...there being a place with twelve kinds of superset(crafting) is also not how things work, she's pretty sure? Or, not a place on the planet. With weird superset(crafting) in play she supposes the options for where he's from aren't limited to that.

He, uh, may be stuck here; they haven't made it off the planet yet, at least not that's public knowledge. She'll spread the word that if anyone's been thinking of picking it up as a project there's a need for it now, but she doesn't expect that to turn up a spaceship very quickly.

In the short term... if he shows her more of what he can do she can share that around and take messages about who'd want to trade with him, but she's not sure it's going to work very well to try to get all his meals that way - nobody's going to want to go trade in a snowstorm, for example, even if he can get enough trading partners that them taking breaks from the projects they want his not-crafting for isn't a problem.

She passes him the board while she takes another minute to think.

While she thinks he writes.

I don't need to get food the day I eat it. It can be the same a year later.

...oh! He should be fine, then. Crafters don't usually bother trading in staple foods - things like meat and fish, yes, not everyone likes hunting or fishing or keeping meat animals, and rare foods that only a few people have sources of, but common plants and eggs are too easy to get to bother with - but if he wants those, people won't want much more for them than they'd want for the crafting material it takes to make them, it's just if he needed someone to visit every couple days with them that would be tough to talk someone into.

Yeah, he's fine.

He asks what she wants.

Honestly she'll probably set him up with a couple months' worth of food just for the peace of mind of knowing he has it - if he needs a lot of help figuring out what kind of housewares he's going to need or something she might want to see if there's anything he can do to make up for that, but for the most part he doesn't need to worry about needing her help getting set up. She's not up for building him a house, though, she doesn't have the free time for that kind of big project, but there's enough people around here who'd be willing to help just for the chance to meet him that he won't have any trouble, at least if he wants something straightforward.

I don't understand.

Uh, what part?

Food is easy to make, she writes; she won't mind making a bunch for him and would mind not knowing that he had at least a small stockpile. Housewares are important too, but it's going to be harder - or at least she expects it to be - to figure out everything he'll need to be comfortable, so she might want to stop after just figuring out enough that he'll be okay but maybe not have everything he might possibly want. And he'll need a house for sure, but those are big, it takes a few days of focused work to make one - they're usually personalized, someone might have a template around that would speed it up but she doesn't know about it if so, and he probably doesn't want that anyway, it's his house - and she has chores that have to be done... that doesn't, she supposes, mean that she couldn't make him a house, if he really wanted her to do it for some reason, but she doesn't want to, and enough of her neighbors would be glad to help a new neighbor in need that it makes much more sense to ask them.

(Does it not work like that where he's from?)

I want you to be happy that you helped me.

I do want to know who would like building me a house.

He could say something about his horrible apartment but he doesn't want anyone getting the idea that he's used to poverty and has low standards.

She likes helping people; she wouldn't've become the kind of fleshcrafter she is if she didn't. Anyway, she'll send the crows to ask around about a house-building party; it'll probably take a few days to arrange that, but he can start thinking about designs now if he'd like - she can make him some models of her household's buildings, if he'd like to see how people around here are used to making them. Or they could get back to the dictionary, or something else.

...That doesn't really explain anything but okay. Since he's just taking notes and doesn't even need to remember words in real time he has a pretty much unlimited capacity to keep absorbing new things from dictionaries.

Back to the dictionaries it is, then; the one about crafting is next.

The dictionary gives words for three subtypes of crafting, in addition to the general sort - communication, fleshcrafting, and genecrafting - and then goes on to give a bunch of vocabulary about traits that crafting can apply to matter. Crafting can apply any physical trait that exists naturally, even temporarily, to crafting material, and there's a couple of traits listed that might seem like they shouldn't exist naturally at all - it's possible to make things emit dangerous but invisible light, for example, or to synchronize two objects so that any change to one appears in the other as well. The next section, nominally about fleshcrafting, is mostly anatomical vocabulary; it quickly becomes obvious that fleshcrafting allows for nearly arbitrary additions to a living thing's physical form, and a good variety of non-addition changes as well. There's also a few terms for general types of modifications: decorative, functional, medical, and so on. The genecrafting section is short and not very cohesive, with sections on mental conditions, heredity-related vocabulary, and a few specialized terms like the one for a creature that's been modified to express ancestral traits hidden in their genes; his host explains that this is mostly because there's so much overlap between the abilities of genecrafting and fleshcrating, and fleshcrafting is much more common, so the genecrafting section only has vocabulary for the additional things it can do, plus it's leaving out most of the jargon that only specialists know.

