...what in the actual fuck.  That is very fucking terrifying.

...While she's scaring the pants off herself, what's the specific danger of klaonso?  What allows them to render you comatose?

They eat your soul, obviously. They're immaterial, so they can just intersect with you for a bit and then they leave and you're dead.

...Has anyone ever survived momentary contact with one?

Sure, if they're awake. You can walk around inside a klaon forever if you're awake.

...but...why....

Does it feel like anything, if you do?

People describe the sensation in different ways and most people don't feel anything.

...okay, fine, she'll update towards 'meaningfully soul-like things exist' but she's not happy about it, universe!

...She's probably gotten off track of something at some point, and she forgot to write down what she came here for.

Whoops.

Let's see, it was...

Not clock-related.

She'd just gotten done feeding her mice...

Ah.  She didn't actually get off track.  Still, she's a little bit at loose ends.

Maybe she can investigate mineralogy; she needs to throw crystals at her wires and see how they diode sometime soon.

There are books about rocks. They contain information about rocks.

Has anyone ever managed to zap rocks with lightning, perchance?

No. Lightning, not being a solid object, is not something they have a particular jump in being able to manage.

Yeah, she wasn't really expecting that to work.

Well, she may as well visit Wheat.  Is it his office sand?

It is not! He is presumably teaching or hanging out with his kids or something.

She'll leave him a note, then.

Professor Wheat,

I've made some progress in electrical generation, thanks to funding from agreeing to teach Feather math; the thing is, to charge the stuff I have that needs electrical charging, I need to figure out how the fuck people made quartz - or some other material - be a signal rectifier, something that regularizes the human-scale power generation irregularities from my "'generator'" being a human cranking a wheel, so I probably won't be able to start trying to do the stuff I'm actually any good at, yet.  I've also made actual clocks, speaking of timing-related things, though it's unlikely that that matters to the chemistry we might do.  Knowing the speed at which a reaction progresses, to a much higher degree of precision than an hourglass allows, isn't very useful when you're still figuring out which reaction to run, and that's where we stand at present, though it may come in handy later.

Still, I do want to get clockmaking in the public eye, so I'm thinking of donating one - and only one - to the university; I've given one to the library on similar principles.

I've rented a storage room at [her address]; you can send mail there if you want.

I hope this finds you well.

Your collaborator in science,

Mira Grant

Next stop...Well.  She doesn't know, actually.

Anything interesting as she wanders around the city some more?

Some acrobats doing a show. A café having a promotion where you get two pastries for the price of one if you go to sleep right after you eat the first to let your cohabitor have the second. The zoo. A public swimming pool. A parent with a crashed seven-year-old passed out on their shoulder sprinting for the dreamward at top speed. A new building being constructed out of bricks of lapis and shiny gold mortar.

...The parent with the crashed seven year old running to the dreamward like their child's life depends on it is going to benefit from Diana's long legs in some way if she can at all make that happen, plausibly by virtue of stuffing the child in her thankfully-presently-mostly-empty suitcase and running like a life depends on it, because it does.

...She's coming back for the pastry twofer after this, though.

Before she catches up to the child the dad has successfully pinched the kid awake and is making her walk the rest of the way.

Pastries! They have lots of kinds.

...Well.  That's better than not-that, even if she's going to be a little bit annoyed at the way she now has all this adrenaline pumping and no cause to use it in service of.

Well.  She'll have a pastry, and some tea.

Do they have chocolate-filled pastries?  She likes chocolate.

And as the adrenaline ebbs, her 'normal' mindset reasserts itself.

She does make a point of shutting her eyes, for just a few moments; enough to feel like a switch to 'standard' Dreamward-ees.  She really needs to find out their demonym.

(This reminds her to drowse a mouse; the crash would absolutely hit her much harder otherwise.)

How does the café handle this special, actually?

The promotion is on the honor system but they did schedule it for a switch hour. They have chocolate, though not the tempered melty kind, just cocoa.

She'll still have it.

Mmmm, delicious theobromine for her thinkmeats.

Say, there's carts and such around here, right?  What're they made out of, anyway?

Mostly wood. Some of them are kind of weird looking in a way that suggests they were originally sculpted out of something else and then troported but some of them seem to be attached planks. They often move in a way that makes them look like especially light wood.

Oh, good, an obvious unfilled market niche.

Mira Grant Metalcrafts, here she comes, she supposes.

That and something about presses.

...What time is it now?

It's late clear.