"Huh. I heard that you claimed your metalworking was more advanced than ours and if any of this is real I believe that. Do you have a guide to making the thing you showed me?"

"The microscope is essentially a careful arrangement of lenses - specially curved glass. You can make a telescope to see distant things the same way. I have some stuff on glassworking, someone could learn to make lenses that way. Do you have glass, and mirrors, around? Let's head back to the store so I can show you things as I mention them?"

And get out of HIS WORKSHOP, much as he invited the doctor in it's making him a little testy.

"Well, I don't have glass or mirrors on me, but I could get them." He'll head back to the store.

He heads towards the crafting sections where a vast number of familiar and unfamiliar tools and materials are stocked.

"I don't have the kind of books that explain how things work in direct terms, just craft guides. Let's head over to where I keep my glassworking stuff and see if any of the guides talk about optics, that's what you need to know here."

"Hmm. Yes, let's." He looks at the tools on the way, trying to see if any seem like the sort of thing he should be looking into getting a guide for.

Weaving machines, lathes, CNC cutters, drafting equipment, strange metals, extremely fancy cloth, lots of some shiny material almost like insect shells, power tools, glue and bleach and dyes and solvents and soap-scenting kits. There's a divide between aesthetics - shiny metal and sharp lines, and natural shapes with fantastical design.

Much more rare are things that seem to be about doing magic, as opposed to magical tools for more ordinary crafts. Sets of implements for alchemy, spellbook-grade ink, a book on how to properly create ritual implements.

He can barely read and generally hires someone for that; he doesn't pause long enough to puzzle out what the magic guide might be about. All the other things look... mostly comprehensible, but advanced, and there are so many things, and some of the materials are very alien.

Here's the glass section. It has a variety of modern and traditional tools for working with molten glass, panes of amazingly clear finished glass apparently for cutting up, stained glass additives and other materials in powdered form, and-

"Here we go. Glass Molding Handbook, Basic Glass Fusing, The Glass Artist's Handbook, Beginner's Glassblowing, Beautiful Stained Glass From Scratch, Art From Scratch: Glass From Natural Materials. Those are the ones that might be any good for this, I reckon."

He can scrutinize titles until he's pretty sure that's probably what they say. "How much are they?"

"A few small copper coins for each." Books are cheap. "I'll need to write down some notes on optics though, that's the part you want- This is just how to get glass good enough to do the other stuff. Maybe geometry and math too... I don't just happen to have a lens grinding book, sadly."

That's shocking and inexplicable but so is the rest of this place. "And how much for those notes?"

"Call it two books, since I'm writing them down personally and the books are all flash-copied."

"...Flash-copied?"

"That's how most books are made where I'm from. Someone writes them once, and machines copy them over and over again. If you check one of these, you'll notice the letters are very precise. Hard to do that by hand."

"Do you sell those machines?"

He gets that look craftspeople sometimes do and mutters for a bit.

"...I could get you something that works to copy text onto new paper, but it'd be kind of finicky and delicate."

"Hm. Maybe. ...Do you sell guides to making that sort of thing?"

"I don't have a guide to the printing press- Which is a more primitive version you might actually be able to build. But it's not all that complicated a concept, you just need some pretty good metalworking and... Hmm."

(He investigates his magically-acquired knowledge of whatever they speak in Sesat. The translation is usually so automatic and seamless he doesn't notice but for this it's probably important.)

The doctor gives him a moment to think.

Sesati is written in a partly phonetic script consisting of 136 characters. They almost exclusively go in straight lines. There's no separate minuscule script but size variations are common (though not required).

"-Sesati would be alright for it. But it takes a lot of very careful metalworking and I don't know how much of that your society has, I've only seen the outside of the one town, you know?" 

"I've never thought we weren't good at that, but... yours is different."

"It's not that we're smarter, it's just that we have more stuff, more writing, more to learn with and that kind of snow-balls." Wait, that's not very idiomatic here. "-Just keeps getting bigger and bigger, like a fire. The printing press is essentially hundreds of little stamps or seals you arrange to make one bigger stamp, and use a thousand times, and then arrange it into another stamp for the second page- You could make a printing press with cast copper, the hard part is making blocks for each character and smoothing them down well enough that they all fit together. Then you can arrange them all in rows along rails and swing the whole thing onto ink and then onto paper and I've gotten a bit off track, I should write this down, with diagrams, instead of just explaining it." He laughs to himself.

"...Huh. Sounds fiddly. Bet we can get it working, though."

"Yeah, it's fiddly. I bet you can, too. Should we get a metalworker in here to browse, since I'm a bit afraid to try to explain vaccines and get it wrong thus hurting people instead of actually helping?"

"Maybe we should go to the city government. They can investigate once and call on the resources of the entire population to figure out what we want and pay for it."