« Back
Generated:
Post last updated:
everybody's looking for something
Earthling![REDACTED]-and-co. is portalsnaked to Dreamward and proceeds to !!DO MAGIC!!!!!! -- What? She's doing science instead? Bah.
Permalink Mark Unread

She's stepped outside of the house for maybe ten seconds before it pounces, not even having the decency to give warning beforehand.

At least she was taking her stuff out to the car for a vacation, so she has the essentials - to wit, her electronics and chargers.  As well as her clothes.  And her medications.  ...Oh, that might be trouble long-term, who knows whether they'll have appropriate chemosynthesis, and she doesn't know the formulae for half these things off the top of her head like some do, let alone the synthesis paths.  At least she knows the horse pee route even if that's actually somewhat medically risky.

"Well.  Whatever that was was not on my top ten list of ways to find out magic's real.  Excuse me, where am I?"

Permalink Mark Unread

The nearest person, weeding a kitchen garden and wearing a giant straw hat, looks up. "- uh, I don't really know what you're talking about but the nearest intersection is Third Street and Mouse Avenue."

Also that isn't a familiar language, coming or going.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Unfortunately I don't know where those are either.  What's the biggest geographical unit you know you're in?"  Pause.  "Annnnnnnd I appear to have learned an entirely new language in the past five minutes.  Huh.  Weird."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Kuigao?" says the gardener. "I didn't know languages could be troported, wow."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have never heard of a Kuigao, which means that I am probably from an alternate universe, if that's a country or something, because I could at least recognize most of the ones on my home - you don't have a word for [planet]?  ...What am I standing on, then?  A plane.  Huh.  That's pretty interesting and means that a lot of my physics knowledge might be wrong!  What's troporting, for that matter?  I don't think that that's why I know this language, though; sorry to disappoint you.  I'm blaming it on my sudden and very unexpected arrival.  So unless you have magic that sends people places, I kinda doubt that's why I know your language."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I'm not disappointed," the gardener assures her. "Uh, I have no idea how to help you at all. Please go away."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh, that was supposed to be read as only a rhetorical apology, but honestly thanks for not doing that, I kinda needed reassurance.  Sure, yeah, I'll git.  Any recommendations for where I should go away to?  'cause I have no idea where to get oriented.  Probably a library would do?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's one that way," says the gardener, gesturing. "Tall blue building."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks!"  To the library!  She's got setting knowledge to acquire!

Permalink Mark Unread

This city is weird.

For one thing, there aren't that many houses. There are some, but they're rare and mixed in with all the non-houses - big community-garden-type things attached to no specific dwelling, shops, parks, food carts, amphitheaters, workplaces where people are manufacturing clothes and suchlike, storage-unit type complexes. The lack of houses doesn't seem to have a relationship to the number of people out and about. It looks like everyone aged ten and up in this entire city is out and about - the only people who've stayed home, apparently, are the smaller children, of whom the visitor can observe literally none. Everything's brilliantly colored, often without obvious paint application, like they happen to be able to find pink wood and green stone that also has suitable structural properties, but the parks have normal green foliage and brown tree-trunks. There are cart-like businesses that resemble the ones selling street food except they have mice, live mice, that people are paying to hold for two seconds and then give back. A number of people have pets - dogs, cats, foxes, birds, a gerbil with wings.

There are four suns in the sky. They are different sizes and colors - the biggest one is white, the smallest blue, the middle two yellow-green and deep red. It makes the shadows kind of weird.

There is no evidence of electricity.

The library is a big blue stone building. It looks like half library, half public lounge, like it not only encourages but expects lots of people to spend all day hanging out in one of the provided chairs reading books. Some of the seating is outside, with awnings that would probably also work on rain keeping the sunshine off.

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh.  She does not have a generator on her, though she vaguely recalls seeing a solar-powered calculator in her laptop bag at some point.  Hopefully she can rig up something convince someone else to rig up something; she knows any things about generators, but not practical ways to build them from scratch.

...She's guessing that the mice thing is a magic thing, which will be resolved by inquiring at the library!

Is there a librarian?

Permalink Mark Unread

There are several, yep!

Permalink Mark Unread

Then - oh, dear.  She will apparently vacillate for several minutes!

Permalink Mark Unread

...She eventually stands at the counter and hopes the librarian talks to her first?

Permalink Mark Unread

An unoccupied librarian smiles at her! "Hello!" he says. "How can I help you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"This is going to sound absolutely insane, but I'm from another universe and I need to figure out what the rules are in this one.  Do you have any recommendations, for someone who's reasonably well-educated but wouldn't recognize a lot of jargon?  Especially in troportation."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That does sound absolutely insane, but we don't kick out people for being insane unless they damage books or bother people," replies the librarian cheerfully. "The troportation section is upstairs on the left, there's a sign; a lot of people seem to like Beyond Drowsing but that means the copies may all be in use."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh gods no, knowledge is sacred and I barely managed to talk to you, so, no worries on that front.  I'll go check, thank you."

And then she does!

What does she find in Troportation?

Permalink Mark Unread

Titles include:

Household Ports

Mouse Maintenance

Swaps vs Transfers

Got Your Nose*: a monograph on cosmetic troportation between human beings

Medical Magic

Were Traitstones Real?

Cohabitation Edge Cases: Case Studies

Dreamwards: A Modern Approach

Colors, Textures, and Tastes: A Beginner's Guide

* this is a cultural translation; the literal title is more like "I Want Your Left Earlobe"

Permalink Mark Unread

Let's see, what to pick...The Beginner's Guide, Medical Magic for long-term maintenance reasons, Got Your Nose - huh, that's an odd idiom of choice given that it's not that possible to pull the nose trick with people's ears, really - Were Traitstones Real goes in a second pile along with Cohabitation Edge Cases - and Mouse Maintenance explains the mice.  To the (second) 'read this afterwards' pile it goes.

And she will read them!  She reads very fast!

Permalink Mark Unread
If you've learned to drowse mice, that's the most important tropotation you'll ever pick up - but that doesn't mean you should stop there! Did you know you can make cabbage taste sweet, turn your clothes your favorite colors, and more? This is your guide to easy ways you can make your life sweeter...


Consult the chart on page 22-23 for information about what medical conditions you can or cannot transfer entire onto a mouse. In this chapter, we will focus on what CAN be troported entire onto a mouse, including diagnosis; how to handle the mouse afterwards; and some methodological cautions...


It is advisable to ALWAYS seek professional troportation support when performing any but the most trivial exchanges of traits between people, even cosmetic ones. Traits that are lost accidentally in the process, overwritten by a transfer instead of a swap or decoupled from one another in a careless swap, cannot be recovered!
Permalink Mark Unread

Well, then.  Definitely need to go back and get the transfer-vs.-swap book.

Permalink Mark Unread
In brief, a TRANSFER is when you troport ALL of a quality from one thing to another. It's much more dangerous than swaps. If you SWAP two objects' temperatures, one warm and one cool, then even if one is large and one is small, at the end you'll still have one warm one and one cool one. If you TRANSFER all the warmth of one object to another, then the one you take the heat from will get VERY cold - colder than anything normally gets! - and the one you put it into will get VERY hot, especially if it's smaller than the first object, maybe even melting or catching fire.
Permalink Mark Unread

"...well that's bloody obvious.  But is it conserved?  ...Hm.  Could probably improvise a calorimeter...that takes liquid and maybe pressure-measurement.  But let's see if I'm just retreading old ground, huh?"  Actually, what words does she even have for temperature-related stuff?

Permalink Mark Unread

Wait, heat's just subatomic motion, is there a privileged reference frame here - can she troport that heat directedly -

Also she can just fucking build a semi-perpetual motion machine if she can make a heat engine.

That's good, as far as power goes.  She'll just need to learn mechanics.  Hopefully they have magnets around here.  And copper.  Or silver or gold; gold's a better conductor from what she idly remembers - do they have - where's geology, anyway?

Permalink Mark Unread

Geology is over there!

Permalink Mark Unread

Do they have metals!

Permalink Mark Unread

Metals exist! They don't... mine them very much... because you can swap the materials of two objects, so you can just make a large thing into gold and a small sample of gold into not gold anymore. But this means they have plenty of all the kinds they currently know are worth having.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah she figured they'd do that.  Alright, good.  To...Reference, maybe?  Do they know what the speed of light is?  3E8 m/s in SI...and the approximate density of water at standard temperature and pressure, which she doesn't actually know off the top of her head, damn it, is 1 g/cm^3...How does gravity work, here?

Permalink Mark Unread

They don't know the speed of light, or that there is one, and they have no concept particularly analogous to gravity qua universal constant as opposed to "that way is down".

Permalink Mark Unread

"Alright then."  That's interesting and she can probably - yeah her glasses are working, light has speed.

To the front desk!

"Where can I find some scientists, if you please?  And a kids'-first-troportation how-to book, if I can take that with me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have a borrower's card?" asks the librarian. "I don't know where you go if you're looking for 'some scientists'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I do not, yet.  Can I get one?"

"...Hm, yes, that is a bit underspecified.  Who would you recommend I speak to if I was interested in going on a general ramble about alternate-universe physics in the hopes that it allows for general technological advancement?  At least enough that I can charge my electronics ever."

She waves her phone demonstratively.

Permalink Mark Unread

"....I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about. Uh, you can get a borrower's card if you and your cohabitor have lived in this city for at least a thousand decasands."

Permalink Mark Unread

...The fuck is a decasand?  SI-prefix analogues and then they go and call it a sand?

"Yeah, I do not in fact have any of that.  A cohabitor, a residence, and also having been in this universe for that long, let alone this town.  ...I have woefully out-of-date alternate universe ID?"  She sheepishly produces it.  The picture doesn't even look much like the person holding it, but it sure does have a lot of fancy features.  "...Yeah, no.  Well.  Anyway.  Where's the nearest big center-of-learning?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...ma'am if you don't have a cohabitor that is an emergency and you need to get under the dreamward as quickly as possible."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Well, fuck.  Which way?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's the largest building in the city, the red and white dome, that way." Point.

Permalink Mark Unread

Right, she will make her way thataway posthaste.

And fret about the possibility of gribblies.

Permalink Mark Unread

The big white and red dome isn't hard to find. It's fenced and windowless and guarded at the only two apertures. It has its own water tower. People are picking up and dropping off children, here, taking them to restaurants and playgrounds that surround the dome. An extremely pregnant woman is going in.

Permalink Mark Unread

She'll let the extremely pregnant woman go on ahead of her, then talk to the guards.  Or plausibly a receptionist, if they just, let her in.

