"It's okay," he says, in a - tone of voice that's probably very familiar. Comforting and soft. "Really. I'm not - writing you or anything off, it was just a bit. I was caught off guard."
"Servantmaking, again, theoretical instructional research - I mean, I can make pets and puppets and I've actually built golems and programmed shines in the course of theorem-proving but it's mostly theory."
"Well - that's okay, Charp will recognize you regardless, and it talks. And you'll remember what Aydanci knew if you wait long enough anyway."
"Yeah, that'll be nice. Problem is, I've caught a lot of the later stuff that doesn't make sense without a more basic education."
"So there's pets and puppets and automata and golems and shines - shades are basically a kind of shine. If you've got anything with moving parts around I can show you how to turn it into a puppet as a start, otherwise I can make you a shine to play with."
"Okay." She finds a patch of light and peels it off for him. "Do you know how to take it as a puppet or should I start there?"
"Okay, go ahead and do that. Predictably, I have paper, and this is a nice big shine, so I can write it some instructions longhand and they'll work just fine." She flips to a fresh notebook page and writes a short program that will fit within the shine's area, and walks him through each line in it, and then puts the program down where he can move the shine onto it.
"Thank you," he says, smiling at the little shine.
"You're welcome. I like shines. I had a bunch of colored ones on the ceiling in a pattern in my room growing up. Left them for the next kid when I moved out, though."