it.

The problem is that it's so automatic she isn't aware of the details anymore, it just happens when she wants it to. Doing it feels like this, though.

Huh. It's alien in the same sort of way Wave Force manipulation was alien. A complete new twist to the brain, thinking in a way never thought before.

Testing. Testing. Testing. Testing.

She just feels silly. Doesn't really expect it to work.

Again?

Communicating feels like this and making crafting material feels like this and making something hot feels like this.

She thanks pebbleclinker and tries thinking at her without any particular strategy for half an hour, occasionally asking for the feeling to be sent again. If nothing happens maybe she'll do... Mindfulness meditation about it or something? (God, she should be in tactics class about now...)

Pebbleclinker thinks she got something, after about twenty minutes - not anything coherent, but it's still progress!

Encouraging if it's not a false positive!

She mmmmight need to take a break on this though, brain hurting. And she's getting reasonably fast at writing, with a complicated algorithm she reused for this, so they can still talk a bit without her learning how to do the thing.

What is living in this place like? Does everyone everywhere have territories and small houses?

It varies a bit more than that! Lots of people want to run their own households once they're adults, but not everyone, so some crafters stay with their parents or find households to be members of rather than starting their own - it's simpler that way, they don't have to make as many decisions, but also more restricting. And most but not all households have set territories; some are mobile, with everything on trundlecarts - usually traders or people with migratory species in their households but some people just prefer it for itself, temporarily or permanently. She herself has often thought about going mobile for a while to see what kinds of computing things have been invented in other places.

There can't be that many crafters on the planet if they live in such low density.

And with so few people...

One person doing one kind of work gets very good at it. If pebbleclinker can just clink pebbles all the time and not do any farming or chores, and someone else who is good at farming does all the farming, that would mean more of both things get done, yes?

But with fewer people around you can't do that as much.

...has riverwalker not shown her how they craft food? Nobody needs to spend all their time on farming; people who really like plants get into breeding interesting kinds, and meat takes work, but someone who only keeps easy things doesn't have to spend more than a few minutes on it, most days.

Ooh, riverwalker is a good name.

She isn't explaining what she means correctly. Maybe she'll try again once she can speak properly, if she learns.

Shrug; all right. Does she have any other questions?

How does the food-crafting work? Can you craft one carrot into two carrots?

Not directly; what foodcrafting does is force-growing plants. It's best for things like fruit or nut or legume plants where the edible part is pretty separate from the main body of the plant, that way you can just grow exactly what you need when you need it and leave the rest of the plant there.

...Does the plant need huge amounts of water and fertilizer when you force grow it?

It needs water and crafted fertilizer, yeah, no kind of crafting can make matter. Not huge amounts, just equivalent to what you're making it grow.

She is relieved. If crafting could make new matter that would be very surprising.

(...But can it reduce negentropy? ...Well, Valkyrie Cores do that, they think, so nevermind.)

Her going home is unlikely but maybe pebbleclinker could help, or knows who could help. She messed up a [golden sphere] technique to get here, and she has logic-machine recordings of what happened, but it almost killed her and she doesn't know why or even understand how the thing she was trying to do works exactly. It also involves some very weird math.

That sounds like it might be a big project, but one that'd be in pebbleclinker's wheelhouse, and definitely interesting. She can take a look at the recordings and see if she can make any sense of the format, that seems like a place to start. And old leaf likes weird math, it'd be worth telling them about it probably.

Uh...

Explaining how to interpret Impeller Field recordings would be very hard until she learns to speak properly. But she doesn't feel ready to try that some more right now either. She might just need to go back to sleep.

That's fair. Should she call riverwalker back? Wanda might want to cover her ears if so, it'll be loud.

If the house is negation-can-go, yes please. Hopefully she'll be more able to do things tomorrow.