"Excuse me, but I was recently dropped here from an alternate universe, so I don't know what I'm apparently in critical danger of by not so being, nor how to resolve said danger, but apparently I need to be under the dreamward for reasons?"

Permalink Mark Unread

...the guard sighs. "Do you have a cohabitor, ma'am?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Define cohabitor."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...do you speak Nlaaki, or do you need a translator, ma'am."

Permalink Mark Unread

Something intangible happens, and the way she stands, moves, speaks, is subtly different, more forceful - "You wouldn't have a translator to or from English, which is the only language I grew up knowing enough of to converse in before something dumped a vast collection of nearest-neighbor Nlaaki vocabulary in my head, unless something even more improbable than my arrival has already happened.  Though I can't rule out that it could have, because clearly it happened to me and why would I be special?  Anyway.  More pressing concerns.  What's a cohabitor.  I know the word but not the connotations as you do and it is clearly important that I know its proper meaning in this context."

Permalink Mark Unread

The guard goes a little cross-eyed with confusion, but says, "Another person with whom you share your body."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...That is a very interesting question that we cannot rightly answer unless you've a measure for souls."  She pauses, reconsiders.  "A nondestructive measure for souls.  Nonetheless, it is a recognized phenomenon of our homeworld's study of the mind that some attested the subjective experience of having multiple people in one body, in varying degrees and kinds of subjective differentiation of experience; in that model we could be said to have cohabitors, for we find modeling ourselves that way to be more accurate than not so doing.  Why are cohabitors necessary?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"So you don't fall asleep outside the dreamward."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, well, we definitely don't have any way of knowing if we can manage the technique to avert that yet.  Or if we can even troport, as of yet; it's not something our homeworld had.  Though it didn't have whatever necessitated not-sleeping, either, and it had much grander technology, so who knows who's coming out better on that tradeoff, long-term."

"...Probably still you, a certain someone who prefers to be quiet about her true name and hasn't yet settled upon one to assume already has ideas for achieving things that our homeworld could only speculate about, because troportation is, in a word, bullshit.  We will need to go inside, then, though our present wake-cycle shall last quite a while yet.  I'm not sure of the time conversion, but if..." tap, tap, tap, tap go her fingers on a convenient hard surface, "each, of, these, is a second, and sixty of those are a minute, and sixty of those are an hour, we have perhaps twelve to sixteen hours left before becoming too physically incapacitated to meaningfully focus, modulo finding something our dear shy intellectual hyperfocuses upon, which has seen us through longer periods of wakefulness but does not avert sleep."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If what you're telling me is that you aren't a citizen of Kuigao, the dreamward isn't for whoever walks up acting insane, we need that space for our children."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What I am telling you, good sir, is that I do not know if I can successfully drowse a mouse, and that is clearly a critical skill to have, here.  So I will need to learn it, and if I have not learned it within sixteen hours, I will likely be unable to not sleep.  Regardless of whether you believe me sane or not, that is definitively a potential emergency, for reasons I still don't know, and it needs prompt handling.  So if you will not help me, I require directions to someone who will."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Your parents are supposed to teach you that. But I think most likely you have a cohabitor and you'll be fine as long as you don't go lie down under a tree and drift off, okay? She'll take care of you."

Permalink Mark Unread

...Well, that was clearly the wrong sort of thing to say to her, given that her reaction is to draw up tense as a bowstring and rejoin, firmly, "What part of I don't know if I can troport physical fatigue was unclear, exactly?  We were informed, good sir, that this was an emergency, and I do not wish to subject this city to monsters from our nightmares, for example!  ...Though, realistically, what dreams we recall are more the flavor of an endless labyrinth, rather than of monsters on the hunt.  So if that is the threat..."  She shakes off the tangent, and resumes.  "Regardless.  We still don't know what the danger is.  And you are not telling us what the danger is in sleeping, nor are you directing us to someone who will tell us the danger.  Therefore, we cannot take steps to mitigate it.  So," she looks like she's holding herself back from raising her voice by sheer will alone, "are you going to help, or shall I try asking at the other gate?"

Permalink Mark Unread

He rubs one eye with his hand and reaches for a mouse. "If you fall asleep, a klaon is likely to eat you," he sighs. "Just stay awake until your cohabitor can take her turn, all right? Do you need help to write her a note that you're having trouble?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The - " She cuts herself off.  "My ability to communicate is quite functional, and you are not helping."

Nope, she's done trying to talk to this guy, back to the library it is.

"Having determined that I am enough of a cohabitor to count, I find that my problem is unsurety in our ability to troport, as it is not something that this body was born having.  I - we - would surely have noticed, prior to now.  How would you recommend I approach a crash-course to drowsing?"

Permalink Mark Unread

The librarian sighs. "How about 'Counting A Hundred Suns', children's nonfiction, over there?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Many thanks, and my apologies for the - everything; we are having quite a time of all this, and the English-to-Nlaaki slash Nlaaki-to-English lookup table that has somehow been stapled on to our brain is apparently both populated oddly and stingy with its synonyms, because it missed the word we use to describe a person who is not you but shares brainspace with you, and instead picked the word for someone who lives in your house.  Still.  The warning was needful, even if for different reasons."

Now, the troportation book, perhaps?

Permalink Mark Unread

There are a few copies of Counting A Hundred Suns and they are about how to drowse your first mouse to demonstrate that you are ready to move in with someone and be able to live outside the dreamward permanently.

Permalink Mark Unread

And...does it explain how the fuck, pardon her language, one actually goes about troporting?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yup. In lots of different metaphors in case one doesn't click right.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well.  She can test that.

And then, when it works, and she's - she hopes that they have a test page in the books, honestly, she doesn't want to meddle with her clothes - she can hope that it's extensible to mice.  She kind of wonders if she can troport the fatigue poisons from her brain into her - was it kidneys, or liver?  No, skip the middle step.  Directly to the bladder for excretion.

But that's later.  Right now she's just going to try it the bog-standard way and not pay too close attention to the fact that if it's just material properties it oughtn't work on any of the out-there stuff like fatigue or even temperature.

Permalink Mark Unread

The book does not have a designated test page. It recommends using your clothes if you're practicing with color, and further expects that everyone's clothes have a few extra bits in other colors sewn in for swapping the color around. It has no recommendations for drowsing your bladder instead of a live mouse you have conveniently on hand.

Permalink Mark Unread

She does not have that but she does have the maker's logo on her sweatshirt so it's doable at least.

Yeah, they wouldn't, this is the barest basics of troporting, whereas her thoughts are off in - yawn - advanced theory land.

Well, she needs to find a mouse and hope, then.  And hope that it doesn't cost the end user money.  She only has Earth money.

Permalink Mark Unread

Mice are available... for sale.

Permalink Mark Unread

...What about the mouse carts?

Permalink Mark Unread

It's cheaper to borrow one there, for sure. Not free, but she could conceivably find the necessary change by rummaging around.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well.  She'd best rummage, then.

Once she's tried...well.  Then it's definitely time to go back to the library again.  She has someone she ought to thank for their help.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hey, it's me again.  Thank you for the help, and furthermore, apologies for all the trouble - I know Ophelia offered hers on our collective behalf already, but I was the proximate cause of the mess.  Honestly, though...I still don't know what to do, now.  There's monsters afoot somewhere, and I'm just a budget-model scientist, not a fighter, but I still - There's stuff I know, about lots of things, even if some of it's clearly invalidated - for example, the force of gravity can't possibly be only the constant G times both masses over the distance between their centers squared, because you can't have infinite massive planes that way, but I know some of my knowledge is still accurate, and I know the process of how to determine what's not accurate about knowledge.  I want to use that to help people."

Permalink Mark Unread

The librarian blinks at her politely. "- Ophelia?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ophelia was driving when we came back in here after the guard pissed her off by not explaining shit until she'd asked him thrice, repeatedly, then asked for the rapid intro to drowsing book.  You're speaking to the person who asked about troportation the first time and then ran off in a panic when she tried to borrow a book and found out that there was a potential emergency in possibly not having any cohabitants.  Which still strikes me as odd; we can slog onwards just fine even while physical-fatigued, and that seems to be the majority of mental-fatigue sources, at least in our experience."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...so, you do have a cohabitor, Ophelia, and you.. forgot?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"There was a critical understanding failure of what a cohabitor is.  And it's technically not just her, she's just the one you met.  I wouldn't say I forgot, because - well, you can't forget someone you can feel in your brain, but it's not going to produce a particularly inaccurate world-model if you think that way, because I don't know many things a child should, for all that I know quite a few things you don't."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...are you looking for more books, at this time?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Hmm...  "...I'm not sure what the hell I'm doing, pardon my language.  So I guess what I'm looking for is advice on whether I should look for more books, or for directions to the nearest university that has laboratory facilities."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure which you should prefer, but there are books here, and a college that way, which... might have labs, though I don't know what kind of lab you want."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The college seems like a decent bet, honestly.  As much as I just enjoy reading for its own sake.  ...Thank you, again, for, well, putting up with all my me-ness."

And now!  To the college!

Permalink Mark Unread

The college is several buildings, and there's signs, which is helpful. There are students sitting outside under trees and awnings, and lectures going on in various classrooms.

Permalink Mark Unread

What are the departments, actually?

Permalink Mark Unread

They don't have a sign about that!

Permalink Mark Unread

Well then, Admissions it is.

Permalink Mark Unread

After considerable poking around, she can successfully blunder into the registrar's office. "Hello," says the registrar.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hi!  I just moved, because of various reasons, and was thinking of enrolling, but I don't know if I can transfer my class credit from my prior course of study?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- I don't think we have a system for that, no. Do you have a scholarship?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I did over there; I haven't exactly checked if I qualify here yet?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can't enroll you until I know where your funding is coming from."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, well.  The problem is that I know for a fact you won't be able to contact that school."  She rummages in her suitcase, and pulls out a university lanyard with corresponding ID card.  "It's a world away from here."

Permalink Mark Unread

The registrar blinks at the ID card. "Well, you're correct that I won't recognize it. Which does suggest that I will not be able to bill your scholarship fund."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Having established that I definitely have something that is ID-shaped, how much credibility would you give the claim that this ID is from another universe?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...none whatsoever?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"..."  Frustrated and self-disappointed noises ensue.  "I should've expected that response.  Well, what would be credible?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't really know, we don't get people claiming to be from alternate universes often enough to have a standard test."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Suppose I should've expected that too!  ...How's this for 'definitely-not-local'?"  Drivers license with fancy hologram-thing?

