Amentans have some similar animals - here is a picture of his daughter's last dog, aren't they similar apart from the horns? - and they train them with food rewards and behavior shaping techniques. Most pet dogs don't learn quite as many things as a crafter's dog but they learn to behave in public and contain their waste and so on.

Well, if they're confident they can manage it, a litter is usually six to eight but can be over a dozen - and she'd want homes arranged for them all, she doesn't need any more dogs - and the pregnancy takes two months and it's another two before they're ready to be away from their mother. They should start meeting a variety of people at the end of the first month, though, whatever species they'll be expected to get along with as adults; it may be a good idea to send the mother and pups to the househive at that point.

The grey's daughter does not want six to eight puppies but they can probably be homed without trouble and there's almost certainly a vet or something in the city who can take the mother to get acclimated to Amentans, though they don't look super different from crafters. Maybe they smell very different.

Her dogs have been fine with them, but she doesn't know what other sorts of livestock they might have around, that part is important too. They are carnivores, and pack hunters at that, they'll eat species they don't see as family.

Non-pet animals would be on farms but it might matter if they'd attack cats on the street, sure.

Well, there they go then. Anyway, she'll think about pairings - she assumes they'll want a companion line, not a hunting or labor line - and they can tell her if they decide they want to go through with it.

Yeah, a companion dog, and they will for sure get back to her about that. Do crafters breed crows at all or do the crows just manage themselves?

They sometimes use crow eggs for fleshcrafting or genecrafting, but they don't arrange pairings, no.

What sorts of things have crow eggs been crafted into?

Well, the easiest kind of genecrating is just to bring out traits that an individual's ancestors had that are hidden in them; doing that to a crow makes them a little clumsier in flight but stronger and better at hunting and fighting, and the flocks like having a few of those around - if they've seen ones with long tails, feathered legs, and toothy snouts, that's what they are. Fleshcrafting options are pretty limited on flying species, it's so easy to disrupt that, but she knows there's a few modifications to wing shape that work for crows, and a couple for better senses - sight and smell that she knows of.

Can they have some more examples of how genecrafting and fleshcrafting work in practice?

Genecrafting's a specialist skill even for the basics and her community didn't have one, she doesn't know that much about it personally, but she can print them up a book if she hasn't already. It overlaps some with fleshcrafting, which can add basically arbitrary body parts to a living being - when she grows fruit from her plants, that's simple fleshcrafting. It can also do modifications - she's made her dogs temporarily infertile via fleshcrafting, and it's used to correct peoples' vision if they have trouble seeing things too nearby or too far away. She could probably make her hair grow a different color with it, if she spent some time reading up on how; some people do custom food that way, as a fairly easy use that's beyond the basics everyone learns. Functional organs are harder, especially if they'll need to be removed afterward - the medical book she read to them the first day talked about that, and it's how men can breastfeed and bear children and women can sire them. Advanced uses include giving people prehensile tails or wings that are, with lots of caveats, functional, though the latter is very hard to prepare for: like all crafting, fleshcrafting can't create mass, and the mass it uses can't come from crafting-material, either; the person receiving the wings has to eat enough to gain that weight, and wings big enough for a crafter to even glide with are pretty huge.

Wow, that's all incredibly amazing and is again something Amentans would be super into trading for. Amentans are actively doing genetics research into milder springs - Amentans have a seasonal cycle and spring is the one where they can have babies, and it's pretty unpleasant to spring and not have a baby, and even with faster than light travel they aren't finding new planets so reliably that they can just pull out all the stops on that. Does that sound feasible?

...huh. Fleshcrafting can probably do something about that and she wouldn't be surprised if genecrafting can too - they probably want it as genecrafting if they can get it, since genecrafting can be made to be passed on to children and fleshcrafting can't. (Hmm.) It's going to take some luck for her to find a genecrafter for them given her current constraints, but she'll try; it sounds like this is a bit of a big deal.

It's a really big deal, yeah. Nobody wants to be totally hypovernal, that would be cutting themselves off from a huge part of the experience of being an Amentan, but mild springs are good.

Well, she'll do what she can.

Awesome!

They have come up with lots of valuable things crafters can do; what sorts of things will crafters want from Amentans?

Well, she's noticed that they seem less resource-constrained for basics, which makes sense with such a huge household; crafters really like their households to be self-sufficient, but being able to trade for big quantities of things would make some kinds of projects feasible that aren't usually, she expects they'll get people interested in that - not being able to make crafting-material themselves is a limitation, but if they're going to pay for people to convert things it could work out well enough. Their tech is neat; they'll get people wanting that and wanting books and expert consultation to reverse-engineer it and make crafting-material versions. Livestock and plants, of course, once they're sure they're safe for crafters and their domesticates. Interesting designs for things are always a popular trade good - new clothing or furniture or vehicles or whatever. Books in general, probably. Any special skills they have to trade or to teach.

Books! Are there any sorts of books lone sassafrass would like? They'd be machine translated, and that's never perfect even with much more training data and people who speak both languages fluently, but it might be better than nothing.

Not right now; she doesn't have time for reading.

Fair enough, they're keeping her pretty busy. Sun's been advising against sending parties farther afield to find more crafters to talk to, since some farther-afield crafters will have been deliberately getting out of the Amentans' way.

And the rest will have been warned by the fleeing ones, around here. Once they have their apology written she can make some headway on getting that distributed, maybe include a suggestion that they make contact with it. (That should be written separately from the apology and she should probably be the one to write it if they're going to be sent out together.)

Sun has some questions about that - is there particular formal language suited to apologies, how long is it supposed to be, should it be a personal apology from the director of the colony or several from the people who actually initially walked up to crafters or just a collaboratively written apology from the colonists as a group...

Well, the point of it is to explain what went wrong and that they regret it; the details will depend on what exactly did go wrong and what's going to change as a result of the regret - if the head of the hive made the decision to handle things that way and everyone else was just following orders in a predictable way, it'd make sense for it to come from the head-of-hive; if the directions were vaguer and decisions about how to implement them were made by the people who trespassed then it could potentially go either way, depending on what changes will be made to solve that problem; if the people who trespassed were under clear orders but feel that they should have disobeyed them and will do that with similar orders in the future then that'd be a good apology, too - ideally in conjunction with an assurance that they won't get those orders again in the first place, of course. But usually when something like this has happened there were several things that could have been done differently, and it's up to them which one or ones they want to change, and the apology should reflect what they're doing with that.

"Okay, I'll pass that on to Governor Tauko." They have speech to text going now.