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.

Anything alive has genes - plants too, and fungi are actually a separate kind of thing, and bacteria (which are extremely tiny and sometimes cause diseases), but not rocks or dirt or water or anything like that.

Fleshcrafting is how honeysuckle's mom fixed her face, yes; it's complicated to learn on that level - bodies are incredibly complex - but very powerful, definitely. It's also how they get most of their food; making a plant just grow what it'd normally grow but very quickly and right when you want it is much easier.

Mind-genecrafting is risky and people mostly aren't that interested in having experiments done to themselves with it if there isn't something wrong, so most of what mind-genecrafters know how to do is fixing problems, not making people who are basically all right better, but they can help with happiness and intelligence at least some of the time. It's better for improving livestock and food plants, though, in terms of practical uses.

Oh, Mabel knows about bacteria! You can see them with curved glass machines (she doesn't know how to write "microscope"); they were discovered 50 years ago or so. She knows someone who's very passionate about them.

And the extra information about genecrafting makes sense, if it's an extension of healing magic. In Mabel's world they make a distinction between crafting objects (this she would call "transmutation," if she was speaking, but she's not so she doesn't try to write it), crafting plants (nature magic), and crafting people (healing), but she supposes that's similar to specializing in fleshcrafting or genecrafting.

The type of lens-based viewer they use to see bacteria is written the same way as other lens-based viewers, but with this intensifier, usually.

Healing isn't really a natural category when it comes to crafting - her mother might be a little better at genecrafting than a random person who didn't have any fleshcrafting training, but only because she knows so much about bodies and wouldn't make the kinds of mistakes that come from not knowing about them; the actual crafting is an entirely separate skill. Plus if you're trying to divide it up that way you run into the fact that communicative crafting is technically crafting people and has nothing to do with healing at all.

Ah, okay! That makes sense too. Communicative crafting is also separate in her world, but it's a relatively unusual skill and usually they just make noise.

She'll have to update her categorization system.

Oh, speaking of noise, do crafters... (Here she sings a little song, she doesn't know how to write "music" and hopefully this is understandable to also mean music made by instruments.)

Sometimes! It's a bit of a niche hobby but very pretty when you get a group singing together, there's a club that puts on concerts at one of the slightly-farther-away meeting places every once in a while.

Oh good! Talking (she writes "noise communication") is not particularly important to Mabel but music kind of is, or at least is something she really enjoys.

Does honeysuckle have other hobbies?

She likes to swim, and there's a game group at the nearby meeting place that she goes to pretty often, and she reads a lot - helps the traveler edit his books, sometimes, too, he's a friend of the household... actually he'll be super interested in talking to Mabel sometime, if she's okay with that and doesn't mind him maybe wanting to write a book about her.

Swimming is fun! Mabel does not do it much, but she does like to read a lot, too. 

Talking to the traveler sounds fine! She doesn't mind helping him, although she's not sure how accurate his book will be because she never really left her house much.

He'll be fine with writing about whatever she wants to tell him, really; he's written books on very narrow topics before, and they're just as good as the other ones - or better, in her opinion, there's so much more room for details when he's not trying to fit too much into one volume. Anyway, she doesn't want to pressure Mabel at all, but if she wants to talk to him, once she's had a chance to settle in and everything, honeysuckle or her mom can set that up, they have a link to send him messages with. Just, uh, warn them if she's not up for having him decide that means he wants to visit, because it's pretty likely that he'll want to, and honeysuckle's mom is always looking for an excuse to get him to stop by. (They're very cute together.)

Aww, that's sweet!

She's willing to meet him in person, that's fine! She does want to get better at reading and writing first but she's not opposed to meeting new people, especially since it looks like she might be here for a while.

Sounds good! He's also a good one to talk to if she decides she doesn't like the area and wants to live somewhere else - he knows people all over and often gives people advice on where they might like to try living.

She'll keep that in mind, thank you!

Has honeysuckle ever traveled? Is there anywhere she particularly likes? Mabel honestly never traveled much at all in her home world so she's not that familiar with different places and what makes one preferable to another.

She hasn't gone very far but she did spend a couple of summers at the beach, that was pretty neat - the climate is different and there are different animals, plus of course she didn't know the people, which was strange but not in a bad way or anything. She got to talk to a dolphin once.

That sounds both scary and interesting! Mabel's still really fascinated at the idea that people here can just communicate with animals, that's pretty neat.

In Mabel's world there are people who look a lot like a type of animal -- like cats or birds -- but there's still usually a pretty clear visual and everything else difference between people who you can talk to and animals who you can't, unless you have special crafting.

(Mabel is thinking about druids; she doesn't think crafters probably have this concept so she's not going to try and explain enough to see if she can get the word.)

Yeah, that does sound like it'd be a change. She doesn't think of it as hard to know who can talk and who can't - there's like half a dozen families of species that can, plus a couple of surprises here and there - but of course she grew up with the idea.

That makes sense! Mabel usually knows intuitively who is a person and who is not, although of course there are some edge cases or groups they only realized were people later, like the robots... but she also grew up with that.

Actually, speaking of people, edge cases, and robots, do they have... "death crafting?" One group of people in her world is, well, dead people from all the other groups. Her friend who is very interested in bacteria is one of these; he used to be in a group of people without horns or fur and now he is a skeleton.

...no, nothing like that. Skeletons are just regular matter as far as crafters are concerned.

That makes sense! Not a lot of people do death crafting, except specific very powerful people, and a lot of other people are generally against it. It makes them uncomfortable.

Yeah, it's intuitively kind of creepy. Probably good to be able to keep functionally-living, though.

The idea of people being more powerful than others at crafting is a little weird, too, but that might just be the word she's choosing for it, usually they say that people are more or less skilled than each other.

Yeah, the thing Mabel is calling "crafting" is not really crafting? It's just the closest word for it and she doesn't have another. There are certain parts of the thing she's talking about that are almost exactly the same as crafting but a lot of parts that are very different. Mabel uses her tools to craft-like-activity, for example, but not everyone does or has to. 

People who are more powerful than others at crafting... there are variations in skill for sure, but there's also certain individuals who are more powerful, don't die, and don't spend time with normal people. They often provide normal people with the ability to craft-like-activity, even. The person who brought her friend back is one of these people.

Huh. She'd caught that Mabel was talking about something different, but she wasn't expecting it to be that different.

Yeah! That's kind of why she said at first that she couldn't craft, although she doesn't know if honeysuckle's mom would have told her that -- Mabel was thinking crafting was referring to one of the types of "crafting like things" in her own world, which does have its own name when you want to specify. She guesses technically crafting does still refer to this specific thing only, but she still needs a way to talk about the broader concept so she's probably going to continue to call it all crafting. 

Yeah, she'll want to be clearer when she's writing to other people, at least at first - 'the superset of crafting' does what she wants - but honeysuckle gets it.

Anyway. Honeysuckle's starting to want lunch; does Mabel have any requests now that she's got some taste- and texture-related words to work with?

Thank you! That will be helpful. There's definitely a lot of things that will need some explaining, probably. She will do her best to be more precise when writing new people.

She likes soup, and fruit, and bread -- any or all of these sound good, if they're available?