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, I don't think it's local, I've never seen a picture like that, but if they had things like that a few hundred sands' ride counterclockwise how would I know?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, yes, I suppose you wouldn't have the communication infrastructure, would you.  No electricity.  Uuuuuugh.  I just want to give my knowledge to actual scientists instead of merely-well-read myself.  Ride on what, by the way?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...a horse or something?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I see.  Well, hopefully I can change that sometime soon.  I hardly know much but I know anything about mech-e.  Which means plausibly making bikes instead of having to rely on horses, at least.  If I can figure out heat engines properly they'll even be self-propelled, depending upon how safe the heat transfer troportation is..."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"So what I'm hearing is that you want to invent some things, but you have no funding and cannot enroll in this school."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Also no identity that y'all'd recognize, and as far as I know I'm stuck here-ish."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh-huh."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am becoming a broken record of 'so where should I go about that, then?'.  ...How does scholarship funding even work in a - actually, how do you even have material scarcity enough that money exists?  I suppose it's the mice.  And labor-hours, and general craftspersoning, because you can't really just duplicate things by any way I've given five seconds' thought."

Permalink Mark Unread

The registrar blinks. "I don't know where you should go, or why you'd think I'd know."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think you'd have any idea more than some other person I could pester in the street, necessarily - though I did have some priors on you knowing someone I might want to talk to about potentially making stuff - but you would have more idea than I do about where anything might be here, because I don't have the foggiest idea where I'd be on a map right now, let alone what else is around."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, if you want directions to the nearest bathhouse I can do that, but I don't know where you should be asking directions to."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, damn.  Do you think you know anyone who would know?  Research-oriented professors with spare money to throw around, business contacts especially in - hm, probably casting or sculpture, what with troportation being a thing, mechanical engineering cares about fiddly detail work most often in the use cases I'm thinking about..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I... don't think the professors would thank me for referring you to them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Would it help if I had something shiny to show them?"

She has a smartphone, even if she's conserving its charge until she can recharge it...

"...Quite literally, actually.  Eheh."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...shiny?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Indeed, this small handheld box is emitting light and sound.  (And then she turns it off because she's conserving charge.)

"I don't think I can replicate this, even given a generation's lifespan, but I know some of how it was made, at the very least."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- okay, that's pretty neat," acknowledges the registrar. "I... don't know what kind of science it has to do with. ...acoustics?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nope.  Most of the theory behind this is...materials science in the form of semiconductors, electromagnetism, probably some sort of quantum subatomic stuff, precision manufacturing, and making mathematics sit up and do tricks.  Here's not anywhere near that, yet, though.  Goodness knows what'll happen when you add troportation, for that matter.  We didn't have it, back where I come from."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...so, given that you acknowledge that I'm of course not going to know what those words mostly mean, what kind of science do you think is relevant?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, that was absolutely full of jargon.  Even for my world.  I think that what I start with should be - metalwork, in the sense that what I want to do first is probably going to involve the same sort of processes as I expect that trade uses, or possibly chemistry."

Permalink Mark Unread

She gives directions to a chemistry professor's office.

Permalink Mark Unread

And she will follow the directions to that professor's office!

Permalink Mark Unread

 

He's not in!

Permalink Mark Unread

She can wait.

Permalink Mark Unread

About two hours later, in someone comes. He is surprised to find his office occupied.

Permalink Mark Unread

She stops idly humming something.

"Hello!  The registrar directed me your way.  Can I interest you in a research opportunity?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Which registrar?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...you know, I don't think that throughout the entire conversation either of us offered names.  Rather silly of me, that."  She can provide a description?

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. And she thought I'd be interested?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"She did, yeah.  The shiniest demonstration widget I have is barely tangentially your field, but..."

She shows off her phone.  "It's powered by chemical energy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Chemical energy, like - fire?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Like lightning, actually.  ...do I actually have -"

She does have disposable batteries, in her graphing calculator!

Shit, she should've demonstrated with that, instead.  Oh well.

"A simple chemical battery, as built by an industrialized civilization."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I don't believe lightning is a chemical."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It isn't.  But acids are, and the component of batteries that aren't metals, are acids."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So you have - a small amount of acid and some metal, in there, and these react in a way that... lights your rectangle?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, there's a large number of intermediary steps between the battery and the rectangle for other reasons, but making light's not that complicated, no!  If I knew what actually went into lightbulbs other than 'glass', 'vacuum' and 'some sort of high-electrical-resistance filament'...well actually, arc lamps came first and those you can do with just electricity and wire, plus a cover for safety, though they're kind of power hogs and also absurdly bright, I think."

Permalink Mark Unread

He's gotten ahold of a notebook now. "Electricity being the thing that happens when you combine the correct metal and acid? In what proportions? What should the wire be made of, if it needs to touch the acid bath?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Copper and gold are good wiring metals, and there's the terms anode and cathode that - ugh, there's got to be something about which metals go where but I don't have the periodic table...Actually let me check if it's in my calculator!"

 

And it is!

"And those are fresh batteries!  So we have plenty of time to write them down!"

Permalink Mark Unread

It transpires that they don't have the periodic table.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Of course not, you meddle with things in ways that make even starting to think about fundamental properties kind of absurd; color's a property of electron orbitals and you just change it at a whim, y'know?  ...Zinc is ringing a bell for some reason...Anyway.  I think that if you stuck copper wires in a lemon, you'd get a shock.  ...You don't have the same vegetation at all.  ...You would probably know what works, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't use troportation during experiments," he says indignantly.

Permalink Mark Unread

"You in the collective sense of 'people around here', I mean.  Place I'm from didn't have it.  I'm really curious to see what happens when we do add troportation to our list of variables, honestly."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What is the important property of a lemon?" he sighs.

Permalink Mark Unread

"It has citric acid in it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is that a particularly useful acid for the purpose?" Write write.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not as far as I know, but I don't know the commercialized sorts; it also really depends on your use-case.  Motor vehicles used lead-acid, which - by the way do you know that lead's brain-damagingly bad for you, and mercury's bad as well -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- mercury I knew, lead I didn't."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lead is unfortunately quite pernicious, and so otherwise-useful, as well.  It's really quite rude of the universe.  Sweeteners, pipes, paint, additive to fuels for some reason, sometimes it just shows up in groundwater - the fuel additive was definitely associated with statistical decreases in intelligence, our government, notoriously not fond of regulating things, passed one about obligatorily removing lead paint.  I forget precisely how or why it does the thing, but I have a vague guess of 'gets in your internal chemical supplies and then your body doesn't even know how to get rid of it', because lead poisoning never goes away, once you have it.  ...Speaking of dangers, do you have a word for radioactivity..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm... not actually aware of lead being used in any of those things. Or of 'radioactivity'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Good.  That's good.  It shouldn't be.  ...Radioactivity is a thing where sometimes the fundamental structure of big-enough atoms is unstable, so they spontaneously break down, and emit harmful byproducts, that're bad for the chemical instructions for making humans in your body, which sometimes can even make other stuff radioactive.  As well as usually leaving more and different unstable atoms behind.  Avoid pitchblende; I'm pretty sure it's one of uranium's ores, which is invariably radioactive, as well as having both radioactive and non-radioactive lead in it too.  Same goes with especially - so, light has a wavelength, like - I don't know if you even have tides, but light's.  Okay light's weird, unless you don't have quantum physics here, because it is both a wave and a particle and I think something about that explains why if you hold a prism to a sunbeam different colors spread out.  Anyway, really-really-high-frequency light, like, millions of oscillations per - small unit time I'll have to rederive somehow probably, is one of those byproducts of radioactive decay, and that's bad for biology-in-general."

"...Ironically, lead's really good at shielding people from that!  Enough that people used it for that purpose even in my time, anyway, though it might have been that other materials were in much shorter supply."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- why were other materials in shorter supply?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They couldn't do troportation, there."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- that must be ludicrously inconvenient."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, it definitely is, but we rose to the challenge.  None of what I have with me has been troported at all.  ...Except this shirt, which I changed the colors of a few times to see if troportation worked for me, now that I'm here, or if I needed to hide under the dreamward posthaste.  ...It didn't have the monsters, at least, despite...well.  People still finding reasons to do violence.  And they were mostly stupid reasons, in my opinion, but I think that line of thought is better saved for a historian or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, demons practically never make it into the city. Unless you count klaonso."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wouldn't know, what's a klaonso?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Singular is klaon. They're insubstantial, so the city walls can't keep them out, but they can't eat you so long as you're awake."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...are they perceptible?  What happens when they try eating you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They're pretty hard to see but sometimes you can make out a faint mist. It's just hard enough that you should never assume there isn't one near you, particularly since nothing's stopping them from drifting along underground. They eat souls like all demons, they're just special because they don't have to eat your body to do it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I have so many questions about first of all what a soul even is, but secondly what happens to that soulless body, I'm guessing it's unharmed but nonresponsive?  If only there was the infrastructure necessary to run a fMRI machine...Probably not in this lifetime, it'd be way too specialized.  And do the physically-eating-you monsters take bites of your soul, too, while they're at it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"All demons eat souls," repeats the chemist patiently.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Yes.  That's a given.  I mean is them grabbing a limb and chomping going to take a bit of your soul with it, if you know.  If you can know.  I'm - not sure how you came to the conclusion that souls exist, let alone that it's souls that demons target - it was a hotly debated topic whether they existed at all where I'm from, or if we were simply a sack of self-deluding chemicals - but if I assume that souls exist, then yes, sure, demons eat them.  The question is what other interactions souls have."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- souls don't come in bits. Uh, what... do you think happens... when people are mentally fatigued."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, their capacity for doing complex or creative thinking decreases temporarily, and they probably need to do something else or just take a break, but...it's mostly just that they are in fact mentally fatigued?  What happens here?  ...It's bad, isn't it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can't offload mental fatigue onto a mouse, they aren't smart enough to support it, you can only do that when you're physically tired. This is why people have cohabitors, so they can rest without sleeping."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...That does not make sense; you're still on the same brain, it's a chemical, neurological imbalance as much as it's a problem of thinking - oh.  Standard cohabitancy is troportation-induced, isn't it.  Which still...doesn't make this make sense...but makes less nonsense."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- what, how did you think it was done?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, mine's all-natural 'people sometimes spontaneously happen in my brain', and there's people who actually made guides to meditate and visualize your way into growing someone, and sometimes extra people just happen as a trauma response.  But if you have two brains per brain, somehow, that's...less of a surprise, that you can refresh fatigue by plugging the other person's thought-pattern in.  We'd just have to task-switch.  ...Wonder how that works for muscle memory, actually."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...we have one brain, two souls."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, so...Brains, their physical structure, that actually contains data.  Is in fact the person, their thoughts, their memories, as far as I know.  That's why head wounds suck.  And separately, there's the neurochemical-electrical impulses that are what day-to-day consciousness is.  Somehow, the troportation that sets up cohabitation is compacting the data stored in two brains, into one skull.  If you don't have co-consciousness...Well, I could come up with a lot of possibilities for how the fuck, but that's rather premature considering no way of checking safely exists, and neither will it anytime soon.  If you ever do operate your brain at the same time as your other half, then I'm stumped on fatigue-reduction again and confused about data-storage."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...why in the world would you assume, having come from another universe that doesn't have troportation, that 'as far as you know' is far enough to make pronouncements like that, in contrast to what I'm telling you, which is that after I've been awake for another six sands I'll be unconscious and my cohabitor will go to his job at the tavern, and that before we were cohabitors we had separate bodies brains and all?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well I didn't have a soul yesterday, and - does brain damage exist?  If getting hit on the head doesn't sometimes fuck up people's cognition that's evidence against physical brain encoding!"

