It's hard to describe with the vocabulary she has, but she gives it a try.

She explains cities, where many people live in the same territory even if they're not related. She tries to explain different species but she doesn't really have the vocabulary beyond "many types of crafters," and she's not good at drawing. Lots of vehicles run on water and heat -- she doesn't know the word for "steam" or "coal." People (crafters) can't make robots; they make themselves.

It's sweet that honeysuckle is so interested!

Cities sound interesting; most crafters would hate them but if they have... multiple different species about as smart as crafters? she'd write that like so... anyway if they have those then it wouldn't be too surprising that they all had different instincts and things. Steam she recognizes (and would write like so); coal she doesn't. Robots that can self-replicate sound neat but surely someone has to have made the first one? And, like, knows how they operate and everything so they can make modifications and stuff?

Cities can be a lot for sure! "Species" is a useful word to have -- some species live in cities and some species live alone.

Someone probably made the first coldsteel but nobody knows who for certain.  She tells honeysuckle that the robots believe a powerful person with strong crafting ability made the first robot, and they have stories about it and give her lots of gifts, but she is not known for crafting and has not said that it was her. Now the robots only craft each other. She also doesn't know how to say that they're violent, so she tries to write that coldsteels have strong territory instincts. Now that she knows "species" she can say that in her world robots are a species -- it's not quite what she wants to say but it's close enough. She gets the feeling that robots here are not a species?

They are not! Robots as crafters make them aren't alive in any sense or smart in any but the most abstract sense, even the dumbest of bugs is smarter than they are.

Huh! So... like clockwork, kind of? People have made some interesting clockwork machines that are not people.

She doesn't know how to say this so she draws gears.

She's never seen gears before, so she's not sure! Crafted robots have parts that react to different things - touch, or sometimes light levels, or more rarely other stimuli - by doing things like moving or reshaping themselves, which can set off chain reactions in useful ways. The fan in Mabel's bed nook is robotic, for example, and the lights in her house only aren't because they don't have any moving parts - some robots are much more complicated, you really want to copy an expert's design for a cart or a self-propelled house or something like that, but plenty of robots are just simple things that move a little.

Oh, that makes sense! Definitely more similar to -- she doodles gears again -- instead of people-robots.

The self moving cart was very interesting and not something Mabel is used to -- she knows as soon as they read through the animals dictionary she'll probably know how to write "horse," but for now she'll draw a horse-drawn carriage. 

If honeysuckle doesn't know much about robots is there something she usually prefers to make?  

She's not particularly specialized and just does a little bit of everything, but her favorites are animal traps, which are often a bit robotic, and large housewares, like furniture and things - she's been wanting to get into house design, too, but hasn't had an opportunity to make anything full-sized yet.

Oh, neat! Sometimes it's useful to do everything. A lot of the furniture here is different from what Mabel is used to, which she wouldn't have expected; it's cool!

House design sounds interesting too; Mabel writes that she hopes honeysuckle can design one someday. 

It'll happen. Maybe not soon, though; her mom is pretty good with having people in her space, but there's a difference between that and letting someone build in it, and honeysuckle doesn't want to move out alone - the plan right now, if nothing else comes up, is that she'll take over the territory when her mom gets too old to want to run it anymore, but probably something will turn up before then.

That makes sense! How does one go about moving out? Are there lots of unclaimed territories out there? Or do you have to wait until someone is too old to run it?

There's usually a pretty good amount of unclaimed space; the really good territories get snatched up as soon as the markers around them decay enough to allow it but if you're not that picky there's usually options, and then it's just a matter of setting up your own territory-markers and camping out there until your instincts are satisfied that the place is yours. Formally handing over a territory while the old claimant is still around like she and her mom have been talking about is pretty unusual, though, usually it's more, uh... people keep their territories their whole lives... or they just abandon them when they can't live alone anymore.

Mabel has so many questions, but in a good way. Honeysuckle has seemed very willing to answer them, though, which makes her happy.

What exactly is a territory marker? How long does it take them to decay?

Also, when people are too old to manage their own territory, where do they go? Do they live with their children? What if they don't have children?

Territory markers are how crafters know when they're at the edge of someone's territory! They're usually waist- to chest-high pillars in the territory owner's aesthetic, usually in an interesting shape and sometimes with writing on them, placed wherever there's a path into the territory. They're crafted, so how fast they decay is determined by whoever makes them; usually they're set up to need to be refreshed every couple years, but some less-social crafters who don't leave their territories very often set them up to last longer than that. Every once in a while someone will set one up not to decay at all, and if that seems to have happened usually someone will eventually notice and take on the project of figuring out if there's still someone living there - the crows usually know, or covering the territory markers and seeing if the coverings get removed can work, or if nobody remembers the person anymore that's usually a pretty good clue.