...How much does it usually cost to hire a fleshcrafter to, say, add some things?

Different fleshcrafters have different policies but she in particular works on a gift/donation basis and doesn't mind if people don't offer anything in exchange at all, in most cases.

...Why doesn't she mind that?

Well, she likes the work, and if she makes it harder for people to ask her for it she doesn't get to do as much of it - not all fleshcrafters like working with people, if he'd found someone who mostly liked working with dogs or chickens or something he'd probably have to figure out a trade.

...That makes sense. Would she maybe like to do some more things for him?

Sure, once he has a little more mass for her to work with. She can bring over the boxes of models if he wants to start thinking about details - did he have something specific in mind? (It seems like she has a guess.)

He has some thoughts but he'd like to see the models.

She goes to do that; it takes only a few minutes for her to return with a walking cabinet stocked with boxes of tiny miniatures of all different sorts of add-ons. The first couple of boxes are for things that can go anywhere on the body - swatches of fur and feathers and scales and plates and shells in all different textures and patterns, patches of chromatophores and whiskers and tasting nodules and light-sensitive eyespots and magnetic-field sensors and stridulating barblets, tentacles with flattened grasping surfaces or heavy muscles for climbing with or just plain, reinforced loops integrated into the skin for hanging crafted objects from, glands that can produce anything from milk to musk to a numbing liquid, and more. Further boxes are organized by body part: there are no less than two dozen options just for types of feet he could have without adjusting how his knees and hips work, and half a dozen options for how he could rearrange his stance, each with their own collection of completions. Five boxes just of genitalia, crafter-typical and more-exotic male and female plus one for things that defy that classification. Hand-specific modifications: four different models trading off grip strength and dexterity in different ways without sacrificing the crafter-typical aesthetic, two dozen approaches to adding extra fingers or wrist tentacles for fine detail work or pinchers for extra carrying capacity or other functional greebles, a dozen full-replacement options intended for people who want an entire set of extra arms with different functionality. And on and on - it's a bit overwhelming, though it's organized enough to keep track of if he tries. The crowns of her collection are a pair of wings that, with enough other mods, will allow a crafter to glide short distances - creatures their size and build are really just not made for flying, and nobody's cracked it yet - and a complex sequence of mods for replacing someone's legs with the entire body of a smallish bear.

He has no interest in being an entire smallish bear but it's really technically impressive that she could do that.

He would like one of these dicks. Maybe it should have chromatophores. No, it'll just be covered in hair, when's he going to have a chance to speak ereli intelligibly with it and who would he speak it to... yeah, no chromatophores. Possibly the wings. How big are the functional wings and how much gliding do they do?

The fur is really nice. He's not sure if he actually wants fur but it's really nice.

...Do hands get strictly better when designed intelligently from the ground up or is it just tradeoffs?

Most of this thought process doesn't make it into his writing, since he's effortfully translating each sentence a word or two at a time, but it might show on his face anyway. He writes his questions and pets the furs.

It's probably possible to make replacement hands that are strictly better, but the thing with handlikes is that there's a fairly long learning curve for anything that complicated, and nobody wants to go without dexterous hands for possibly up to a year or two (though most people do have the second set working well enough to get by with within a couple seasons), and if you're going to be adding extra arms for the new set anyway there's not much incentive to do the design work for something that's strictly better rather than just differently useful. This mass of tentacles comes closest; it's a bit prone to dropping things in moments of inattention but has better grip strength and dexterity and the ability to do some tasks one-handed that usually require two hands and/or a specialized tool. The greebles on the other hand are mostly strict improvements; she personally likes the wrist tentacles best (hers are hard to spot against her fur when they're wrapped around her wrists) and the extra thumbs are also popular.