...She's frustrated for the first half, and then, when she hits on 'does brain damage exist' as potential falsification, she veers into excited science mode!

"And I'm not disputing your experience of cohabitation, or that consciousness is a troportable quality!  Just and only that there's a specific thing called a soul involved, because it's underspecified and poorly-evidenced!  Make falsifiable claims!  That's how you do science!  And I've inherited knowledge from lifetimes of people doing exactly that thing, that haven't yet been outright wrong, save where they lacked information, except in the parts that they already knew didn't make any sense!"

And now she's frustrated again.

Permalink Mark Unread

Someone else shifts in.

"Excuse me.  We're going to take a minute or three - a centisand, or thereabouts - and cool off; getting that aggravated at you was profoundly uncalled for."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- okay. You're, uh, swapped in at the same time?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Something like that.  She would have said cohabiting, were she coining a term, but she isn't coining the term, so she won't.  On Earth, where we come from...if the comment Ophelia - who is not your previous interlocutor; she still needs to pick a decoy name if she's actually expecting this conversation to end up on an alternate Earth's Internet, authored by her own alternate universe hand - if the comment Ophelia heard, about having to leave notes for other halves, is indicative of cohabitation's nature, you would be described as a fully dissociated system; the only thing you share is a body.  By contrast, we're most likely what Earth called a median system; it's not inaccurate to say that all of us are present all the time - it's just that we have our own separate areas of concern.

"You were speaking with the one of us who spends the most of our time by far fretting about correctness and seeking to contribute to the accumulation and spread of knowledge, and the implication that what she had spent that much time and effort acquiring was useless in the face of, to our perception, a statement of 'indivisible, apparently-incorporeal, fundamental-to-consciousness souls exist because I said so', hit her right in the pride.  She doesn't actually have much of that, so she clings fiercely to what pride she has.

"Also, she does legitimately want to know what happens with traumatic brain injuries here; some possible outcomes would actually potentially disprove the hypothesis that brains store people-data, and, for that matter, be potentially evidentiary for the 'are brains' neural patterns merged, or in superposition, post-cohabitation' question if souls' existing ends up not being parsimonious based on the available evidence; she really wants to find that out, if any way exists to check without personally concussing someone.  None of us want to hurt anything - except monsters, and that drive is mostly Diana's alone, anyway.  She's outvoted.

"I hope that helps explain what's been happening; while we're thinking of it, might I ask your name?  You may call me Sylvia, and I'm sure that if you ask, the science lady will figure out something to call herself once she's driving again."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm Wheat. Uh, I don't know very much about brain injuries, seeing as I am a chemist. I assume they get healed off like other injuries. We're never awake at the same time," says the chemist, looking dubious and overwhelmed at the monologue.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, that's not exactly your field of expertise, our apologies.  We've never really been able to specialize knowledge-acquisition very well; almost everything is interesting to hear about.  This is probably going to be a recurring problem in hypothetical uplift plans, because - well, a certain someone -"

Permalink Mark Unread

" - Call me Mira, I suppose! - "

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, she's prone to going off on infodump tangents at the drop of a hat, and that's not just a her thing, as you've noticed."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's very conspicuous," says Wheat.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Isn't it just."  She laughs quietly, a self-deprecating chuckle.  "That's actually another of the non-normative things our brain and-or consciousness does, in addition to the spontaneous people-ing; it seeks opportunities to give or consume infodumps.  Regardless, you're not a psychologist - someone who makes a study of the ways people think, in case the profession mistranslates."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am not," Wheat agrees. "- the extra cohabitors appear spontaneously?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, there's usually - we sort of do make them up first - "

Permalink Mark Unread

"But, yes, we simply coalesce at the appropriate time and place, given the appropriate stimulus.  It's somewhat of an open question, to our attempted amateur psychology, whether this is generative, in our case, or simply assigning extant personality traits to names, faces, made-up or dreamed-up backstories...imagine a child with some imaginary friends that stuck.

"That's not totally accurate, but it is rather catchy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...have you been here long enough to know if these made-up cohabitors actually, uh, work, in the being able to leave your body awake at all times sense?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not yet, especially over the long term, but I do know that the only thing that has yet stopped me from reading an engaging book is physical fatigue kicking in.  And if that fails, well, we may as well use our spare time to get in shape.  Given the monsters, and our preferring not dying."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...get in shape?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Exercise; pardon her misuse of idiom.  We lived a rather sedentary lifestyle, and now is the best time to build new habits.  ...Though there are some things we ought to talk to a doctor about, in the medium-term, so perhaps the direct meaning isn't wrong."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well. I hope you're right about your cohabitors working well enough. What do you need a doctor for?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Some private stuff that can be solved, instead of merely continually - if successfully - mitigated by my homeworld's medical science, by troporting at it hard enough."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay. I can't recommend you a doctor if I don't know what kind of troportation you need, people specialize."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Huh, howso?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Everyone can drowse mice and do colors but only a few people can do, say, souls, or things that involve a lot of transfers from animals, or what have you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...damn, now I'm idly wondering if I can get a tail; I know my breed of human actually has the reflexes to use it still.  Just human-to-human body-feature troportation, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can get a tail. They're not very popular. Uh, do you have... someone you want the features troported from? That's not the doctor's job."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not yet.  I have only just gotten here, remember?  Though I could probably find someone, with luck.  Though I'll probably have less chances because cohabitation exists, and that's gotta include cosmetic alterations to taste, but still.  People sometimes change their minds about their desired forms."

"...I'm hoping that most of that unpopularity is the expectation of chair-related problems, honestly, because - they're useful.  Open doors with your hands full, shut doors behind you without having to spin around, just carry something extra, help yourself balance, there's room for accessories...Are there bad side effects or something?  If you can just casually smooth over whatever when you have the - because normally just cut-and-pasting a tail wouldn't work, but if it actually integrates..."

"...Curb your enthusiasm, me, there's probably a reason I haven't seen anyone photosynthesizing, yet.  ...Damn if I'm not tempted, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't actually know why tails are unpopular but I don't... think I'm aware of any animals that can open doors with theirs."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Well, yes, most wouldn't have the intellect nor scale necessary.  But a human-scale tail, on a human, would do it.  On the third, mutant hand, I should probably ask a xenografting specialist these questions; you're a chemist!  We were talking about chemistry at some point...Honestly, I don't know all that much about chemistry where it's not related to other fields I take interest in, other than that chemical fertilizers exist.  ...Oh, and gunpowder.  Sulfur, saltpetre - huh, that's a fertilizer, KNO3 - charcoal.  Goes bang when you set it on fire.  ...Most chemical fertilizers can explode, if I recall correctly.  It's probably the nitrogens.  ...I wonder if you can troport meaningfully increased crop yields, over time, by feeding your crop plants weeds' capacities to absorb nutrients and convert them into growth...And the selective breeding capabilities!  ...If they're heritable, at least.  I'm probably retreading old ground, anyway, I expect y'all have somebody who thought to use the most important tool on the most important resource, before."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Troported traits are heritable among people, at least, my kids have my eyes and the color was moved to this body rather than being here already."

Permalink Mark Unread

She is so excited by this information!

"That's a) awesome and b) holy shit I can't imagine how it's doing that and I want to find out!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're awfully excitable."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Imagine that today, you opened your eyes for the first time, and found yourself in a beautiful art gallery.  That's me, but with troportation.  Wouldn't you be excited, if you found something wonderful, powerful, new?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not really an art person but I suppose I don't know what it'd be like if I'd somehow kept my eyes closed all my life."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Yeah, it's pretty hard to imagine fundamental deprivation, I suppose.  But - isn't troportation really cool?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's... fine? It's very useful."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I suppose the shine will end up wearing off eventually, but right now?  It's very shiny.  It's - magic, y'know?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...yes, it is?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have only ever been able to imagine magic.  And now I can do magic."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm glad you're enjoying it. Uh, do you have anything else about chemistry you wanted to tell me?"

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"Which ones?"

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"'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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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.'"

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...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?"

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"...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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Good... luck with that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"Have fun with that," says Wheat.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"...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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can only troport solids."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...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?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know? I don't even know if that's a thing you can do."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I suppose we'll have to find out!  ...Anyway, yes, I would like to be introduced to the glassblower, I think."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I'm actually not sure you'll get along with her."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Hmm?  Why's that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Am I correct in thinking that you don't know anything about glassblowing, so she has no particular reason to want to meet you in the first place?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I know some things about glassblowing, but certainly not to the degree a tradesperson would.  I do think I have had a useful idea if 'can you troport melting points' pans out, though...Excuse me, can I borrow a sheet of paper, I need to make sure the logistics work.  ...Oh!  Do you have rubber?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Wheat hands her a sheet of paper. "Yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

And she has a mechanical pencil!

"...hmm, hmm hmm hmm...  ...huh, wonder if you could get partial elasticity out of something by troporting elasticity while it's already trying to stretch...  Molds equal to axes of symmetry plus one for the y-axis...and you would need fittings, probably, for the boxes..."


