Maybe, maybe not - crafting-material making is normally meditative and soothing, and working with something like dirt takes more active attention and strategizing, like a puzzle; some crafters like it, it's just more like a hobby than a form of relaxation and not something everyone enjoys.

Maybe someone will specialize then. What does it feel like to do?

It's kind of its own thing, but it's very sensorily immersive, like lying in a sunbeam or letting a stream run over your hand or petting a quiet dog. Converting dirt is like petting a dog that keeps moving, or floating down a river and having to be careful not to drift into the banks, or trying to get comfortable lying outdoors on a blustery day.

Those are such wonderfully evocative descriptions.

Sun would like to introduce Uta Meston! Meston's here to talk about vehicle controls.

Cool.

Lone sassafras, as it turns out, is a nerd about vehicles.

Then she'll get along great with Uta Meston, who is also a nerd about vehicles! Here is how scooters and bikes are controlled - here's how tuktuks do it - trucks - trains - airplanes - spaceships -

Trains are neat! Airplanes are neater! Spaceships are amazing!

She brought most of her vehicle collection, and steps back eventually to get out of her walker and go into the shed to retrieve it, boxes on boxes of two-inch-long miniatures that must have taken up half the space inside. She gets a brick of crafting-material while she's in there, and crafts it to enlarge one after another into functional models to explain how walkers work and what they've figured out about making balloon vehicles and all her opinions about control-cabin design.

Can Meston try some of the vehicles?

She has enough crafting material with her to make sequential full-sized versions of some of the small ones, sure! She hasn't worked out how exactly to hook their controls up the way these vehicles need yet but she can put in a more familiar kind of manual control system, and soon the purple has a walker of their own to take around the campsite.

Meston tromps around, getting the hang of it gradually.

Lone sassafras follows, occasionally getting briefly stuck and having to back up and choose a new trajectory when she comes too close to the tents and once flinching badly when a grey unexpectedly passes too close to her.

Sun thinks this is very fascinating and makes sure to get video of these events, though she also shoos the grey. "How do you figure where our camp starts?"

For a temporary encampment like this the boundary is about the distance that it'd feel reasonable to interact with them at, for example by waving; they've made it clear that they want her here and they don't have a true claim to the area, so she can approach closer than that without too much effort, but she still feels it. The tents are separately awkward because they look flimsy, if she was relying on a shelter like that she wouldn't want anyone to get too near it and that makes it hard to approach them.

Can she teach Sun how to encourage her closer or would that be scary?

In theory she can invite her to do specific things closer to the tents, and if she does a lot of that it will eventually get clear enough that she's welcome to be near them that avoiding them will feel silly and she'll stop; in practice that's not entirely reliable even under normal circumstances, and Sun only mostly seems to be the head-of-household here which makes it less likely to work. Also lone sassafras is pretty much neutral on the idea of doing that; she doesn't see a reason for it - it doesn't bother her at all to be respectful of their territory and possessions - but won't mind if Sun wants to anyway.

It seems like it would be a good idea to know more about this topic in general; Sun can tell all the other Amentans what she learns, and then if they ever work more closely with natives, in general, they will have more collective experience to draw on. For example, they currently have no idea what they'd do if an Amentan ran across an injured native, since touching them is so bad.

That's really contextual and right now there wouldn't really be any good options, the best-practice advice for finding a stranger who's too badly injured to communicate assumes that the stranger has chosen a nomadic lifestyle and the risks that come along with that, and that's not likely to be true here, and it matters.

If they find someone who's unconscious then touching them to move them won't harm them, usually even if they wake up during it, but the situation they're moved to definitely could and she doesn't think she can list all the potential problems there - being confined and being told what to do are the most obvious ones.

She supposes that Amentans can just abdicate responsibility for intervening in native medical situations but they have such similar anatomy it seems like it would be a waste not to find some way to share their expertise.

She assumes everyone who's still in the area here has come to terms with being on their own for medical purposes, so yes, leaving them alone unless they ask for help is the best option. If crafters start moving back in they can start figuring out how to interact with their communities in better ways than that, if they want. If nothing else she expects crafter doctors to be interested in sharing knowledge.

Sun can start lining up some oranges who'd like to talk about that!

She still doesn't expect that to be soon, mind.

Of course. Ballpark estimate?

It really depends on how things go here; she's reporting back to the people from her old community that she's still in contact with, and they'll spread the word from there. A year would be very optimistic, five would be more what she'd expect if things go well. There'll probably be nomads through sooner than that if the nearest remaining communities of crafters don't warn them off strongly enough, which they definitely might.

Okay. Can she tell Sun more about how communities are structured?

They aren't, really; a community is just a group of households that live near each other and mostly know each other.