"..."

"Can I persuade you to be the slightest bit impressed?  Like, not even a lot impressed, but...any amount impressed.  It's.  I made this from scratch simply by knowing it's been done, and honestly I shouldn't care whether you care when there's pretty obvious inherent utility in the premise of timekeeping without constant human management if you just...think about it...but if you're not actually interested in the thing..."

"I don't know."

She sighs.

"I suppose I should probably not get my depression all over this, though, so where do you want the clock?"

The receptionist finds a spot on the end of a bookshelf with the major references (dictionaries and such) visible from the library entryway.

"Thanks!  And do, if anyone asks, let them know that the person who built it is currently working out of -" she gives her address.  "My name's Mira Grant, by the way.  No, Mira doesn't actually mean anything foreign, it just sounds pretty."

The librarian takes a blank card catalog card and sticks it to the wall beside the clock. This timekeeping installation was generously donated to the library by Miragrant. (The name transliterates tolerably into Nlaaki, fortunately.)

"...No it's - There's actually multiple names per 'name', for legacy and distinguishability reasons, so it's Mira, my first name, and then Grant, my last name, and you write them separately.  Sorry, should've said something beforehand but it hadn't occurred to me that y'all didn't do names the same way here."

"...fine," sighs Fern, and she whites out the name, blows on it, and then re-writes with a space, and adds the address.

"Thank you; my apologies for the persnicketiness."

Right.  Next step, make a clock for the university.

Maybe she'll make a carillon.  That'd be cool, though it'd also be more difficult.  It would also probably need power.

Regardless.  She'll focus on just making the one thing, to start off with.

Her funding will not last indefinitely but it will spot her some more materials for clockmaking.

Well, troportation hardly follows conservation laws...

So what if she does some Shenanigans with swapping around her supplies' aspect ratios, then paring them down and repeating the process ad nauseam?

...Well, she actually needs to visit the jewelry maker, but she can test this first.

Aspect ratio turns out not to be troportable, though volume, mass, and shape are, independently.

...okay, she has to know, what the hell happens if you transfer a shape instead of swapping it?  ...On a very small test piece, transferring a pyramid onto a cube.

Doesn't work at all.

...Boooooo.  Ah well, she'll live.

Still, if she can troport shape...She's almost certain there ought to be a way to harvest materials indefinitely from a cube, via shape troportation.  She'll just...find it later.

She has coiled wire to get, and a bicycle's pedaling mechanism to assemble.

The wire is coiled up to her specifications, presently stored around its dowel but easily slid off when she arrives to collect it.

"Wow, you did really well with just freehanding that.  I brought you a jig for coiling things automatically as they come out of the die, because I could."  She pauses.  "I'm working on making an automatic crank turner sort of thing, as well.  D'you think you'd buy something like that?"

"What, like the kind a donkey turns?"

"More scalable than that, but yeah, I suppose.  And without the donkey."

"...what does it if there's no donkey?"

"Differences in temperature, basically."

"What does that have to do with the donkey's function?" says the jeweler, visibly frustrated now.

"...The donkey moves and turns a wheel which powers the rest of the apparatus, yes?

"You know how hot stuff cools down to room temperature, and ice melts?  You can think of that as temperature, moving.

"So you have a hot zone on one side of the device, a cold zone on the other, and in the middle you have something that captures airflow and turns it into motion, because the air will, in fact, try to flow through it, to equalize the temperature difference.

"And that's how it does the things donkeys also do, once I've actually produced it."

"I'm not sure a pinwheel will be able to draw wire."

"But it can definitely turn a gear.  Might need to adjust the ratio of speed to force exerted a bit once that first gear's turning, but that's definitely possible.  At which point, the torque from the engine turns the crank."

"They had some pretty big pinwheels back home, too.  Those powered quite a lot of things."