"But bindings, paper, the materials for books aren't that hard to get?"

"Not that hard, no. I'd say a blank book the size of my encyclopedia would cost... Three days' wage. Kind of pricey but not completely out of reach."

Nod. "It's probably more immediately relevant for me to look into starglass, seeing as how Akien isn't familiar with that. Would you rather have help with the chores now, or…?"

"As long as they get done. Gather more fuel from this island, check the gas cells, refuel the engine hoppers, water the plants in the greenhouse... Perhaps I need to show you how to do these things though."

"Probably," she agrees. "Might be good to get to them now, in that case."

"Let's get to it, then."

She unfortunately does not have a ton of expertise with this sort of thing! Well, refueling and dealing with the engines and so on. She does, however, pay attention well.

None of it is super complicated. Just barely complicated enough that verbal instructions without a demonstration wouldn't do.

Gathering fuel is a matter of putting a weighted bag over the stalks of this strange plant 'floatgrass' and then hitting it so the seeds come loose. And then been feeding said seeds into some large machine and hitting a button.

"… How sure are you that this isn't magic?"

"Quite. They filter out all the heavy gas and put light stuff in that cell in the middle. Same way my ship and, like, rubber balloons float."

"I did not realize," she waves her hand through the air, "was enough to make quite such a difference."

"Oh, yes, the air is very heavy here compared to Earth... At least, I think I read that somewhere... Hmm. That puts paid to my plans for airships in your world. We have a lift of anywhere between five and fifteen kilograms per cubic meter of light gas. So that tiny seed can easily lift itself, and birds of all kinds have an easy time flying here, and lighter than air critters can stay afloat by filtering gases."

"I honestly don't know much about birds or various species of plants, but – yeah, the air is definitely not as thick."

She gets to bagging some more floatgrass seeds.

They clean out the island of easily-reachable ones in about twenty minutes. And then she can feed them all to the machine while Nick looks at a curious thumping on one of the control surfaces, and then they can go water the plants, a relatively boring task.

Watering plants is, however, a thing Evara is used to, so she doesn't need any instruction.

"What sorts of things do you grow?"

"Food. A few herbs and spices and such. Carrots are due for harvesting, actually."

"Should we do that, then? Carrots are a species I'm familiar with, fortunately."

"May as well. I wonder how much is familiar? I've labelled the trays with how much water they get... Should really get around to finishing the automatic thing I've been working on for these, but it's just not as interesting as other stuff I could make."

She looks around at the other species. "I recognize, uh, maybe a third of this? Seems like you have a lot of – rice?"

"Yep, that's rice. Huh. I try to have a high variety, but rice grows fast and in little space, it's a good choice here. Well, let's get to work."

Harvesting!

"So what sorts of other things do you make? Control systems, you know a lot about those, but – I mean, I'm not much of a scientist myself so I'm possibly missing something – what's the difference between working on something like that and something for plants?"

He works alongside. The carrots go in a big basket. "The thing I'm building for this is a water pump and a bunch of valves hooked up to timers. It's hard to explain? A lot of time goes into planning things out, a lot of time goes into calculations, a lot of time goes into actually making the stuff, a lot of time goes to fixing little problems that turn up. Maybe if you have specific questions? My current pet project is a solar thermal generator."

"Is that more useful, does it look prettier…? Does it do something novel? I mean, I'd probably be interested in seeing how both, either of them was built, but I haven't really investigated into much technology."

"It's definitely more interesting. A lot of interesting calculations about optics. It would make electricity without fuel. Depending on how the drawbacks shake out, it might be better in some ways than using generators for it."

"Other generators using what sorts of things as fuel…?"