...Well, mountains, and earthquakes ever happening, imply the existence of any amount of plate tectonics, but yes.  That makes sense.

...Has anyone ever tried doing the dreamward thing by excavating down to stone and warding that?

No. Troportation about large geographical features does not work out of legend.

...why not?  They're still objects!  Well, if the stone goes on to infinity, maybe not, but...huh.  What's the biggest thing that's successfully been troported?

Elephants, buildings, glaciers, depending on your reference class.

Also she's been in here with these books for a long time now.

...Yawn.  Okay, time to drowse a mouse, she supposes.  What time is it?  ...Do they even have a daylike time unit here?  She needs to invent pendulum clocks sometime soon.

There are hourglasses around the library, and Juniper's job appears to include occasionally swinging through, flipping them over, changing the color of the glass, and moving on to the next one.

Drowsing a mouse makes her more physically awake. The mouse goes to sleep.

She gives the mouse a little pet, if - yeah, this is the boy mouse, he - likes the idea of Strange Human touching him.  Because he's a good and helpful mouse, yes he is.

...They need timekeeping that's better than that, that's not dependent upon such a fickle thing as human memory to keep ticking.

She knows the rough mechanics of pendulum clocks.

She has time, she has focus, she has paper, pencil, and a soundtrack... Tick, tock, it's clockmaking time.

Really, the hardest part is going to be making the pendulum ratchet the gears forwards reliably, without losing impractical amounts of momentum, but that's why the end of the pendulum is heavy and the gears are light, she supposes.  And she could cold-cast the gears, too, to check her work on that whole process.

Oh, hey, there's an idea, while she's thinking about troportation: she could make frictionless ball bearings.

Troporting weight seems less wise to just up and do.

...Incidentally, what happens if you alter a metal's properties, then use it in an alloy?

You can get some really neat special alloys that way. They use them all the time.

Neat!  That's good, they're actually leveraging troportation properly.  She's not alone.

Anyway, back to clockwork.

Are there any specific measures of longer times than a sand to take into account, for ease of use, if she just starts inventing terminology?  Are there specific shorter times?

Sometimes people talk about "a breath" or "a grain", but this doesn't appear to be a specific amount of time, just idioms for "a moment". People talk about multiples of sands. Sometimes people talk about a sleep but this has dialect and context differences in whether it means five sands (the amount of time children sleep when they sleep), twelve sands (the amount of time between children's bedtimes), or six sands (the amount of time an adult is normally fronting at a stretch).

Alright, she'll carry over seconds and minutes, then build a 24-hour (or twelve sands) clock and call that one cycle.  Well, she'll probably end up calling it a day.  Maybe she'll call the six sands unit a cycle, that'd make sense.

The books have no comment on this ambition.

...right.

Time to go find some parts, she supposes.

Watchmakers evolved from jewelers, she thinks...

After any amount of agonizing, because the guy she talked to before is...oh, huh.  Has she been reading and writing for that long already?

"If I was looking for someone who did precise work with metals, is there anyone you'd recommend?  Preferably someone," she wibbles a hand, "ambitious?  There's better timekeeping than glasses full of sand for the making."

The librarian currently behind the desk furrows her brow. "I don't... often need precise work with metals done... so no, sorry."

"Alas.  How do you get your books copied, then?"

"We hire it out to a printer, but I think they carve their type out of wood and then just turn it into metal afterwards."

"That would make sense, wouldn't it.  ...boy, am I glad you have the printing press.  Don't know what I'd do if there just weren't books.  Most likely, be dangerously bored, or try and invent the thing myself.  You mind pointing me at your printer, then?  I'm looking to turn a design into a reality, and I bet they know how, and if they don't, then they certainly know who would."

"Uh. Sure. The printer's at Seventh and Diagonal."

Right.  Double-checking the map, and then...off to the printer!

It's a pretty long walk, but there's lots of neat decorations to look at - stained glass and mosaics and sculptures that look like they were probably originally created in a more forgiving medium.

She's got pretty good endurance, walking, for a modern desk plant of a girl.  Especially when she's on a mission.

The pretty art and sculpture is honestly rather distracting, speaking of mission focus, but she does have a quest, and the art will be there tomorrow and the days after.  She can come back later.

The printer is nestled between a storage unit and a grocery store, across the street from some kind of shared kitchen situation where you can rent a stove and cooking tools.

Oh wow that's neat -

Gawk and ponder sociological implications later, talk about clockwork now.

She knocks on the door (or otherwise enters the printer's workshop).

"Door's open!" a voice calls from inside.