amenta colonizes delena
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Hmm, okay, give him fifteen minutes -

And fifteen minutes later he presents them with two hand-sized ovals, each with a three-position toggle marked 'concave', 'empty', and 'convex' on one end and a patch of sky blue on the other; setting the toggle one one oval to empty and the other to convex changes the sky blue to midnight blue on both, and similarly setting them to empty and concave changes them back to sky blue. Empty is the receptive state, he explains, and convex and concave are the types of magnetization; setting the ends to convex and concave at the same time will have unreliable results and will tend to damage the connection parts if they leave them that way for long. (A proper network machine will have safeties for this but he'd need to check a book to see how to make them.)

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Cool. There is actually some cash to be had on-planet, they were building their network from the ground up and didn't want everything to screech to a halt if it went down for some reason, so here is a pile of cash the physicists put up for this.

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...sure, he guesses?

Anyway here's a network-end for the crafter diplomat and if there's nothing else he'll get going.

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They look forward to seeing him tomorrow!

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Yep!

 

The network connection they're holding for lone sassafras starts changing colors in the wee hours in the morning, quickly blinking between indigo and gold for a minute, waiting ten, then blinking for another minute, with no apparent sign of stopping in this pattern.

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Huh. The grey on night watch writes that down in case it matters later.

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Lone sassafras comes by in the morning, as usual, and quickly identifies the blinking as a message trying to be sent through. She pops the connection into her machine while it's resting between sendings, and on the next cycle it prints her out a page: Indigo's had a rough night after eating the aliens' food and won't be by today. Their doctor friend thinks they'll be fine and should just have started more slowly with it. They might send some questions later for their book.

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...indigo?

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From yesterday? ...writes under the name traveler?

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Oh! (Amentans have mutliple designations too, they just aren't used to the context switching.) They wish him a speedy recovery and if the doctor friend has any other guesses about what might be easier on the digestion they would be eager to hear.

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She passes this along; the reply comes back quickly that his doctor friend thinks food more like what they're used to eating will have much less risk of this sort of thing but that it should be possible to get used to new things if they just take it more slowly and give their digestion a chance to adjust.

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Okay. Maybe they will put together sample sized collections of things for crafters to taste at a gentler pace.

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Indigo writes back that that sounds like a good idea.

 

Meanwhile, in the city, there's a crow who's heard about threehawks' request for information about other kinds of newpeople. It took a few days, in between making the rounds between all his newpeople friends, but he finally spotted one! They also come in red-haired! He's going to get such a tasty treat from threehawks, and maybe more if he can tell her more things about them. The newpeople like to live in treecliffs all together with other newpeople with the same hair, so he shouldn't need to find this exact newperson again now that he's followed them home, just check all the windows of this treecliff until he finds one that's open and then he can go in and see!

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The windows in the red-haired-people building are basically never open. The ones that are open - when someone has burned something cooking, when someone's air conditioning is broken - have screens over them.

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That's weird!

He catches a thermal to check the roof.

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The roof has netting over it, two layers of it a couple feet apart, but there are red haired people on it, growing some food and lounging in the sun. A child runs up to the edge of the inner netting to get a closer look at a crow.

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Hi kid!

He perches on one of the supports and plucks at the netting, checking it out.

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The netting is actually fairly tough metal cabling, insulated to protect from the weather, barely flexible.

"Hi bird!" says the kid.

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He pecks at it again and then steps out onto it, carefully, and attempts to get a good bounce going on it. Disappointingly, it doesn't work.

This stuff is mean, he tells the kid; he wants to play!

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"Aw poor bird," says the kid.

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Can the kid help? He wants to play!

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"I can't let you in, bird, that's not allowed."

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He doesn't catch the words this time but the tone is clear enough.

He flaps over to the edge of the building and starts checking out how the netting is attached there - newpeople make worse edges sometimes, they don't leave them all smooth like crafters do, maybe there's something he can pick apart.

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The netting is bolted into the concrete once every inch.

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He spends a few minutes pulling at the various bits of this arrangement to no effect - maybe he'll get a toothycrow to come try later - and then hops back over to watch the newpeople some more.

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