Most people really do live in their territories their whole lives! Crafting makes it easy enough to do basic survival stuff that people can get by even if they're very frail. Some people don't prefer to live that way, or are worried about dementia or similar things, and they'll move in with their kids, or with younger friends, or with someone like her mother who's pretty free about taking new household members - they actually have someone elderly like that living in the next-door cottage right now, though Mabel probably won't see much of them.

Ah, okay! Mabel probably passed some when she couldn't see.

In Mabel's world people don't mark territories all the time, but sometimes they make fences that act similarly to markers. But places where many people live together often don't have defined borders. Likewise some people live in the same place their whole lives (usually with other people, though) but some people move around a lot.

Can crafters communicate with crows?

That's, hm, kind of the wrong question? Communicative crafting works on any creature, up to the limits of their ability to understand it; crafters can communicate with dogs just fine, it's just that dogs have no way but body language and noises of communicating back. And crows are smart enough to learn communicative crafting - it's easy enough that a bunch of types of animals can pick it up; just crows and mastodons locally but there's like half a dozen or a dozen other sorts of animals that also can - so they can communicate back the same way crafters do.

Oh, okay! It's similar in Mabel's world -- generally, only people can do complex magic, but some animals can do simple spells or are magic themselves -- she just writes they are "made from crafting" and hopes that's intelligible.

If crows can learn communicative crafting, is it teachable? She wants to continue with the dictionaries but she'd love to be able to communicate more normally.

She realizes that she's been asking a lot of questions very excitedly, and has just asked something that may be a significant commitment. She adds another "thank you."

She wouldn't mind teaching it if it worked that way, definitely, but it doesn't - babies learn it the same way they learn to walk, she has no idea how someone would go about teaching an adult. On the other hand people who've had strokes sometimes learn to walk again, or people who grew up not being able to walk and only got fleshcrafting for it later in life, so it's not impossible that Mabel will be able to figure it out eventually just by trying.

Oh, that's too bad. Mabel tries not to be too disappointed. So more like a warlock or sorcerer power than a wizard-style magic? She can't convey any of this, both because her vocabulary is too small and also crafters don't seem to have anything approaching the concept, so she'll just nod and write that that's okay.

Kind of a bummer to have the communicative capacity of a dog, though! She'll keep trying. She doesn't write this, though.

Does honeysuckle have time to go back to working in the dictionaries?

Sure, of course. And just in case it wasn't obvious, she does think Mabel will be fine once she gets fluent at writing - plenty of crafters almost never interact with other crafters in person and do everything via letters, that's not a barrier to making friends or anything.

They still have the volumes on crafting, plants and animals, and natural phenomena to do; what does she want to see next?

That's good to hear!

Crafting, please? It's probably the next most useful for her, even if she can't craft.

Actually, come to think of it... one second, honeysuckle, she'll be back.

Mabel put her tinker's tools next to her bed when she showered and changed her clothes yesterday, and she hasn't tried them out here yet. If she's on a different world, she doesn't know if they'll work at all.

She brings them back to the table where honeysuckle is and successfully casts a simple light cantrip on her writing implement! Then she removes the light, because it was kind of hurting her eyes to try and write with. 

Oh, neat! She's guessing that was the thing Mabel's been calling crafting that's from her world and different?

Yes! She's glad it works here -- she can make a lot of useful things this way, she just needs materials. 

Actually, this was how she hurt her face -- Mabel doesn't know the exact word for "acid" yet, but maybe she'll learn if they go through this dictionary.

They will, as it turns out! The majority of the dictionary is terms for various traits one can give to crafting material, and 'acidic' is one of them; it's actually a pretty comprehensive listing of physical traits that matter can have in general, though some of them are poorly understood. Some of them will be new to her, too, like the dangerous invisible light that objects can emit, or the way two objects can be linked so they react to things that affect each other over any distance. This book also covers anatomical vocabulary, in the fleshcrafting section, and terminology for mental conditions and heredity-related concepts, in the genecrafting section, plus a bit of jargon, like the term for a creature that's had genecrafting used on it to make it express lost ancestral traits.

Genecrafting can do most of the same things fleshcrafting can, honeysuckle explains at the end, with the disadvantage that it's more difficult and can't directly change the way a creature is already shaped, but with the advantage that genecrafted modifications can, with a bit of extra work on the genecrafter's part, be set up to be passed on to a genecrated creature's offspring. Plus it can have mental effects, even immediate ones, which fleshcrafting is clumsy enough at that nobody tries to use it for that.

This is really exciting; she knows vaguely that people resemble their parents, but had no idea about genes or that they could be modified. Does everything have genes? Or just animals?

Fleshcrafting is how the healer fixed her face, right? It's definitely a lot more powerful than even healing spells at home. Also, what kind of mental effects? Making people happier, or smarter, or something like that?

Things she doesn't write out but has thoughts on include anatomical vocabulary -- Mabel has some concerns she's not quite ready to talk about yet but would be nice to deal with at some point.