Most people can drowse and sicken/injure mice to get themselves more awake and healthy; the principle transfers straightforwardly to other animals but mice are convenient. Temperatures, flavors, sizes, materials, those all work. It's specialized work to do one soul into another body, or complicated cosmetic features, both because it's difficult to finesse at all and because the consequences of fucking it up are so potentially awful. Making dreamwards is incredibly difficult and involves transferring the klaon-slowing properties of certain materials that slightly stall klaonso attempting to float through them into a single thing, hundreds of times, till you have enough of it that it not only possesses this property itself but also radiates it outward to a certain radius.

Oooh, what materials have those properties?  -- No, no, that's still not answering her actual question.

Are there concrete examples of traits that just can't be troported despite significant effort trying?

Sure. You can't pick locks by swapping their lockedness with an open one you bring along. You can't make dead things alive. You can't swap "stolen-ness" or anything similar. You can't take the swiftness of a horse or the flight of a bird, though there are legends about being able to manage that long long ago, possibly by also appropriating some limbs.

"...well, duh, that's a gross material arrangement problem..."

Can you troport relative position like you...seem to be able to troport scale somehow?

"...wonder if you could swap a paraplegic into - oh, no, not touching that ethics question with a ten-foot pole.  And you can probably just troport that off onto a mouse or something anyway."

"...well, yeah, those are clearly consequences of underlying physics.  Wonder if you could traitsteal from demons, though, they're bullshit-magicium."

Say, wasn't there a book about traitstones theoretically having existed?

Also: What happens if you troport a trait onto something, and then break it apart?

You cannot troport positions, though with enough finesse if you are making something bigger you can decide in which directions it gets bigger. (If you are bad at this it might not work, or try to get bigger in the direction of you and break your finger.)

Traitstones are legendary, like getting swiftness or flight off horses or birds; the idea was that there were special stones of some kind which could hold a trait you found somewhere and wanted to save for later, and then be used as a source of any traits you put in the stone, while itself remaining a conveniently portable small object. It is theorized that maybe this had to do with some advanced kind of transfer, sort of like the kind you do with souls, which is already pretty special as transfers go.

Huh, traitstones are not exactly what she expected.  And kind of odd, really.  Well, if they existed they are either bullshit-magic, or replicable.

She has some ideas, if troporting troportability works.

Has anyone managed to hold down a demon long enough to see if they could get traits from it?

Yup. Demons are basically animals that don't die of starvation; there are some in the zoo.

...that's - what - huh?

...can humans do the not-dying-of-starvation thing, too?

Someone tried it! They started madly biting people, presumably trying to eat their souls, and had to be put down.

...what, and they didn't try un-doing it?

That's honestly the weirdest thing she's seen so far.

Anyway: Do demons have any other weird integral traits that don't cause weird biteyness?  She's curious.

They don't appear to reproduce; this has been successfully troported, actually, but birth control is apparently discouraged in this society so it's not something you can get zoo employee help with. They'll eat each other, any two kinds of demon will try it, but no one appears to have tried to grab that one. Some of them have cool natural weapons but these are not obviously better than those on normal animals.

...Well, she doesn't want to have spawn of her loins overmuch at this moment, so maybe she'll see if she can, if she can find the time.  And the zoo.

Anyway, back to research: Klaon-proof materials and their relevant properties?

Materials are basically not klaon-proof. Some of them - it's an idiosyncratic set including living wood, running water (not usable as a troportation source but mentioned as a member of the category), fossils, glaciers, spiderwebs, and wool fabric - very, very slightly, but detectably, slow down a klaon on the move that someone's been tracking.

...weeeeeiiiirrrrddddd.  It's not static electricity...how do they even have fossils?  And somehow dead wood doesn't while living wood does?  That's getting to be soul-evidence, though it could be the same thing that makes running water do the klaon-slowing thing.

...Now she wants spinnerets, too.

...Okay, she has a theory, because water is semi-ionized and wool and spiderweb are staticky, and it fits with 'klaons are some sort of electrical-activity monster', but she can't get too set in that hypothesis.  That's not how science works.

Anyway, if klaons really don't like Tesla coils...that's evidence.

She'll find out eventually, probably.

"You're gonna put those back when you're done," says a voice behind her, "right?"

"That's the plan, at least.  Demons are really fucking weird, by the way.  And so are the things that repel or impede klaons, but at least there I have some clue what might be happening.  I wonder what happens if a klaon's struck by lightning?"

"Klaonso."

"Sorry, yes, klaonso, not klaons.  Second language problems, where I'm from you can just stick an s on most things and call it pluralized.  Who're you, by the way?"  She finally remembered to ask someone's name at the beginning of the conversation!

"Juniper. If you don't shelve all those books it's my job, I'm watching you."

"Yes ma'am," she says, tossing off a mini-salute.  She has been putting most of the ones she's not actively consulting back, but that's no reason to not please the pretty lady.  "It's funny, libraries back home actively don't want the patrons re-shelving things because then it'll get the organization system messed up.  But if I can save you a few minutes, I'm up for it."

"Just put them back where you found them, it isn't hard!"

"If your memory is sufficient to the task, certainly, and your organization system isn't very strict.  ...Fun fact, every time you remember something, you are also rewriting the contents of that memory."

"...where'd you read that?"

"Several studies on neurology; people cross-referenced memory with records and found that memory was a lot more fickle.  If I had a way of accessing the source from here I could show you the pop-sci article that's not all jargon that my mind jumped to, but I don't, yet.  ...I wonder if they even transcribed it, NPR isn't the best at turning radio into text...I can remember the example and the voice but not the name, show, or year.  It's really quite annoying that my brain drops all the actual identifying attributes of sources at the drop of a hat but remembers everything else."

"You'd better put all those books back when you're done, weirdo," says Juniper, and she walks away.