The wings are quite large batlike affairs, but jointed in a way that lets them fold down small enough to fit through most doorways without much fuss; chairs are more of a problem with them, and he'd most likely want to add a few of those reinforced loops to help keep clothing on around the side flaps. They allow for gliding about twice as far as the height you're starting from, and triple or quadruple the height it's safe to jump from depending on skill; jumping out of a flying machine or something is still inadvisable without a parachute, and most people prefer to stick to hang gliders if they're going to need equipment anyway.

If he wants a dick there's a couple related choices he should make - the easy one is just whether he wants to be fertile that way or not, which is an entirely stand-alone choice. (This won't make him interfertile with crafters if he's not already, which she has no idea about.) The other one is what he wants to do for hormones - those affect things like hair growth and fat distribution and what people smell like, all those subtle differences between the default sexes. Crafters mostly do fine on mixed hormone systems but most other species tend to have problems in the long run that way, so it'd be risky for him to try it, and if he switches over to a male hormonal system he won't be able to bear children, just sire them. It's also possible to make it male-typical amounts of obvious that he's capable of bearing children even if he wants to keep the ability to, though that means he'll require crafter assistance to give birth - any adult crafter can do that much fleshcrafting, so it's not a huge limitation, but it is pretty risky if he's not sure he'll be able to get to someone in time.

She can totally make him a bigger swatch of one or two of those furs just to have, by the way.

He'll just stick with the hands he has for now. He'll... consider the wings and not make a snap decision about that.

He has never previously thought he might want to bear children but he takes this moment to look deep inside himself for any such yearnings and nope he still doesn't think he wants that. It's conceivable he could want to father children. He knows basically nothing about hormones but probably male hormones are fine?

...He might want furs like this one or this one for his bed once he has a house, but for his body, hmm, fur distribution is sexually dimorphic for humans and he should probably expect to start having some regardless, right? This texture here is nicer than the kind of coarse hair humans get in places other than the tops of their heads, and for that matter it's nicer than what humans mostly have on their heads and relevantly it's nicer than what he has on his head but maybe he shouldn't get ahead of himself here, maybe just the body hair. And while he's at it what if it were mostly black but with little glowing red speckles. He can draw the kind of pattern he's thinking of. ...Maybe his head hair should match the color, at least... It could be redder than it is, it's very orange right now.

Male hormones will give him body hair unless he has something done about that, yes, and if he decides he doesn't like them it's easy enough to set him  back to female ones. And that color pattern should work fine, though he might want to consider how it'll follow the contours of his face a bit more; she can't make hair glow directly but bioluminescence under reflective hair looks very cool in her opinion: she makes up a sample of that, with the red glittering up and breaking into subtle rainbows in the shiny black hair shafts. Reflective red or black would match it well on his head - bioluminescence won't work as well there if he wants to keep his hair as long as he has it now, unfortunately, though he may want some anyway to unify the look - and she makes up long samples of those as well, plus one that fades from red to black through a dappled roan of the two colors.

It's fine if the ends don't glow.

...Maybe he should fade from red to black like that? He doesn't like that exact design, though, it looks too patchy. Or maybe his beard should match the top of his head, because they'll end up continuous - actually, that's kind of annoying, he really only wants a goatee and he's probably just going to end up shaving the rest off...

She can set him up with just a goatee; it's not hard to make it keep a particular length, even. Has he thought about whether he wants sideburns?

She makes a new swatch with the roan fade without the dapples, and... actually, she really should make a proper model, here. She does that, taking a few minutes to put together a life-sized and moderately masculinized bust of Valanda with a shiny black goatee and long shiny black hair both lit by tiny glowing red dots on the surface underneath. (It's not a perfect rendition, but quite close; the masculinization helps save it from falling entirely into the uncanny valley.)