"Yeah."

Still, she'll hang out here, for now.

Eventually Wheat changes the hourglass to light blue and collects up all his papers and departs the office.

"...So what is an average day like, for you?  If you have time and energy to talk about it, I suppose."

While Wheat was working, she was...well, if music notation is remotely the same on this plane Wheat might recognize the thing she's doing as 'attempting to transcribe music by humming it and writing down the pitches as she goes'.  It's not exactly her best skill, judging by the grumbling she emits and the number of times she has to go find something relative to a very well-known pitch, but she makes any progress.

"- well, right now, I'm going to meet my wife at the dreamward, see the kids," says Wheat. "...you aren't invited."

"Yeah, I'll go be in the library or something."  Maybe she'll see if Feather's in.

Feather is in! "- hello?"

"Hello!  I hope I'm not intruding?  Wheat mentioned your name when I was wondering who'd be interested in the pile of math worksheets from another universe I have on me."

And she has worksheets!  With calculus on them!  Freshly annotated with local-math symbols!

"I also have a device that does math, but that's harder to reproduce."

Feather looks slightly cross-eyed at the worksheets. "- like an abacus?"

"Like this."  She has her calculator handy!  "Give me something to test it, if you like.  Five digit multiplication, maybe?  ...oh, what was that formula for doing square roots by I think it was interpolation, there was an entire worksheet about it..."

"Why five, can't it do six?"

"It can do...hm, how many significant digits does this have, anyway?  But yes, it can do six-digit multiplication too; I just pulled five out of a hat as being checkable easily-ish."

"What's 45901 times 89226?"

"Four oh nine, five five six, two-six two-six," she rattles off after a second's button-poking.

Feather double-checks this.

"Wow," she says. "How much do you want for it?"

"Room, board, healthcare, and help with materials while I try to figure out how to build another one.  Or at least how to replace the batteries.  Iiii kind of don't have the actual blueprints on hand for any of my stuff, even if I know the generalities of how it functions.  ...You can build a mechanical calculator with sufficient ingenuity, Babbage's fully mechanical calculator and his computer worked when someone built them back where I come from, but this one runs off of, perhaps too-poetically speaking, bottled lightning.  Which is why I was talking to Wheat - the calculator's batteries, which will eventually need replacing, on a couple-hecta-cycle timescale, use an acid of some sort for storing chemical potential energy; that's then tapped to calculate stuff.  A shame they're not rechargeable, I can much more easily jury-rig an electrical generator from parts than I can chemical formulae, even if I'm going to have to figure out how the fuck voltmeters and ammeters and...however the fuck you turn jerky human motions into nice smooth sine-waves, work, to power my other stuff.  Which is much more impressive than a kilo-cycle old calculator design, even if the calculator is much more power-efficient per flop.  ...Floating-point operation, excuse me.  ...Excuse me again, that's computer jargon.  The calculator's much more power-efficient per unit math.  ...And since I've gone and mentioned it, IEEE-754 is going to haunt me even though I'm in another goddamn universe.  Fuck.

"...That's a specification for representing good-enough decimal numbers for computing, instead of integers.  Notable for producing some results like one plus two equals 3.000000004, and eventually having an x plus one equals x moment.  ...Not sure of the exact zero count, but, that's floating-point math and its...quirks.

"Honestly you'd be hard-pressed to get me to produce base-two computerized math, let alone working in decimal, without having examples handy, but thank goodness, I do, so I'm not just flailing around wildly at logic gates.  ...There will probably be plenty of that happening at some point in this process, but at least not as much as there otherwise might be."

"...what do you mean 'room and board'?"

"Enough pocket money to not starve, and having a workspace somewhere, probably.  I'm not sure of the details - it's not like I need a bed, now, what with troportation existing.  Back home we didn't have that."

"Ah. What kind of workspace?"

"I don't actually know?  Probably...well, if I were planning an ideal workspace just, for my neurotype, not actually taking any specifics into account per se, I'd want a separate space for thinking in compared to actually doing experiments, just to - have appropriate separation between the requisite states of mind...

"Honestly, just A Room, furnishings to be determined later but I do want a decent chair and it probably shouldn't be near places that should be quiet if it's going to be a proper workshop, since things will get noisy, is probably good to start.  ...Actually, hm, we're - Wheat and I - definitely going to need somewhere to do chemistry that no-one minds having explosions happen near.  I remembered one important chemical formula, and it goes boom when you light it on fire.  Good for absolutely ruining demons' days.  Better to avoid having that near anything anyone cares about.  That's not the only project I have percolating, though, just the one with the most obvious potential consequences, and I wouldn't want to have that near anything at all, such as my other projects.  There's a lot of interesting things you can do just with gears, pipes, and heat differences.  ...So, probably lab space for doing things-that-might-explode, an office for thinking and book storage and just having personal space because I don't have anywhere to get mail right now...and maybe general access to commonly-held university facilities, by arrangement slash when unoccupied?  ...I'm not sure how I should be modeling this question, whether you want - minimums or optimums."

"I'm not going to pay you tuition to get you into university facilities just so I can do arithmetic faster," says Feather. "...and if you want things to explode, you probably need to do them outside the walls, everything inside is important and would be bad to have on fire."

"Minimum requirements are just a room and food, then.  But it's not just your field that I have stuff for, and it's not just arithmetic I have; the calculator alone has an equation-solver and graphing, let alone what I can program up to do simulations, once power's a solved issue.  ...Damn I wish I had a local copy of Wolfram-Alpha, that's computerized math's best showing, second to none.  Natural language math solving.  But I don't, so it's relegated to memory."

"...Find a room you like the look of for rent somewhere, and get back to me on how much it costs, and I'll decide then," says Feather.

"Sure!"

...Well, it seems to be time to go househunting!

"Oh, also, I have some building techniques so y'all can fit more useful stuff in the same square unit-of-measure.  And elevators.  Elevators are really good for moving things vertically, and thus make taller buildings less of a pain to utilize."

"I'm a math teacher."

"...Yeah.  Ugh, sorry, I just...I can finally dream big, and I keep getting carried away.  Who funds the university?"