Twelve-Step Plan For Creating Exact Duplicates Of Arbitrary One-Part Material Objects, If (And Only If) One Can Troport Melting Points

1. Acquire a template object (or more generically craft a template, but this is beyond project scope.)

2. Acquire a detailed cast of any significantly concave surfaces (dimples in the surface are fine, a bowl is probably not fine) - if you are attempting to create something with a closed, hollow interior, I cannot help you anywhere near as much as I'd like at this time but suggest leaving a tiny hole and patching it afterwards.  (Exploration of certain properties of metals whereby sufficiently clean edges can simply fuse together may be useful.)

Sidebar: Casting Process: 

Acquire a) ice, or a solid with the melting point of ice (or other liquid-at-room-temperature objects) and b) sufficient material to fill the interior of said concave surface or fill a segment of exterior mold.

Swap the melting point of ice to your chosen mold material.

Allow the mold material to fill the concave portions of your work, one at a time / fill the segment of exterior mold, with fitted concavity, one at a time.

Resolidify the mold material, and troport the melting point back wherever you took it from.

3. Analyze the topology of your object: does it have any points where a hole bores through the material (e.g. a mug's handle)?  Prepare one additional exterior mold-case per topological hole.

4. Cast the exterior surfaces.

Sidebar: Mold Design and Shaping:


It is at approximately this point that she makes a frustrated noise and - carefully puts the sheet of paper back down, folded in half.

"Maybe if I do the thing I will be better able to explain it, because while the individual steps I would take are clear enough to me, they're proving to be quite a pain in the ass to generalize and put to the written word.  And I'm definitely kind of going to need to figure out the process; I'm going to need to make some specialized metal parts if I want to make a portable electricity generator, because you can just do it with magnets moving predictably, and it'd be a damn sight easier than hand-forging coils, chains, and cogs.  ...Though what I ought to do is just make a heat engine, if I only actually remembered the details of the How It's Made show where they explained the things off the top of my head!

"Still, I can probably make something, even if it's unlikely to reach huge efficiencies without the work of greater minds than I.

"...oh dear gods, I have almost no idea how electrical wiring works.  Fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck.  That's the sort of shit that ends up with dead bodies because your wiring shorted out and caused a fire, or someone touched it while it was live, and I don't have any electricity cheat-sheets handy as far as I know so I can't even develop it from known principles.

"...So what can I do, if I don't have textbooks?

"...First I should probably check and see if any of my other books mention things, but that's a power drain and I can't yet replenish, especially because my phone battery is lithium-ion, which is not something I even know the particular theory of...

"I can hope my calculator has something useful.  ...Let me check that."

A bit of buttonpushing ensues.

"...Well, at least it has the by-definition SI units, if not how they were defined, in the segment I just checked..."

And she pushes the buttons some more!

"...Aaaahahahahaaaa we have UNITS!  Excuse me.  I got a bit excited, there.  It's not what I was looking for, but - I have the numbers!  I have the units!  And from there I can re-derive the equations if I must, not to mention convert to and from local measuring standards!  Incidentally, standardization of parts is a great boon to any attempt to build anything.

"Huh, I wonder where the etymology for 'derive' and 'derivative' - derive, and the math term - ...oh hell, you probably don't even have calculus, do you?  Well, at least I do have a chunk of my calculus classwork in here, just out of ontological inertia... - the tendency of things to keep being things, I mean.  If you've ever read a story where the evil wizard's tower collapses when he dies that's the opposite of ontological inertia.

"Math and language aside, I can at least work out some useful things from having unit conversion tables, but that doesn't make me an electrician; also I don't have a big book of material statistics handy.  There's any amount that we can get from the periodic table, but it's not very helpful.  Certainly not for compounds and aggregates, which is most of what you use when you make stuff.

"I'll keep looking, though."

Tappity tap-poke, go her fingers.

"...If I'd known I was going to get isekaied, I would've brought a copy of Wikipedia or something..."

And then, she closes up the calculator in a practiced maneuver.

"Alright, that's all I've got, right now.  I should prooooobably get in touch with a government figure, now that there's someone who'll vouch for my not being completely 'round the bend, because I don't exactly have trade skills that work here.  I was in training to write the high-level instructions that get transformed into the low-level code that runs on the hardware that these machines use, and I never did finish NANDGame, so I'm approximately three levels of abstraction too high to build a proper computer from the ground up, let alone an Internet, because I have no idea how Hedy Lamarr invented the fundamental theorem of Wi-fi, nor do I have the actual engineering standards documents.

"Short-term plans, I'm going to need to acquire some money for actually doing the research to get from no-indoor-plumbing land to - anything resembling modern societal standard-of-living - from somebody, because while I'd damn well try to do it anyway, it'll be easier if I have a place to live and work, and food to eat.  I could probably stand to get some food and water now-ish, honestly; I ate before I arrived, but haven't since, and by my phone's clock it's been some time since then."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why would a tower coll- that's not important. Uh. Are you trying to get me to treat you to a meal or what."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You have correctly identified the fundamental absurdity of things lacking ontological inertia, if I guess how you were going to end that question.

"As for the meal: I suppose I am, if there's no way to get food or water that's not imposing on you or other friendly faces; I'm assuming that it costs money, and I don't have any trade skills, though I suppose I could pick up my - ah, no, I don't actually have my violin.  Damn.  There's that plan gone.  I really don't know how almost anything works here socially, for all that I can make some guesses from the fragments of information I have, and I don't have the usual knack for social situations that most would expect from others.  So please consider this whole line of conversation to have been approached under the largest possible cloud of self-doubt and anxiety imaginable, with absolutely no expectations whatsoever, because it in fact was and is."  She shakes her head.  "This is somehow the most terrifying part of this entire situation.  Not the monsters, not the clear violations of reality as I previously knew it, but talking to people about normal human things.  Sometimes I can't believe myself."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I really wouldn't have identified you as shy," remarks Wheat. "When my office sand is up I'll go buy food with you but I can't do that forever, I have kids and of their parents I make the most money."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I don't want to be dependent upon someone-in-particular like that anyway.  I just don't know what else to do.  What sorts of jobs do most people do around here?  I'm guessing it's significantly farming."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...this is a city, the farmers mostly don't live in the city. My cohabitor works in a tavern and my wife makes pottery and her cohabitor makes clothes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Yeah okay that communication blunder was my fault, I'm just expecting there to Be A Lot Of Farmers Per City Inhabitant, like, as a demographic; obviously they don't live here.  Pottery, huh?  ...Always kind of wanted to do handicrafts, though I imagine I've a rather romanticized view of the field.  And besides, I kind of really want to dive in to troportation.  And then there's doing scientific research and technology development, if there's anyone who'd want to throw money at that.  ...If you can mechanize farms even a little bit it's so much better for everybody, less people having to manage the dirt means more people living the lives they want to live, which is important, at least to me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If someone where you're from wanted money thrown at them would you know where to go? Would most people?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I know that a type of person called a venture capitalist exists; there's a whole production where people come to a forum and pitch their business ideas to potential investors - though particular discussion of that really ought to wait till we cover mass media; I know that the government of my country subsidizes both military and medical research, and there's even some endowments for the arts, plus the national archives are sort of a research thing if you squint...There's more steps to most of those but I know that most of the people I know, would know that those routes exist.  Of course, my social circles are probably selected for above-average intelligence and knowing-of-random-stuff, but...who pays you?  Who pays them?  I'm given to understand that scholarships exist around here somehow - and maybe, by implication, banking and the field of finance; finding out more about those is a potential avenue of inquiry into how to not starve.  It might not be the answer but I'm sure that I'd get closer than I was before.  Who funds the local library?  There are answers to these questions, available with enough looking for them.  So I ask, because I'll never know otherwise."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm paid by the college bursar and I assume she pays herself too while she's at it. Scholarships are usually rich people who want more students enrolled in this or that subject for whateve reason. I... don't think that knowing how a bank works will give you any money to put in one. The library's public like the dreamward."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Finance existing implies loans exist, and I have any marketable ideas.  Even moreso with troportation helping.  What sort of government do you have here, anyway?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh, anyone can attend the open assemblies as long as they follow the rules of order, and the assembly votes on things like who should have any more specialist position and who to kick out for monsters to eat and so on."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I...should hope that you are not kicking people out to die Just Because?  Right?  ...Anyway.  Okay.  Democracy is good."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...there's not, like, a minimum number of people they have to kick out, they do it if someone is being a relentless criminal nuisance and their cohabitor isn't successfully making them cut it out."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, that case makes sense.  Depending on values of criminal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have no idea what you have in mind but I don't personally have enough complaints about the assembly to bother showing up to tell them to their faces," Wheat shrugs.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, that's fair.  Where were we - ah, right.  Money.  Oh, and I just had an idea for generating electrical power directly - troporting electron shells and capturing the resulting potential somehow."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are... electron shells... solids that you can touch?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They're a property of touchable solids.  And every other form of matter that exists around here, by my best guess, except maybe the suns' interiors.  Those could be plasma, or just some weird magic thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, if you get it working and can demonstrate cool things I'm sure that will get some attention."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hopefully.  I'm not actually sure of the mechanics of electrical motors, is the annoying thing, but I do have some miscellaneous ideas that should be workable.  Introducing the modern bicycle, maybe.  Definitely seeing if I can introduce indoor plumbing and air conditioning.  ...could probably make a water heater if I tried, for that matter...mmm."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You seem to have... too many projects."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's the ADHD.  And the number of seemingly easy-ish interventions, but mostly the ADHD.  My brain is just Like This when it finds exciting things."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It seems to me like it would be better if you reined that in."

Permalink Mark Unread

"When I've actually established myself enough to have priorities, I'm pretty sure it basically will, but when it's all just ideas?  My brain goes wild."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...if you say so." He looks at an hourglass in his window. "Office sand's almost over, do you eat normal things?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think I do?  ...I'll probably have to test that.  Damn.  What was that procedure...Though honestly I don't give the idea that somehow I can breathe your air and recognize you as human and translate chemical names but can't eat your food much credence.  ...Not really a soup fan, and I just don't drink alcoholic beverages, but those are preferences, rather than allergies."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wasn't going to treat you to drinks," he assures her, and he flips over another, larger hourglass and shows her to a cart that sells wraps.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I just don't know what your societal alcohol norms are yet so I'm being cautious."

Wraps are good.  ...How's their food handling standards, incidentally?  She might want to nuke it, just to be sure.

Permalink Mark Unread

The cart guy is not washing his hands and his mouse cage hasn't been cleaned out in a while.

