"Uh.  Nothing immediately comes to mind; is there anything you want to ask me?"

"Well, I'd like to know what many of those words you used mean."

"Which ones?"

He has notes: "Vacuum? Chemical instructions? Atoms? fMRI? Internet? KNO3?"

"Vacuum is - well, it's more of an isn't than an is.  It's the absence of stuff, including air.  If we weren't on an infinite flat plane I'd point up at the stars and say that at a certain height above the ground, long after the standard human stops being able to get enough oxygen from the air unassisted, you're basically in vacuum, but who the hell knows if the atmosphere works the same way around here?  Not me, not yet.  And don't even get me started about the fucking suns.  I don't know how they work!  ...note to self: Eratosthenes' equator-determining experiment, plus shadow measuring, plus accurate timekeeping, plus trigonometry, equals figuring out at least how far up the average sun is.  And I should write down the lookup tables for sine, cosine, and tangent from the calculator.

"Chemical instructions!  So, you know how people can inherit traits, right?  Well, some scientists with really good microscopes managed to figure out why; it's called deoxyribonucleic acid, four base pairs of adenine cytosine guanine thymine and uracil - uracil substitutes for thymine, it appears only in ribonucleic acid, RNA, which is what a lot of the things that live on the cellular scale use for their reproductive code to this day and is also used as a messenger between the various workshops of the cell; that code, a full copy, is stored in every single cell of our bodies, every single little building block of making a human, there's millions to billions of them - and back to DNA, things that reproduce sexually do so so they can recombine their selection of various chunks of DNA - their chromosomes, and the genes upon them that determine things like hair color and blood type - oh, blood type, I'll get to that later - in new and exciting ways.  ...I have no idea why it's called an acid, nobody mentioned its pH - ...I don't know what specific words generated that abbreviation either except that the H is about hydrogen ions, ions being atoms that have electrical charge imbalances, but I know that where I'm from it was a 1 to 14 scale, with water, dihydrogen monoxide, H2O, as seven right in the middle as perfectly neutral; more-acidic things trend 1-wards, more-basic things trend 14-wards.  ...Fun fact about water: Ice is slightly less dense than water, because water's two hydrogen atoms are attached to the oxygen atom like this, for...I'm vaguely under the impression that it's electron reasons - which means that when water stops moving fast enough on the atomic level - oh, and here's another good one, heat is microscopic motion, motion is macroscopic heat - anyway, when water freezes, it does so in a hexagonal structure that lowers its density compared to equivalent masses of liquid!

"...I should invent the phonograph; you can just record my damn rambles instead of having to take a zillion notes.  Shouldn't actually be that hard once we have motors that work; speakers and-or microphones aren't hard once you have motors, really.  It's just wobbling a membrane really fast, and turning that around vice-versa to record's easy.  Especially with troportation in play!

"Anyway!  Atoms!  They're the building blocks of matter; they're made of protons, electrons, and neutrons.  ...Usually; there's weird shit that the high energy and exotic physicists get up to with weird subatomic particles that aren't stable but are still capable of producing valid arrangements.  The periodic table sorts by number of protons or otherwise equivalent particles, incidentally; that's always identifying.  You can have atoms that're missing electrons or have extra electrons, because of various reasons; those're called ions.

Electrons are smaller and they exist in a variety of probabilistic spaces - You don't really have anything that could possibly be an orbit, but they're called orbitals because they go around and around, their fuzzy cloud of plausibly existing spread out a certain distance from the center.  Like a sphere, which is also sometimes an 'orb'.  ...Did I mention that color is - normally, I don't know what the suns are doing because it's simply not possible to create a fusion reaction that's green, as far as I know, though it's not like I know very far there, maybe it's just fusing something weird, maybe it's just universal fiat, maybe it's actually balls of contained electrified gases because you can get those in green, maybe it's troportation somehow - anyway, materials' color is normally a function of the distance between electron orbitals.  Photons 'hit' atoms, and the energy causes electrons to jump into higher orbits, and then they collapse into base levels again.  Visible light's wavelengths are in the 400-700 nanometer range - do I have a ruler with metric...yeah, definitely.  Anyway.

"Where was I?  fMRI: That's short for functional magnetic resonance imaging, where you do something fancy with a normal MRI machine - those basically just shows tissue density because water's got that weird not exactly ionicity going on and you can use that and magnets, probably electromagnets, which are magnets that're only magnetic when you induce electrical current to run through them, to measure how much there is, somehow; I don't know, all I've done is be given one rather than learn how to make either.  This works because humans are surprisingly high in water content.  ...fMRI is when you do the MRI thing plus some other step to pick up brain activity.

