"I don't believe we have, no.  I have an idea that's so stupid it just might work about how to massively speed up the process of making dreamwards, and was hoping you'd be willing to double-check my work, as was."

"Are you a student?"

"I'm not presently a student here, no.  That said, I have been working with Professor Wheat on some other projects."

"- are you a student somewhere else?"

"Yes, but not that you'd know of.  It's very far away."

She does, however, still have her university ID handy!

Beryl looks at the ID. "We don't have a relationship with that school and I'm not currently signed on to any of Wheat's projects. My office sand is for students," she says.

"That's fair, and your students should have priority.  But if you have just a moment - I think it's plausible to cut down the troportation necessary to make a dreamward from a thousand steps of chopping trees to less than twenty steps, with one tree, and some additional materials for property-holding."

"Is your plan to put the property in a piece of paper and tear it into a thousand pieces?" asks Beryl.

"Approximately, though not quite.  Is there a particular reason that sort of thing doesn't work?"

"The leading theory is that contiguity is important to something being klaon-repelling. You can divide a tree, as long as it's still alive in every piece you use when you use it, but the property disappears when the wood dies. If you tear a piece of paper, there's no gradual dying process to take advantage of. The property dissipates."

"...Huh.  I still think that the method I'm planning to exploit ought to work out, even if I'll need more trees or tree bits than otherwise.  Because you're right that it was about troporting split parts holding the klaon-repellent property, but the other thing is that, mathematically, f of x equals two to the x grows a lot faster than f of x equals x plus one.  ...Has anyone tried clay, for an intermediary accumulation medium?  It's not alive, but it has a wet-dry transition..."

"I don't know if clay in specific has been tried. It's a been a moment, please go away."

"Thank you, you've been very helpful.  I'll let you know if plan B works."

Now, to find a tree, and repeatedly troport the "can repel klaonso" property onto it from its twigs!

"Why are you hurting that tree?" asks a little girl, after she's been snapping twigs off a tree in the park for a while.

She shouldn't have needed to do that too many times, to be clear.  Her math says that sixteen doublings is more than enough.  But sure.

"I'm doing an experiment to see if I can make making dreamwards easier, with the tree's help."

"But it's the park's tree. That's not nice to take apart the park's tree."

"Is there a tree I should take apart, then?  Though, I'm actually pretty much done; the only thing that's really left is seeing if the result," she gestures to a rock that she picked as her temporary effect repository, "wards off klaonso.  And the tree might, too, but the rock is easier to actually test."

"My papa said he saw a klaon but he might have been fibbing because I was lying down," says the girl solemnly.

She nods.  "Where is your papa?"

"He's under the apple tree there."

Ah, good.

Well, time to go find a klaon, or something.  She needs empirical verification!

The father is reading a book, glancing over at that girl and another older girl and a boy coming up on adolescence every couple of pages.

...She'll wave politely at him?

He furrows his brow quizzically at her.

She blinks bemusedly at him.