"...okay but that doesn't mean I want to help?"

"...If you're helping, you'll definitely have a job lined up.  Though it's not like there won't be crafting jobs; someone has to make the blanks.  ...not blanks, but the - dies?  No, that's another thing, but - there's still going to be a market for people making things, is what I mean."

"Do you have money?"

"I have some loose change, but, as I said, no significant funds to speak of.  ...wait, how the fuck does whoever mints this do it in a way where someone with half an idea and too much time on their hands can't just forge it?"

"I mean, I could carve a wooden coin and then turn it into electrum, but I'd need the electrum to start with, and the only electrum I have is coins. I could cut a coin in half and carve two coins and turn both of them into electrum but they'd be too heavy. I could try making it the right weight with something else but then it'd float the wrong way up or something. I don't know what-all they do, just that it's not actually worth anyone's time to counterfeit them if they're that good at troportation in the first place."

"Huh, that's interesting.  ...damn, now I'm going to be wondering what they actually do for my entire life.  Unless they wrote it down and put it in the library, I suppose, but I bet they keep at least one step completely secret except for whoever does it - and maybe even from them - because that's what I'd do if I were trying to make counterfeiting-proof currency under the constraints of troportation's continued existence.  Security through obscurity's better than nothing when nothing's what you've got.  Though then the question is how the fuck merchants are supposed to spot the more subtle errors, because that's where the problem actually needs to be stopped.  After a counterfeit's been passed, the damage is basically done."

She catches herself, and stops.

"But you probably don't care all that much about that, so please excuse my ramble."

"I'm not really sure why you're still here, to be honest, but you're not slowing me down much." She's working on a new letter now.

"Got nowhere better to be, I suppose.  Could read up on local civics but I doubt...oh, there's a business opportunity...  ...or maybe not, you don't really have the sort of bustle and breadth of communications that even supports proper journalism, and I've still not figured out how to make an electrical engine work, even if I can probably bodge something together, but....  Dammit, I want to make something already, rather than just rattle around the city like a loose screw and hope knowledge falls out of my skull that's convenient for actual craftspeople to implement in ways I can't.  Maybe I should corner the market on educational primers.  I've got the printing technique, at least in broad strokes, and the first industrialized profession was weaving.  Though admittedly I'm only guessing that sewing - no, it's definitely glue that's part of - and of course having an example of good bookbinding technique on me would be too convenient, so I don't, and - "

She remembers something, and just, guffaws.

"Well, I'll have to hope the series where an industrial-age woman with an absurd love of books is reincarnated into a world with almost no books and proceeds to build the toolchain to make books from scratch, despite being in not-a-physical-book format, proves helpful, if I get into that!"  Once she's picked herself up off the floor, she continues, "Excuse me, I just - the dramatic irony of this precise occurrence is just, so much."

"I feel kind of superfluous to the conversation you and your cohabitor are having," remarks the printer.

"...But I'm literally talking to you, or I wouldn't have said all that out loud?"

"Yes," she says, "but I don't know what you're getting out of saying it out loud in a room that has me in it."

"...I never did actually get to the part where I know, and-or can readily figure out...pretty much everything you'd need but the ink handling, to print a whole lot of things a whole lot faster, did I.  And surely there has to be a faster way to resolve this," she gestures at the drying racks, "than drying racks - or ways to just make those dry faster - even if I can't immediately think of proven solutions.  They had double-sided printing working fine, back home.  You interested in figuring out how?"

"Go ahead and publish a book on it and I'll take a look."

"With what fucking paper?  But you must be joking, if you think I need an entire book to lay out technical specifications!"

Let's see.  Pencil, piece of scrap paper, sturdy surface...

Annnd draw.

It is, she dares say, not bad.  She indulges herself with a little bit of shading, even.

That said, it's not all art; she includes math about the appropriate size of rollers vis-a-vis sheet height (rollers should be x lengths divided by 3.14(15), where x is page height including margins...), she includes notes about gear ratios, she sketches a dummy piece-of-type to fit into the print-rollers, she shows a safety bar on the guillotine that cuts the paper into individual sheets...

She even gets her calculator out to do some unit conversions and figure out material tolerances, assuming no troportation assistance.

"I've never built one of these myself, but with what we have on hand, this is how I'd try to."

"- what is that?" the printer asks about the calculator.

"Graphing calculator.  It does math.  I'd be trying to build this if it wasn't like three generations of tools to make tools away from here."

"How does it do math?"

"Very carefully!  Okay but if you actually want to know, let's talk about binary logic, first.

"...no, actually, let's talk about the Jacquard loom, before even that.  I'm not sure how the fuck mechanized sewing works, even less than printing, but industrialized weaving was the first programmable machine - you could tell it to lay a thread, or not, via holes punched in a card.

"This paved the way for the initial design of the Turing machine: a wholly mechanical device that could do math by manipulating binary (a number system that counts zero, one, one-zero, one-one, one-zero-zero, or off, on, on-off, on-on...).  I believe it may have been steam-powered, but regardless of whether you could hand-crank it, and now that I think about...no, the ENIGMA machine was powered.  Anyway, I'm pretty sure it remained mostly a theoretical curiosity to mathematicians until the proper introduction of electricity - which is, broadly, bottled lightning - a while further on, though my understanding of that era is somewhat foggy save for that Turing himself was around to do codebreaking during a definitely-electrified war.

"Regardless.

"After that war's long since over, people much smarter than I dust off the ol' Turing machine, and put that together with the more recently popularized field of semiconductors, instead of sticking with the early-computing-era use of vacuum tubes, yes, you heard me correctly, they used the absence of stuff to store data somehow - anyway.  Semiconductors are invented, and suddenly, you can make a computer that's not as big as this room do something useful.

"So someone takes the desktop mechanical calculators that got put into stores to sum up prices and such, figures they can put that into handholdable silicon real easy and that people would want one, instead of having to use things like slide-rules, and starts the company that makes this calculator.

"Theoretically you can do arbitrary computing on it but I never learned the programming language this thing uses and I don't have an electrical generator, so I'm not going to waste power trying to learn.

"...I never did actually explain how it does math, did I, just that it does.

"Do you actually want me to try?  I probably can't reconstruct math from the basics of hardware logic, I should warn you - NANDgame kicked my ass when last I tried to play the damn thing, and the whole premise of that game was doing that."

"Uh. Never mind."

"Yeah, I kinda figured.

"It's just a bunch of complicated automated flipping of switches, really, that then gets turned into something we can understand by yet more automated switch-flipping and blinking lights.  ...Well, this particular display is liquid-crystal, I think, but still.  On or off."

"What's the advantage of the crystals being liquid?"

"I'm not sure if it's that the crystals are liquid or if there are crystals in liquid, but the tradeoff here is that because this display's 'active' state is dark, rather than bright, it's more easily read in bright environments."

"...I don't know what that means but okay..." She turns her attention to the rollers diagram. "How do you keep the type from falling out of the rollers?"

"Well, did you see how the actual blank is shaped?"  It has a T-shaped tab at the end, that then fits in to the roller.

"It'll probably be a process to make the first tab, but the slots and other tabs should be easy to copy from the existing piece."

"A process like what?"