"I don't know? I don't even know if that's a thing you can do."

"I suppose we'll have to find out!  ...Anyway, yes, I would like to be introduced to the glassblower, I think."

"...I'm actually not sure you'll get along with her."

"...Hmm?  Why's that?"

"Am I correct in thinking that you don't know anything about glassblowing, so she has no particular reason to want to meet you in the first place?"

"...I know some things about glassblowing, but certainly not to the degree a tradesperson would.  I do think I have had a useful idea if 'can you troport melting points' pans out, though...Excuse me, can I borrow a sheet of paper, I need to make sure the logistics work.  ...Oh!  Do you have rubber?"

Wheat hands her a sheet of paper. "Yeah."

And she has a mechanical pencil!

"...hmm, hmm hmm hmm...  ...huh, wonder if you could get partial elasticity out of something by troporting elasticity while it's already trying to stretch...  Molds equal to axes of symmetry plus one for the y-axis...and you would need fittings, probably, for the boxes..."

Twelve-Step Plan For Creating Exact Duplicates Of Arbitrary One-Part Material Objects, If (And Only If) One Can Troport Melting Points

1. Acquire a template object (or more generically craft a template, but this is beyond project scope.)

2. Acquire a detailed cast of any significantly concave surfaces (dimples in the surface are fine, a bowl is probably not fine) - if you are attempting to create something with a closed, hollow interior, I cannot help you anywhere near as much as I'd like at this time but suggest leaving a tiny hole and patching it afterwards.  (Exploration of certain properties of metals whereby sufficiently clean edges can simply fuse together may be useful.)

Sidebar: Casting Process: 

Acquire a) ice, or a solid with the melting point of ice (or other liquid-at-room-temperature objects) and b) sufficient material to fill the interior of said concave surface or fill a segment of exterior mold.

Swap the melting point of ice to your chosen mold material.

Allow the mold material to fill the concave portions of your work, one at a time / fill the segment of exterior mold, with fitted concavity, one at a time.

Resolidify the mold material, and troport the melting point back wherever you took it from.

3. Analyze the topology of your object: does it have any points where a hole bores through the material (e.g. a mug's handle)?  Prepare one additional exterior mold-case per topological hole.

4. Cast the exterior surfaces.

Sidebar: Mold Design and Shaping:

It is at approximately this point that she makes a frustrated noise and - carefully puts the sheet of paper back down, folded in half.

"Maybe if I do the thing I will be better able to explain it, because while the individual steps I would take are clear enough to me, they're proving to be quite a pain in the ass to generalize and put to the written word.  And I'm definitely kind of going to need to figure out the process; I'm going to need to make some specialized metal parts if I want to make a portable electricity generator, because you can just do it with magnets moving predictably, and it'd be a damn sight easier than hand-forging coils, chains, and cogs.  ...Though what I ought to do is just make a heat engine, if I only actually remembered the details of the How It's Made show where they explained the things off the top of my head!

"Still, I can probably make something, even if it's unlikely to reach huge efficiencies without the work of greater minds than I.

"...oh dear gods, I have almost no idea how electrical wiring works.  Fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck.  That's the sort of shit that ends up with dead bodies because your wiring shorted out and caused a fire, or someone touched it while it was live, and I don't have any electricity cheat-sheets handy as far as I know so I can't even develop it from known principles.

"...So what can I do, if I don't have textbooks?

"...First I should probably check and see if any of my other books mention things, but that's a power drain and I can't yet replenish, especially because my phone battery is lithium-ion, which is not something I even know the particular theory of...

"I can hope my calculator has something useful.  ...Let me check that."

A bit of buttonpushing ensues.

"...Well, at least it has the by-definition SI units, if not how they were defined, in the segment I just checked..."

And she pushes the buttons some more!

"...Aaaahahahahaaaa we have UNITS!  Excuse me.  I got a bit excited, there.  It's not what I was looking for, but - I have the numbers!  I have the units!  And from there I can re-derive the equations if I must, not to mention convert to and from local measuring standards!  Incidentally, standardization of parts is a great boon to any attempt to build anything.

"Huh, I wonder where the etymology for 'derive' and 'derivative' - derive, and the math term - ...oh hell, you probably don't even have calculus, do you?  Well, at least I do have a chunk of my calculus classwork in here, just out of ontological inertia... - the tendency of things to keep being things, I mean.  If you've ever read a story where the evil wizard's tower collapses when he dies that's the opposite of ontological inertia.

"Math and language aside, I can at least work out some useful things from having unit conversion tables, but that doesn't make me an electrician; also I don't have a big book of material statistics handy.  There's any amount that we can get from the periodic table, but it's not very helpful.  Certainly not for compounds and aggregates, which is most of what you use when you make stuff.

"I'll keep looking, though."

Tappity tap-poke, go her fingers.

"...If I'd known I was going to get isekaied, I would've brought a copy of Wikipedia or something..."

And then, she closes up the calculator in a practiced maneuver.

