Once they're out again, "It's... Kind of stressful, trying to treat Vasil right. Especially when trying not to look weird too."

"We can ask them what they prefer, after they're done."

"I'm guessing it will be a 'as my operators prefer'. But we'll definitely ask. Mind going for a cheap-ish breakfast? I get twitchy about cost even if you're paying, old habit."

"Hmm, how will you even know if I decide to spend lavishly and spoil you rotten and say it was actually cheap?"

"I have eyes, I can see what other people are eating."

"Then I can go to a fancy place where everyone is eating fancy."

"Oh, fine, fine."

She giggles and leads the way to another eatery.

Good food and the sense of being pushed into it cure her trepidation over costs, mostly. She eats quietly, muttering about a few pieces of tech, trying to keep the ideas fresh.

And where does she want to go after?

A smith, or a chemist, or some other kind of craftsman.

They can find those! Any specific type of smith or craftsperson?

"It's got to be someone who makes small parts or art type stuff already, if we want moveable type. Or one who does clockwork or moving things if we want a steam engine."

"Hmm... We can look around, there's bound to be someone here like that."

"No doctors who'll take us seriously, right? Or that'd be higher priority..."

"No doctors around, place this small."

"Not even an herbalist type? Fair enough."

"Maybe a barber."

"Some kind of smith or machinist is a better place to start then."

They walk around the village a bit and every other house has some form of decoration, and eventually they find a building that's only distinguishable from the surrounding ones by the fact that it has marginally more and more complex decorations. The inside, though, is very obviously a craftsperson's workshop: bits and pieces of this and that everywhere, tools strewn about various desks and tables, and a woman peering at a complex clockwork... thing... near the back, being watched by an anxious-looking young man.

Horray for not interrupting!

She digs through the bundle of papers she's carrying for the printing press sketch.

"Acceptable," the woman eventually says, and the—apprentice?—breathes a relieved sigh. She looks up. "Hello! What can I do you for?"

She looks a little confused at the phrasing, but, "-Well, I have an idea? For an invention that could be really useful. And this seemed like the kind of workshop that would be good to... Um, build it or just tell me if it would even work."

"Ooh new ideas are always good, tell me tell me."

"Okay. So... So, making a copy of a book is done by hand, or with some kind of artifact, right? Both are kind of expensive and time-consuming ways. There are stamps, you could make a thousand copies of a page of text in a day with a big enough stamp. But making a stamp for every page of a book would be expensive too. So... What about a whole lot of stamps the size of a single letter, arranged on rails into one big book-page-size stamp? Arrange them one way for one page, press it into ink and then into paper a thousand times, then arrange the next page and do it again, and again, and then all you have to do is bind all those pages you just made and you have a thousand copies of some book for cheap-ish."