She'll take it! The wickerwork is kind of neat but she can look at it after. Now, uh, how does one have sex with a Dwellin.

It turns out the parts match. They don't really do kissing, but their fur is smooth and soft and not scratchy, and this Dwellin at least likes lots of fur-skin contact.

Cool. Pet pet pet.

Yeah, that's niiice. He'll do his best to be nice too.

She does admire the wickerwork afterwards but after that wants to get back into space and resume training for zero-g gymnastics exhibitions.

Yeah, this was pretty much just a hookup but it was fun. She can have a little decorative spirally thing as a gift if she wants! Zero-g is still SO COOL!

Stoneheart shows up at the Amentans' building about three hours later, despite having been in a distant town this morning.

The city planners are waiting for her inside! They're talking over a possible resort plan in a spot with nice weather.

She introduces herself politely. "A city of some sort is potentially feasible, but there are a lot of details to consider. Just to get an idea of things, how big will the place be? Where exactly are you planning to put it? What will be done there?"

"A big city will typically be a couple dozen square miles, but smaller cities are possible, though that's not accounting for suburban smaller cities. And also not accounting for the farms, water treatment, landfill, and other rural industry to support the city."

"I think you should plan on a smaller city than that, possibly with plans for expansion if things go well initially. Water treatment and landfill will be major concerns."

"We can use incineration for some things instead of landfill, I don't know how the superorganism tracks air quality?"

"Mostly through plants. I couldn't tell you specific safe concentrations, I've never done something like this either, but once we cover the basics I am familiar with what tends to cause adverse reactions. You will have room for imperfection, slack from nature- But every fingerwidth of that you use is slack you can't use for other tradeoffs."

"What do Dwellin usually do with garbage?"

"Metal is reforged. Everything else is recycled, composted, or incinerated. Mining tailings in particular require special care and are sometimes landfilled. Incineration is preferred to landfill, I'm simply concerned at how much volume of garbage a tallcity will produce, and whether it will have anything weird in the ash."

"It might have something weird in the ash. We can be more aggressive about composting and recycling, but I don't know how much that will cover - I should have brought my civil engineer -"

"This is simply a preliminary discussion. If there's something weird in the ash, it can be filtered in principle, or it might not be a concern at all. I think I will have to visit an Amentan city after all to get a sense of all the additional factors, but that can wait too... You'll want as closed a water system as possible, not diverting more of the local water system than necessary."

"A closed water system is doable but will tend to take up more space."

"Also more expensive, I would assume? I'd need a lot more information and a site picked out to accurately tell you the tradeoffs."

"More expensive too, yes. Though it does have the advantage of greater resistance to weather shock."

"How do your water systems... Work?"

"Didn't bring my civil engineer, but in the basics -" He explains how water is piped in through various pump and valve and pressure systems for cleaning, cooking, and drinking purposes, and then wastewater is removed by a different set of pipes - some closed systems use greywater for flushing toilets, first - and then there are a series of treatments, usually in covered pools so they don't have animals partaking of undertreated water, where various chemical and plant and radiation interventions are applied until the water is clean again. This usually requires a series of at least a dozen chambers at various stages, and there is some water loss at various points in the process if you're on a planet and not a spaceship (the spaceship can reclaim water with dehumidifiers; on a planet that water will just evaporate away) but they can keep it limited..

"If your largest outflow is evaporation that will be fine."

"Oh, good. Is construction dust likely to be a problem? Subway tunnels? We won't need to mine locally much, we can do asteroid mining for anything that isn't abundant on this planet without invasive methods."

"Oh, you'll have to ensure good drainage for when it rains, and mind what runs off into the drains when that happens, other than that digging down doesn't cost much more than laying down a foundation at all does. I'm not sure about construction dust, but as a temporary condition there's a bit less concern there."