Permalink Mark Unread

Upon processing this, she looks forlornly at the wrap, then tries to calculate some things.  "...okay, nevermind, found my first project: public sanitation.  Don't leave poop near food, that's just asking for trouble!  It smells bad for a reason, for fuck's sake!  And people should wash their damn hands before doing food stuff!  Nobody wants to eat dirt!  ...Okay some people want to eat dirt sometimes but that's in and of itself a medical condition indicating severe nutrient deficiencies, leaving aside the -- fucking goddammit you totally don't have anything resembling germ theory around here do you, I'll be lucky if you have penicillin.  Or indeed even the same general bacterial species, because it's not like I brought cultures with me...Right.  Boil anything you drink before drinking it, that kills off most of the stuff that makes you sick."

"Now please keep an eye on me while I do something kind of stupid to make sure the food doesn't kill me.  ...Probably doesn't kill me.  I'm not sure about whether food poisoning goes away if you heat the food up afterwards, but honestly I kinda doubt it does, so, fuck."

At which point she uses the many dangly zippers on her suitcase as heat sources, to heat her wrap until it's over 160°F.

"Ow.  Ow.  Ow.  Fucking ow.  I do not like this, and I like the alternative options even less.  Foodborne illness is bad!  Fuck..."

At least it was only a few fingers exposed to Really-Fucking-Cold for approximately no time, but...fuck.  She does not like this.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"If we get sick, we can... stop. Being sick," says Wheat, slowly.

The cart owner is giving her a weird look. "Wash my hands in what? We're in the street!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Bet you could fit a tiny hand-pump - well, foot-pump - sink-and-reservoir in the cart somewhere, use it before shift-start.  Even washing just with water would help.  And honestly, I can't hold it against you; it took forever for the place I'm from to seriously notice public health problems and start making public health solutions happen.  I'm a long way from home right now."  And the actually useful advice delivered, she has a rant to get wrapped up in!  "But apparently, instead of mitigating the cause, somehow y'all troport away the fucking effects; I give up on attempting any logic whatsoever about troportation, it just does whatever for reasons.  Okay I can probably reason about troporting materials but the internal logic of biotroportation just really kind of isn't.  What was I expecting?  When you can take a person, take another person, and stick them in a metaphorical blender that somehow nonetheless enforces a strict, stark separation between their consciousnesses that's apparently mission-critical to awakeness, there are no fucking rules!  I give up!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Please do excuse her; she means well, but expresses it poorly.  This is a rather decent wrap, even by the absurd standards of back home."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They're conscious at the same time," Wheat mutters to the cart owner, ushering her away from the cart. "And very strange. I'm sorry."

"Money's money," shrugs the cart guy, though he's inspecting the coins a bit minutely.

Permalink Mark Unread

The 'and very strange' line prompts a wry snort from probably-Ophelia.  "Yes, that we most certainly are.  My apologies for the - dramatics, once again."

Annnnd exit stage left.

"She is quite incensed at the temerity of the world to fail to make sense, it seems.  And wondering how the implications of this nonsense impact troportations of metamorphic rock e.g. granite."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not a geologist."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We're aware, and were not expecting knowledge regardless; the problem - or, the confusion - stretches wider than rocks alone, but metamorphic rocks were the first thing we thought of when we went searching for 'visibly heterogenous material, made of inclusions, that is still The Same Substance'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm - as I am so often - not really following you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I will try to explain more thoroughly; it seems that there is almost a consistent flaw in transmission between the local style of communication and our own patterns of thought.

"Where we are from, and we would not know for sure without a microscope but can certainly check with a glassmaker's assistance - oh, do remind us about...what was the name of it...something about floating molten glass atop a dense liquid to make particularly sheer panels - regardless, with a microscope, we can confirm that cellular biology as we understand its nature hasn't suddenly been translated, or find out that it has, which would be interesting but also frustrate our dear researcher because that's more she must throw out...

"Anyway.  The thing about troporting disease, is that it is like touching this wrap, and troporting out specifically the lettuce.  The lettuce is in a sense its own entire set of objects, as diseases are their own incredibly tiny organisms, as the flecks of granite are their own tiny crushed-together rocks, and yet, at least one is somehow troportable if it is within a delicious burrito, which does not, to us, make sense - we are given to understand that partial troportation is simply an impossibility, the way it has been explained, and troporting only a subset of material is partial troportation.  For example, touching granite, and then rearranging the fragment patterns.

"This does not even delve into the question of if troporting 'is granite' to some intermediaries and back again will preserve the flecking patterns somehow; that speaks to troportation having a memory if so, and plausibly true-random generation if not."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, those sound like things you can do your own experiments on - not the thing with the glass, but I still really think you won't get along with the glassblower I use -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We could write down instructions, rather than meet in person.  That also generates a record, which we prefer to have, especially in matters of business."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That might work."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then, given the opportunity, we'll certainly try doing so.  ...Do you know any troportation researchers, speaking of troportation research?  And - hm.  We're quite curious, but equally wish to avoid prying, into why you expect us to not get along with your glassblower."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Doesn't like it when people don't get to the point and then stop talking. The university has some troportation research but I don't personally know the folks."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ahh.  Yes, she likely wouldn't enjoy a full nerd ramble.  If we speak in person, I would suggest requesting either Diana or Sylvia as intermediary slash interlocutor; both trend towards goal-focused curtness."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That might work, I don't have your whole cast of characters in there down to be sure."

Permalink Mark Unread

The 'cast of characters' comment prompts a small smile, as if she's laughing at a private joke.  "We'll keep it in mind, on our end."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have... any mice?" Wheat asks, after a silence.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...We do not, no.  It is likely that we should acquire some, or equivalent drowsing-fodder.  ...The animal welfare people back home would pitch a fit about the mice, regardless of medical necessity.  I'm given to understand that they need a bit more space than being kept in pockets or in desk-top cages would provide, and have other care needs if you desire they have happiness, though one imagines that there's been significant selective breeding pressure.  Still, that's something for later."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I'm not even going to ask," says Wheat. "I can give you a couple and lend you my travel cage, and hopefully that'll tide you over till they've had babies you can use, but drowse them as little as you can get away with while staying awake to start, okay? Usually you want to rotate among more than two, they need to sleep for themselves as well as you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Indeed.  How often do most people drowse their mice, anyway?  If I analogize sands to hours, I'm still good for - ...hmm, when did I...Before I went university-wards, and then that was about three before you, and your office sand was one..."

"At least eight hours more, I think.  Plausibly twelve or more if I push for it, especially if I find something interesting.  So about six sands.  Do you have a care guide?  I do want to make sure my mice are appropriately fed."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mice will eat troported food, if you save the last crumb of your wrap there and swap it - or, uh, let me do it, it's slightly more complicated than swapping sizes - with a rock or whatever, you can leave that in with them and they'll eat that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You've got to make sure that you focus on the actual nutritive qualities, I presume, because troportation just bashes reality into the shape you want until reality gives, and there's less metaphorical force required for 'rock that behaves like food' than there is for 'rock-sized food item', am I right?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know what metaphorical force means, but yeah, there's several steps to make sure the nutrition comes across. It's not tasty but mice aren't picky."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's not supposed to mean anything in particular, just be something that helps with visualizing what I'm imagining.  In this case, trying to - ball up fabric so it fits in a basket, or something similar.  What are those steps, incidentally?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think if you try to do it yourself you'll wind up with a weird deficiency, I took a class on it and I remember the checklist but not how to teach it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...The more I learn about troportation, the less I understand about troportation."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds like a problem," says Wheat, reaching into a junk heap that appears to be left out for just this purpose and turning a shard of glass into a chunk of bread with the last crumb of his wrap. He walks her back to his office and pulls a couple mice out of the cage under the desk and finds his travel cage to put a male and a female into for her with the bread.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm sure I'll have my understanding catch up to my knowledge eventually, but it's rather disconcerting.

"...It's just occurred to me that I have no idea how one teaches troportation.  Can you, like, metaphysically hover over someone's shoulder and watch them?  Or check their work somehow?"

She'll take the cage.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...no, not really."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...well, that's certainly a thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess." He fills the water bottle in the mouse cage. "Well. I have a class to teach. Good luck."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And to you as well."

She may as well head back to the library, then, and see if the troportation section can resolve her abject bemusement at its general methodology.

Permalink Mark Unread

The troportation section thinks she's picking it up pretty quickly, at least out of a reference class of five year olds.

Permalink Mark Unread

She has lots of experience with puzzle games, good memory, and a strong kinesthetic sense; this probably helps.

Nonetheless, she is still confused, in that she continues to fail to build accurate models of troportation's rules; has anyone done that?

Permalink Mark Unread

There are lots of rules! Solid objects only, you have to touch them with bare skin, that sort of thing. There is absolutely not secretly a physicist who wrote a treatise about how it interacts with electrons, though.

Permalink Mark Unread

No, no, not like that; she's not looking for limitations on how one can troport.  Those are reasonably straightforward.  She's trying to figure out if there's rules about what you can troport.

Permalink Mark Unread

Most people can drowse and sicken/injure mice to get themselves more awake and healthy; the principle transfers straightforwardly to other animals but mice are convenient. Temperatures, flavors, sizes, materials, those all work. It's specialized work to do one soul into another body, or complicated cosmetic features, both because it's difficult to finesse at all and because the consequences of fucking it up are so potentially awful. Making dreamwards is incredibly difficult and involves transferring the klaon-slowing properties of certain materials that slightly stall klaonso attempting to float through them into a single thing, hundreds of times, till you have enough of it that it not only possesses this property itself but also radiates it outward to a certain radius.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oooh, what materials have those properties?  -- No, no, that's still not answering her actual question.

Are there concrete examples of traits that just can't be troported despite significant effort trying?

Permalink Mark Unread

Sure. You can't pick locks by swapping their lockedness with an open one you bring along. You can't make dead things alive. You can't swap "stolen-ness" or anything similar. You can't take the swiftness of a horse or the flight of a bird, though there are legends about being able to manage that long long ago, possibly by also appropriating some limbs.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...well, duh, that's a gross material arrangement problem..."

Can you troport relative position like you...seem to be able to troport scale somehow?

"...wonder if you could swap a paraplegic into - oh, no, not touching that ethics question with a ten-foot pole.  And you can probably just troport that off onto a mouse or something anyway."

"...well, yeah, those are clearly consequences of underlying physics.  Wonder if you could traitsteal from demons, though, they're bullshit-magicium."

Say, wasn't there a book about traitstones theoretically having existed?

 

Also: What happens if you troport a trait onto something, and then break it apart?

Permalink Mark Unread

You cannot troport positions, though with enough finesse if you are making something bigger you can decide in which directions it gets bigger. (If you are bad at this it might not work, or try to get bigger in the direction of you and break your finger.)

