The dog wags his tail and looks expectantly at him.

"...what does it want?"

Oh, they probably want to play - here - She makes a ball and tosses it over.

Ento will throw the ball for the dog.

The dog is pretty happy about this!

Traveler comes out to join the group after another few minutes. Aw, cute baby!

"Thank you!" says Sun.

Eventually Shian gets cranky and Ento picks her up and starts walking her to sleep on his shoulder.

Awww.

Sassafras sits with Shadow to ask her questions about the city; meanwhile traveler asks Sun about the pocket everything he's after - has she been able to find anything out about getting one that uses crafter writing?

There is now a crafter input method! It's not very smooth yet, they can submit requests to the translation project.

Great. He's going to want two, one for himself and one for the diplomat, does she know how long that'll take?

They have spares, since it would be really bad to be without pocket everythings far from civilization. Sun can unwrap a couple for him.

Excellent.

He's been thinking he'd like to talk to some of the aliens over their internet, just kind of random ones maybe, for his book; is there a way to do that that she can show him?

Sure, if he wants random aliens there's Chat Shuffle - it'll only get ones on this planet, the lag is big for ones on Amenta. If he wants ones on Amenta he can use Async, a message board where you can post questions or remarks and people discuss what you said underneath.

Chat Shuffle sounds like it might be what he wants. - he wants to be able to find the same person again if he has followup questions, though.

Then he can ask anyone he wants to keep in touch with on Chat Shuffle for their email address or their Breakout ID or their Everybody name.

He'll need a little help figuring those out, too, but eventually it comes together.

That evening, a crow drops a rolled-up tube of unassuming grey crafting material through the upper net on the reds' roof.

It rolls along the inside layer of the net for a bit and comes to a stop near the northwest upper corner.

...well that's not how this was supposed to go. The crow looks for a red to get the attention of.

There's one pacing with a baby on his shoulder; the baby is very fussy and the dad is very tired. There's an adolescent one doing homework over there. There's an old lady taking apart and repairing something with loud power tools.

He hops over closer to the teenager. Hey newperson!

She looks up. "Hey bird."

He brought over a message from the crafters but it got stuck, can she get it?

"Uh." She looks. "I guess I could maybe climb up there? I'm not sure it's a good idea..."

He doesn't understand those words.

"What's in the message?"

It's from the crafters. They didn't tell him what it is.