"Odd that the crystals are conjurable and the oils aren't."

"Essential oils are secreted by crystals, so it wouldn't seem very strange to me although I don't actually know for certain that they aren't.  But I don't have sufficient technical knowledge to be as confident as is necessary here in my ability to distinguish 'this doesn't magically hurt daeva' from 'this is entirely inert in the first place'.  Without potentially seriously harming one of myselves, I suppose."

"Secreted by crystals, goodness. Yeah, we can source them in some way that doesn't have the false negative risk."

"Ellie is designing up some specs for a wing-harming array; it'll be just a few minutes.  In the meantime: it seems like our worlds' relative proportions of the directionality of handedness and transgenderism are approximately opposite?"

"Huh. I guess if you have birthday-related personalities some of them might tend to gend in a particular way whichever bits they get, is that what's driving it?"

"Yes!  Spring solqs are nearly all male and most of mortal society mostly doesn't have much of an idea of the concept beyond that, but we're precisely half and half on handedness, at a population level."

"Spring solqs specifically? It seems curious that there would be only one personality that gends consistently if that's a thing that happens at all!"

"I suspect there are more who have the inclination, but that's the only one which is very culturally acknowledged, let alone acceptable.  It's sort of like - am I remembering correctly that Jordan has a boyfriend - "

"I think so? I don't know if they explicitly clarified."

"He communicated that he was dating someone but we weren't using words at the time so I wasn't certain that I had retained the gender.  So: in terms of orientation, fall and winter solqs aren't picky; springs are mostly uninterested in sex and only slightly moreso in romance, and summers are only attracted to one gender each although sometimes it's the same one as they are.  But that's, well, odd of all them.  From multiple personal experiences I know for certain that even people are sometimes not entirely heterosexual, but the general societal perception is that whoever Jordan's dating is probably doing it for the status or the connections or the money or because he finds the oddness in itself attractive enough to outweigh gender.  Two same-sex even people dating each other would face much more disapproval; it would be seen as - self-absorbed, depraved, against the natural order -"

"Wow. I don't know whether to expect that your even people are - evener - than just people in general where I'm from, or if they merely have uncorrelated enough traits that they don't get the - protection of inevitability, when one of the traits is weird - do you have a sense of that?"

"I don't know about the whole population, but I myself at least contain enough transgenderism that I'm fine with being instantiated as women despite having male components?  But part of that is that the social infrastructure for being a man in a woman's body exists at all, even though I don't intend to make direct use of it."

"Huh. I'm possibly too cis to have much insight about this."

"So if you imagine sharing a mind with twenty-seven other people and you collectively get the chance to acquire some bodies . . .?"

"...I mean, I'm pretty horrified by the idea of sharing a mind with twenty-seven other people, and don't know what I'd be like after having done it anyway."

"What do you find horrifying about it?"

"I don't want my mind - read or altered?"

"Mm.  Well, it's a good thing you're already your own kind of dead."

"It's convenient, yes!"

". . . I don't know whether I actually conveyed that handedness is partially separated by bir - oh, Ellie's done with the array description; there's a 'letter to Cam' on it as of . . . . now."

Letter to Cam!

Cam should make these crystals of these sizes shaped as these polyhedra, which should be created either instantaneously or from the inside out in circles of these approximate radii, perpendicular to the ground and suspended in resin which completely envelops all the crystals on all sides but with a wide enough hole in the center to stick a wing through.  Once he's done he should disassemble the array from the outside in and put the crystals in these three models of specially-designed case, unless he for some reason wants to keep a bone-hurting flat donut around for a while; Ellie claims the array is safe to leave up for at least a month.

"I need to know how instantaneous is instantaneous. I can make things very quickly but it is not literally instantaneous. Also what happens to the resin in the disassembly process?"

"I'll ask!  . . . Oh dear, now she's being anxious at me.  Um, probably it's instantaneous enough from what she saw, she thinks, but just in case go in concentric circles from the inside out, and either east or west within the circles is fine but don't, for example, start at a point and radiate out in both directions; it needs to be one after another along the same line.  As for the resin - stots, I really dislike being treated like an authority figure whose disapproval matters, is painful, and exists - alright, apparently it doesn't even have to be resin necessarily but you do need to be very certain that the crystals won't move relative to each other until it's time to take it down."

Cam sketches out an order of operations for the crystal creation. "I can interpolate the resin, but that runs some risk of fracturing the crystals."