Traitstones are legendary, like getting swiftness or flight off horses or birds; the idea was that there were special stones of some kind which could hold a trait you found somewhere and wanted to save for later, and then be used as a source of any traits you put in the stone, while itself remaining a conveniently portable small object. It is theorized that maybe this had to do with some advanced kind of transfer, sort of like the kind you do with souls, which is already pretty special as transfers go.

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh, traitstones are not exactly what she expected.  And kind of odd, really.  Well, if they existed they are either bullshit-magic, or replicable.

She has some ideas, if troporting troportability works.

Has anyone managed to hold down a demon long enough to see if they could get traits from it?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yup. Demons are basically animals that don't die of starvation; there are some in the zoo.

Permalink Mark Unread

...that's - what - huh?

...can humans do the not-dying-of-starvation thing, too?

Permalink Mark Unread

Someone tried it! They started madly biting people, presumably trying to eat their souls, and had to be put down.

Permalink Mark Unread

...what, and they didn't try un-doing it?

That's honestly the weirdest thing she's seen so far.

Anyway: Do demons have any other weird integral traits that don't cause weird biteyness?  She's curious.

Permalink Mark Unread

They don't appear to reproduce; this has been successfully troported, actually, but birth control is apparently discouraged in this society so it's not something you can get zoo employee help with. They'll eat each other, any two kinds of demon will try it, but no one appears to have tried to grab that one. Some of them have cool natural weapons but these are not obviously better than those on normal animals.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Well, she doesn't want to have spawn of her loins overmuch at this moment, so maybe she'll see if she can, if she can find the time.  And the zoo.

Anyway, back to research: Klaon-proof materials and their relevant properties?

Permalink Mark Unread

Materials are basically not klaon-proof. Some of them - it's an idiosyncratic set including living wood, running water (not usable as a troportation source but mentioned as a member of the category), fossils, glaciers, spiderwebs, and wool fabric - very, very slightly, but detectably, slow down a klaon on the move that someone's been tracking.

Permalink Mark Unread

...weeeeeiiiirrrrddddd.  It's not static electricity...how do they even have fossils?  And somehow dead wood doesn't while living wood does?  That's getting to be soul-evidence, though it could be the same thing that makes running water do the klaon-slowing thing.

...Now she wants spinnerets, too.

...Okay, she has a theory, because water is semi-ionized and wool and spiderweb are staticky, and it fits with 'klaons are some sort of electrical-activity monster', but she can't get too set in that hypothesis.  That's not how science works.

Anyway, if klaons really don't like Tesla coils...that's evidence.

She'll find out eventually, probably.

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're gonna put those back when you're done," says a voice behind her, "right?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's the plan, at least.  Demons are really fucking weird, by the way.  And so are the things that repel or impede klaons, but at least there I have some clue what might be happening.  I wonder what happens if a klaon's struck by lightning?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Klaonso."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sorry, yes, klaonso, not klaons.  Second language problems, where I'm from you can just stick an s on most things and call it pluralized.  Who're you, by the way?"  She finally remembered to ask someone's name at the beginning of the conversation!

Permalink Mark Unread

"Juniper. If you don't shelve all those books it's my job, I'm watching you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes ma'am," she says, tossing off a mini-salute.  She has been putting most of the ones she's not actively consulting back, but that's no reason to not please the pretty lady.  "It's funny, libraries back home actively don't want the patrons re-shelving things because then it'll get the organization system messed up.  But if I can save you a few minutes, I'm up for it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Just put them back where you found them, it isn't hard!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"If your memory is sufficient to the task, certainly, and your organization system isn't very strict.  ...Fun fact, every time you remember something, you are also rewriting the contents of that memory."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...where'd you read that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Several studies on neurology; people cross-referenced memory with records and found that memory was a lot more fickle.  If I had a way of accessing the source from here I could show you the pop-sci article that's not all jargon that my mind jumped to, but I don't, yet.  ...I wonder if they even transcribed it, NPR isn't the best at turning radio into text...I can remember the example and the voice but not the name, show, or year.  It's really quite annoying that my brain drops all the actual identifying attributes of sources at the drop of a hat but remembers everything else."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"You'd better put all those books back when you're done, weirdo," says Juniper, and she walks away.

Permalink Mark Unread

Bwah.

She pouts at the universe a bit, and - yeah, she kind of thinks she's about done with the books anyway.  May as well put 'em back.  Next stop, medical troportation, maybe?

...Now that she's thinking about it, what the hell happens if you try to troport "has claws" on to a plank of wood or a tree or something?

Permalink Mark Unread

Usually doesn't work; there aren't underlying structures suited to having claws.

Permalink Mark Unread

...usually doesn't work?  She is now tempted to see if she can get chloroplasts.

Well, she already was, but now is more tempted than before.

Permalink Mark Unread

If you carve a tree into a claw-having shape and you're very good at troportation you can get the keratin from a clawed animal on there in the claw loation.

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh, neat.  What happens with the corresponding wood?

Permalink Mark Unread

Winds up on the animal, of course. Usually not very pleasant for the animal, you shouldn't do this if you want to keep the critter.

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh.  Does it actually work, though?  (Distant thoughts of grassy hair drift through her mind.)

Permalink Mark Unread

The details of the functionality of tree claws are not included in this volume.

Permalink Mark Unread

Okay, but the tissue didn't fall off or anything, right?

Permalink Mark Unread

Not in the successful cases!

Permalink Mark Unread

Okay, she definitely wants to try going kind of absurdly transhuman if she can find someone who'll actually do the troportation.

...Can you troport yourself?

Permalink Mark Unread

Sure, though it's usually recommended to go to a professional who can see what they're doing better.

Permalink Mark Unread

What is this see what they're doing?!  Wheat all but said "seeing what you're doing" is basically a lie she's telling herself as she petitions the troportation god for miracles!  But seriously, is there a relevant sense attached beyond the semi-proprioceptive one?

Permalink Mark Unread

No, there is not a sense involved, but if you want something especially fine-grained (the shininess but not the color of someone's hair, say) it's better to keep a visual on it so you can form the correct intention.

Permalink Mark Unread

Tell her more about "intention", would you kindly?

Permalink Mark Unread

The set of books she has here doesn't seem to have anything answering this question in a way that she finds intuitively satisfying.

Permalink Mark Unread

...do they have examples of intention, desired effect, output, etcetera?  Someone has to have been bored enough to try troporting the same trait in as many different ways as they could think of and written down the results at some point, surely!

 

...They totally don't, but she's allowed to dream.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah no, they seem to have the idea that there's a thing you're trying to do and you do it more or less correctly depending on skill and whether you're being careful and stuff but do not have the thing she seeks.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well she'll just have to introduce them to the Heterodyne Corollary to Clarke's Third Law herself, then!  When she has actual resources to experiment with, and the sum total of her worldly possessions isn't the contents of her suitcase.

...At least she has her suitcase.

 

Alright, back to testing the limits of troportation secondhand:

What happens if you troport inorganic materials in as the output of organic processes, e.g. trying to give someone metal fingernails?

What happens if you troport a wet sponge, or clay?  Both of those hold water.  What about something like sand, wet or dry?  Is pitch officially a liquid according to troportation science?  What happens if you're mistaken about what you're trying to troport, e.g. you have a solid object but are informed that it is hollow and attempt to troport a material onto it, or have a filled container that you're told is a single solid object and material-swap that?

Permalink Mark Unread

You can change the materials of your hair or fingernails (though you have to do all your hair individually) but it won't grow in that way and will soon fall out. You can get moisture out of something moist like a sponge or a fruit. Sand has the all of it individually problem. No mentions of pitch in these books. The experiments listed also do not appear.

Permalink Mark Unread

...but...moisture is a liquid!?!  Troportation, whyyy...

Permalink Mark Unread

None of the books has a chapter entitled "whyyy".

Permalink Mark Unread

One of these days, she is going to troport the moistness of a frozen sponge into a rock.  It won't really elucidate anything, but it might make her feel better.

Permalink Mark Unread

Right, well, enough about that for now.  There's something else she should probably look into: Plate tectonics, geography, and seismology.  Namely, whether those things exist.

Permalink Mark Unread

Volcanoes exist. Geography exists in the sense that there are maps. Earthquakes have happened ever but appear tremendously rare. No sign of plate tectonics.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Well, mountains, and earthquakes ever happening, imply the existence of any amount of plate tectonics, but yes.  That makes sense.

 

...Has anyone ever tried doing the dreamward thing by excavating down to stone and warding that?

Permalink Mark Unread

No. Troportation about large geographical features does not work out of legend.

Permalink Mark Unread

...why not?  They're still objects!  Well, if the stone goes on to infinity, maybe not, but...huh.  What's the biggest thing that's successfully been troported?

Permalink Mark Unread

Elephants, buildings, glaciers, depending on your reference class.

Also she's been in here with these books for a long time now.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Yawn.  Okay, time to drowse a mouse, she supposes.  What time is it?  ...Do they even have a daylike time unit here?  She needs to invent pendulum clocks sometime soon.

Permalink Mark Unread

There are hourglasses around the library, and Juniper's job appears to include occasionally swinging through, flipping them over, changing the color of the glass, and moving on to the next one.

Drowsing a mouse makes her more physically awake. The mouse goes to sleep.

Permalink Mark Unread

She gives the mouse a little pet, if - yeah, this is the boy mouse, he - likes the idea of Strange Human touching him.  Because he's a good and helpful mouse, yes he is.

...They need timekeeping that's better than that, that's not dependent upon such a fickle thing as human memory to keep ticking.

She knows the rough mechanics of pendulum clocks.

She has time, she has focus, she has paper, pencil, and a soundtrack... Tick, tock, it's clockmaking time.

Really, the hardest part is going to be making the pendulum ratchet the gears forwards reliably, without losing impractical amounts of momentum, but that's why the end of the pendulum is heavy and the gears are light, she supposes.  And she could cold-cast the gears, too, to check her work on that whole process.

Oh, hey, there's an idea, while she's thinking about troportation: she could make frictionless ball bearings.

Troporting weight seems less wise to just up and do.

...Incidentally, what happens if you alter a metal's properties, then use it in an alloy?

Permalink Mark Unread

You can get some really neat special alloys that way. They use them all the time.

Permalink Mark Unread

Neat!  That's good, they're actually leveraging troportation properly.  She's not alone.

Anyway, back to clockwork.

Are there any specific measures of longer times than a sand to take into account, for ease of use, if she just starts inventing terminology?  Are there specific shorter times?

