Bwah.

She pouts at the universe a bit, and - yeah, she kind of thinks she's about done with the books anyway.  May as well put 'em back.  Next stop, medical troportation, maybe?

...Now that she's thinking about it, what the hell happens if you try to troport "has claws" on to a plank of wood or a tree or something?

Usually doesn't work; there aren't underlying structures suited to having claws.

...usually doesn't work?  She is now tempted to see if she can get chloroplasts.

Well, she already was, but now is more tempted than before.

If you carve a tree into a claw-having shape and you're very good at troportation you can get the keratin from a clawed animal on there in the claw loation.

Huh, neat.  What happens with the corresponding wood?

Winds up on the animal, of course. Usually not very pleasant for the animal, you shouldn't do this if you want to keep the critter.

Huh.  Does it actually work, though?  (Distant thoughts of grassy hair drift through her mind.)

The details of the functionality of tree claws are not included in this volume.

Okay, but the tissue didn't fall off or anything, right?

Not in the successful cases!

Okay, she definitely wants to try going kind of absurdly transhuman if she can find someone who'll actually do the troportation.

...Can you troport yourself?

Sure, though it's usually recommended to go to a professional who can see what they're doing better.

What is this see what they're doing?!  Wheat all but said "seeing what you're doing" is basically a lie she's telling herself as she petitions the troportation god for miracles!  But seriously, is there a relevant sense attached beyond the semi-proprioceptive one?

No, there is not a sense involved, but if you want something especially fine-grained (the shininess but not the color of someone's hair, say) it's better to keep a visual on it so you can form the correct intention.

Tell her more about "intention", would you kindly?

The set of books she has here doesn't seem to have anything answering this question in a way that she finds intuitively satisfying.

...do they have examples of intention, desired effect, output, etcetera?  Someone has to have been bored enough to try troporting the same trait in as many different ways as they could think of and written down the results at some point, surely!

...They totally don't, but she's allowed to dream.

Yeah no, they seem to have the idea that there's a thing you're trying to do and you do it more or less correctly depending on skill and whether you're being careful and stuff but do not have the thing she seeks.

Well she'll just have to introduce them to the Heterodyne Corollary to Clarke's Third Law herself, then!  When she has actual resources to experiment with, and the sum total of her worldly possessions isn't the contents of her suitcase.

...At least she has her suitcase.

Alright, back to testing the limits of troportation secondhand:

What happens if you troport inorganic materials in as the output of organic processes, e.g. trying to give someone metal fingernails?

What happens if you troport a wet sponge, or clay?  Both of those hold water.  What about something like sand, wet or dry?  Is pitch officially a liquid according to troportation science?  What happens if you're mistaken about what you're trying to troport, e.g. you have a solid object but are informed that it is hollow and attempt to troport a material onto it, or have a filled container that you're told is a single solid object and material-swap that?

You can change the materials of your hair or fingernails (though you have to do all your hair individually) but it won't grow in that way and will soon fall out. You can get moisture out of something moist like a sponge or a fruit. Sand has the all of it individually problem. No mentions of pitch in these books. The experiments listed also do not appear.

...but...moisture is a liquid!?!  Troportation, whyyy...

None of the books has a chapter entitled "whyyy".

One of these days, she is going to troport the moistness of a frozen sponge into a rock.  It won't really elucidate anything, but it might make her feel better.

Right, well, enough about that for now.  There's something else she should probably look into: Plate tectonics, geography, and seismology.  Namely, whether those things exist.

Volcanoes exist. Geography exists in the sense that there are maps. Earthquakes have happened ever but appear tremendously rare. No sign of plate tectonics.