"Alright, that's all I've got, right now.  I should prooooobably get in touch with a government figure, now that there's someone who'll vouch for my not being completely 'round the bend, because I don't exactly have trade skills that work here.  I was in training to write the high-level instructions that get transformed into the low-level code that runs on the hardware that these machines use, and I never did finish NANDGame, so I'm approximately three levels of abstraction too high to build a proper computer from the ground up, let alone an Internet, because I have no idea how Hedy Lamarr invented the fundamental theorem of Wi-fi, nor do I have the actual engineering standards documents.

"Short-term plans, I'm going to need to acquire some money for actually doing the research to get from no-indoor-plumbing land to - anything resembling modern societal standard-of-living - from somebody, because while I'd damn well try to do it anyway, it'll be easier if I have a place to live and work, and food to eat.  I could probably stand to get some food and water now-ish, honestly; I ate before I arrived, but haven't since, and by my phone's clock it's been some time since then."

"Why would a tower coll- that's not important. Uh. Are you trying to get me to treat you to a meal or what."

"You have correctly identified the fundamental absurdity of things lacking ontological inertia, if I guess how you were going to end that question.

"As for the meal: I suppose I am, if there's no way to get food or water that's not imposing on you or other friendly faces; I'm assuming that it costs money, and I don't have any trade skills, though I suppose I could pick up my - ah, no, I don't actually have my violin.  Damn.  There's that plan gone.  I really don't know how almost anything works here socially, for all that I can make some guesses from the fragments of information I have, and I don't have the usual knack for social situations that most would expect from others.  So please consider this whole line of conversation to have been approached under the largest possible cloud of self-doubt and anxiety imaginable, with absolutely no expectations whatsoever, because it in fact was and is."  She shakes her head.  "This is somehow the most terrifying part of this entire situation.  Not the monsters, not the clear violations of reality as I previously knew it, but talking to people about normal human things.  Sometimes I can't believe myself."

"I really wouldn't have identified you as shy," remarks Wheat. "When my office sand is up I'll go buy food with you but I can't do that forever, I have kids and of their parents I make the most money."

"Yeah, I don't want to be dependent upon someone-in-particular like that anyway.  I just don't know what else to do.  What sorts of jobs do most people do around here?  I'm guessing it's significantly farming."

"...this is a city, the farmers mostly don't live in the city. My cohabitor works in a tavern and my wife makes pottery and her cohabitor makes clothes."

"...Yeah okay that communication blunder was my fault, I'm just expecting there to Be A Lot Of Farmers Per City Inhabitant, like, as a demographic; obviously they don't live here.  Pottery, huh?  ...Always kind of wanted to do handicrafts, though I imagine I've a rather romanticized view of the field.  And besides, I kind of really want to dive in to troportation.  And then there's doing scientific research and technology development, if there's anyone who'd want to throw money at that.  ...If you can mechanize farms even a little bit it's so much better for everybody, less people having to manage the dirt means more people living the lives they want to live, which is important, at least to me."

"If someone where you're from wanted money thrown at them would you know where to go? Would most people?"

"I know that a type of person called a venture capitalist exists; there's a whole production where people come to a forum and pitch their business ideas to potential investors - though particular discussion of that really ought to wait till we cover mass media; I know that the government of my country subsidizes both military and medical research, and there's even some endowments for the arts, plus the national archives are sort of a research thing if you squint...There's more steps to most of those but I know that most of the people I know, would know that those routes exist.  Of course, my social circles are probably selected for above-average intelligence and knowing-of-random-stuff, but...who pays you?  Who pays them?  I'm given to understand that scholarships exist around here somehow - and maybe, by implication, banking and the field of finance; finding out more about those is a potential avenue of inquiry into how to not starve.  It might not be the answer but I'm sure that I'd get closer than I was before.  Who funds the local library?  There are answers to these questions, available with enough looking for them.  So I ask, because I'll never know otherwise."

"I'm paid by the college bursar and I assume she pays herself too while she's at it. Scholarships are usually rich people who want more students enrolled in this or that subject for whateve reason. I... don't think that knowing how a bank works will give you any money to put in one. The library's public like the dreamward."

"Finance existing implies loans exist, and I have any marketable ideas.  Even moreso with troportation helping.  What sort of government do you have here, anyway?"

"Uh, anyone can attend the open assemblies as long as they follow the rules of order, and the assembly votes on things like who should have any more specialist position and who to kick out for monsters to eat and so on."

"...I...should hope that you are not kicking people out to die Just Because?  Right?  ...Anyway.  Okay.  Democracy is good."

"...there's not, like, a minimum number of people they have to kick out, they do it if someone is being a relentless criminal nuisance and their cohabitor isn't successfully making them cut it out."

"Yeah, that case makes sense.  Depending on values of criminal."

"I have no idea what you have in mind but I don't personally have enough complaints about the assembly to bother showing up to tell them to their faces," Wheat shrugs.

"Yeah, that's fair.  Where were we - ah, right.  Money.  Oh, and I just had an idea for generating electrical power directly - troporting electron shells and capturing the resulting potential somehow."

"Are... electron shells... solids that you can touch?"