"Which would be interesting to use on someone as they and their cohabitor switched out, because while they were able to confirm non-troportated alters had different patterns of neuron activation - and some even have different sensory processing, some colorblind and others non-colorblind as an example - it's troportation that brings up the 'are there two brains?' question.

"The Internet...The thing I am going to miss the absolute most about home.  A world-spanning network of machines that could hold millions of books each, calculate absurdly difficult math, send messages to the other side of the world in perhaps literally the blink of an eye...It took less than the hardware capabilities of my smallest computing device to - hm, what's a good metaphor for landing on the moon - launch someone above the suns, and return them safely to the ground below.  Not all of it was used for educational purposes, much of it was idle play, but even that held wonders.

"And KNO3 is just the chemical formula for saltpetre, apparently."

"Apparently?" says Wheat, after his notes have more or less caught up with this.

"'Potassium nitrate' - KNO3 - and 'saltpeter', both translate to saltpeter.  I didn't learn this language the long way, so, take it up with whatever agency is responsible for the translation if there's some sort of error, I'm just as bemused as you. I honestly expected to get pretty much no helpful knowledge out of the translation effect that got stapled on, but apparently sometimes magically-absurd nearest-neighbor translation shows you unexpected twins!  If that makes any sense.  It barely does to me, and I'm saying it, so I can't exactly blame you if you are presently confused."

"- I'm not aware of such an agency," he says helplessly.

"I wasn't actually being serious about that part, because if I could raise a complaint to whatever-it-was I would already have complained very much about there being no electricity available around here.  But I can't, so I haven't.  It was more of an expression of resignation - 'I didn't do it.'"

"Well. I'll - see where I can get on the electricity front."

"I honestly probably want to get in touch more with someone whose profession involves crafting parts precisely; there's stuff you can do with coiled wire and magnets, and then the only remaining task to generate power is figuring out heat engines, because you can just arbitrarily power those with - seemingly not overmuch personal risk, if the warnings in the textbook were about material consequences rather than burning or freezing yourself."

"...you have to touch things to troport them, if you're making things burning or freezing temperatures you will hurt yourself at least a little."

"...Does it work through your fingernails, you could probably grow them out or reinforce them, or through - no, hair would probably catch fire a bit too much.  Too oily.  Does it work through clothes?  ...I wonder if it's possible to troport more abstract qualities like specific heat - well, I'm not sure if specific heat is the term I'm looking for, but, the rate of change of temperature per unit mass.  You could probably manage something by welding an almost-no-conductivity brick to something with truly absurd thermal conductivity, then troporting the former's temperature and relying upon the latter's absurdly boosted conduction to make the heat differential do something that's actually useful.  ...Though, actually, are partial transfers a thing someone can do?"

"Skin only. Transfers are all-or-nothing."

"...that is going to be such a pain in the ass; it's going to get zeroes all over my formulas.  And then lots of loose infinities, which are even worse.  I might have to try to make partial transfers become a thing."

"Good... luck with that?"

"I hope I don't need it!  ...oh if that worked it would be so stupid but - I wonder if you could troport 'rate of heat exchange', and then if it would stick."

"I don't immediately know if that wouldn't work."

"Well, I'll have to find out sometime!"

"Have fun with that," says Wheat.

"I hope I will!  ...So, uh, do you know anyone who's good at precise crafting?"

"There's... a glassblower I get my beakers and such from?"

"...hm.  Not sure if that's the trade I'm looking for, but it certainly couldn't hurt, I suppose.  ...Oh, one question that you might know the answer to - is it possible to troport 'being a solid, liquid, or gas'?"  ...A thought occurs to her, and she shudders, visibly unnerved.  "...I hope that that only extends to, defined volumes, or maybe the immediate surface of your skin, for gases, if so, because if you could troport the entire atmosphere because you happen to be touching it...that would be.  Uh.  Very bad.  Especially depending upon the speed of troportation..."

"...Damn, now I want to measure that, but it's not like you have the timekeeping...Well, improvised measures over long enough distances might get enough resolution to tell.  ...I'll have to reverse-engineer metronomes."

"You can only troport solids."

"...Oh well.  ...I suppose that that only makes the idea I had slightly more convoluted, rather than outright impossible, anyway.  Just need to troport the melting point of ice around.  ...I wonder what a transfer of that would look like?"