Permalink Mark Unread

Sometimes people talk about "a breath" or "a grain", but this doesn't appear to be a specific amount of time, just idioms for "a moment". People talk about multiples of sands. Sometimes people talk about a sleep but this has dialect and context differences in whether it means five sands (the amount of time children sleep when they sleep), twelve sands (the amount of time between children's bedtimes), or six sands (the amount of time an adult is normally fronting at a stretch).

Permalink Mark Unread

Alright, she'll carry over seconds and minutes, then build a 24-hour (or twelve sands) clock and call that one cycle.  Well, she'll probably end up calling it a day.  Maybe she'll call the six sands unit a cycle, that'd make sense.

Permalink Mark Unread

The books have no comment on this ambition.

Permalink Mark Unread

...right.

Time to go find some parts, she supposes.

Watchmakers evolved from jewelers, she thinks...

After any amount of agonizing, because the guy she talked to before is...oh, huh.  Has she been reading and writing for that long already?

"If I was looking for someone who did precise work with metals, is there anyone you'd recommend?  Preferably someone," she wibbles a hand, "ambitious?  There's better timekeeping than glasses full of sand for the making."

Permalink Mark Unread

The librarian currently behind the desk furrows her brow. "I don't... often need precise work with metals done... so no, sorry."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Alas.  How do you get your books copied, then?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We hire it out to a printer, but I think they carve their type out of wood and then just turn it into metal afterwards."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That would make sense, wouldn't it.  ...boy, am I glad you have the printing press.  Don't know what I'd do if there just weren't books.  Most likely, be dangerously bored, or try and invent the thing myself.  You mind pointing me at your printer, then?  I'm looking to turn a design into a reality, and I bet they know how, and if they don't, then they certainly know who would."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh. Sure. The printer's at Seventh and Diagonal."

Permalink Mark Unread

Right.  Double-checking the map, and then...off to the printer!

Permalink Mark Unread

It's a pretty long walk, but there's lots of neat decorations to look at - stained glass and mosaics and sculptures that look like they were probably originally created in a more forgiving medium.

Permalink Mark Unread

She's got pretty good endurance, walking, for a modern desk plant of a girl.  Especially when she's on a mission.

The pretty art and sculpture is honestly rather distracting, speaking of mission focus, but she does have a quest, and the art will be there tomorrow and the days after.  She can come back later.

Permalink Mark Unread

The printer is nestled between a storage unit and a grocery store, across the street from some kind of shared kitchen situation where you can rent a stove and cooking tools.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh wow that's neat -

Permalink Mark Unread

Gawk and ponder sociological implications later, talk about clockwork now.

She knocks on the door (or otherwise enters the printer's workshop).

Permalink Mark Unread

"Door's open!" a voice calls from inside.

Permalink Mark Unread

Then she will indeed open it.  What does she see inside?

Permalink Mark Unread

Printing presses, several of them, and racks of type, and a person whittling away at a letter. "Hello there!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hello, hello.  You must be the printer, then?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"One of them, have you got something you want run off a few times?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not exactly, no; my cohabitor is interested in how the presses and the type get made.  Thinks that printers might have the skillset to build some of the projects she's working on realizing, and that if you don't, you'd know who would.  ...Also, she thinks you could save a lot of effort by troporting the malleability of clay onto your chosen blank and then, funnily enough, pressing it into a mold taken of your type.  Instead of whittling individual pieces each time you need another."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, we're open all sands if she wants to come by when she wakes up and talk to my co-worker."

Permalink Mark Unread

"She's listening right now, as it happens; I'm just keeping her on task instead of wandering off into a research paper on the sociological and economic implications - and presumed cultural effects - of adults not ever sleeping, compared to back home.  For example.

"She's very distractible."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- she's listening? I don't think I understand."

Permalink Mark Unread

"She's awake, for most values of awake; she's just presently not holding the metaphorical reins.  ...Maybe we should print up an explainer.  We'd just need some time to develop the actual text.  ...And, presumably, funds," she sighs.  "We don't exactly have amounts of local money worth mentioning, at the moment."  (Though it's not like she stopped picking up loose change.)

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I'm not super busy right now, all the drying racks are covered in pages and I won't start the next batch till there's space for them, if you want to ask - her - questions now."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's more that she has plans, and wants to share them with someone who might find them interesting.  Keeping time with a single glass of sand is...rather prone to human failure, and she has just spent the last sand or so figuring out a tentative design for taking humans flipping an 'hour'glass - excuse me.  Second language problems.  She has just spent the last sand or so figuring out the design for a longer-functioning mechanical timekeeper, and does so want to go on about it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't really have any expertise in timekeeping, I'm more here in my capacity as a carver."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you know what there is on the market, if it's not just...

"Hourglasses all the way down, she says to say, making a literary reference that it's quite likely no-one on this plane will get, because she's very herself.

"But honestly, we're certainly interested in the whittling; we've had quite a few ideas for how to replicate arbitrary single parts, but very few ideas as regards making parts to begin with.

"If only we had a set of encyclopedias from home on hand.  Then we'd actually have any clue what a lathe is, and why it's such an important machine slash tool for 'industrializing' - I mean, building better tools.

"...Should check the dictionary later."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I don't think I'm a good person to talk to about this."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure.  We weren't expecting you to.  Do you know who would be?  If anyone is."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...honestly it sounded to me like you were having more fun talking to your cohabitor than you would talking to anyone else."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...You're not wrong, but the problem is that our dreams will only ever be just that, if we can't actually organize the making of them.

"And to do that, we're going to need people, or at the very least stuff."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So you're looking for... people... to give you stuff?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's...not a totally wrong impression, even if it misses most of the nuance that my counterpart would insist upon.  I'm looking for -

"No, A- Mira, I am not quoting Archimedes at the print shop guy, that saying doesn't even make sense on an infinite plane!

"...Oh fine.

"We're looking for a metaphorical lever and a place to stand, with which to move the world."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think maybe you should take her suggestions less," volunteers the print shop person.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I was, unfortunately, outvoted on that matter by local appreciators of dramatics.  But seriously, what we're looking for is...well, leverage.  We can't - or at least don't know how to - set up shop somewhere and start building things.  ...We're rather foreign, if you haven't noticed."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, uh, I did notice. I've never met anyone half so foreign."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We're a bit of an odd duck even back home," she just a bit forcedly laughs off the awkward, "so it might be a little of that, too.

"Anyway.  If you're interested in cutting down on your type-whittling needs, we still do have that idea."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not, really, since that's what they hired me for and if they stopped doing it this way I'd have to find a new job."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...That does make sense, but uh.  I don't think that innovation's going to not-happen unless your opinion is shared by all the print shops here."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay but that doesn't mean I want to help?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...If you're helping, you'll definitely have a job lined up.  Though it's not like there won't be crafting jobs; someone has to make the blanks.  ...not blanks, but the - dies?  No, that's another thing, but - there's still going to be a market for people making things, is what I mean."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have money?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have some loose change, but, as I said, no significant funds to speak of.  ...wait, how the fuck does whoever mints this do it in a way where someone with half an idea and too much time on their hands can't just forge it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, I could carve a wooden coin and then turn it into electrum, but I'd need the electrum to start with, and the only electrum I have is coins. I could cut a coin in half and carve two coins and turn both of them into electrum but they'd be too heavy. I could try making it the right weight with something else but then it'd float the wrong way up or something. I don't know what-all they do, just that it's not actually worth anyone's time to counterfeit them if they're that good at troportation in the first place."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh, that's interesting.  ...damn, now I'm going to be wondering what they actually do for my entire life.  Unless they wrote it down and put it in the library, I suppose, but I bet they keep at least one step completely secret except for whoever does it - and maybe even from them - because that's what I'd do if I were trying to make counterfeiting-proof currency under the constraints of troportation's continued existence.  Security through obscurity's better than nothing when nothing's what you've got.  Though then the question is how the fuck merchants are supposed to spot the more subtle errors, because that's where the problem actually needs to be stopped.  After a counterfeit's been passed, the damage is basically done."

She catches herself, and stops.

"But you probably don't care all that much about that, so please excuse my ramble."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not really sure why you're still here, to be honest, but you're not slowing me down much." She's working on a new letter now.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Got nowhere better to be, I suppose.  Could read up on local civics but I doubt...oh, there's a business opportunity...  ...or maybe not, you don't really have the sort of bustle and breadth of communications that even supports proper journalism, and I've still not figured out how to make an electrical engine work, even if I can probably bodge something together, but....  Dammit, I want to make something already, rather than just rattle around the city like a loose screw and hope knowledge falls out of my skull that's convenient for actual craftspeople to implement in ways I can't.  Maybe I should corner the market on educational primers.  I've got the printing technique, at least in broad strokes, and the first industrialized profession was weaving.  Though admittedly I'm only guessing that sewing - no, it's definitely glue that's part of - and of course having an example of good bookbinding technique on me would be too convenient, so I don't, and - "

She remembers something, and just, guffaws.

"Well, I'll have to hope the series where an industrial-age woman with an absurd love of books is reincarnated into a world with almost no books and proceeds to build the toolchain to make books from scratch, despite being in not-a-physical-book format, proves helpful, if I get into that!"  Once she's picked herself up off the floor, she continues, "Excuse me, I just - the dramatic irony of this precise occurrence is just, so much."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"I feel kind of superfluous to the conversation you and your cohabitor are having," remarks the printer.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...But I'm literally talking to you, or I wouldn't have said all that out loud?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes," she says, "but I don't know what you're getting out of saying it out loud in a room that has me in it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I never did actually get to the part where I know, and-or can readily figure out...pretty much everything you'd need but the ink handling, to print a whole lot of things a whole lot faster, did I.  And surely there has to be a faster way to resolve this," she gestures at the drying racks, "than drying racks - or ways to just make those dry faster - even if I can't immediately think of proven solutions.  They had double-sided printing working fine, back home.  You interested in figuring out how?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Go ahead and publish a book on it and I'll take a look."

Permalink Mark Unread

"With what fucking paper?  But you must be joking, if you think I need an entire book to lay out technical specifications!"

Let's see.  Pencil, piece of scrap paper, sturdy surface...

Annnd draw.

It is, she dares say, not bad.  She indulges herself with a little bit of shading, even.

That said, it's not all art; she includes math about the appropriate size of rollers vis-a-vis sheet height (rollers should be x lengths divided by 3.14(15), where x is page height including margins...), she includes notes about gear ratios, she sketches a dummy piece-of-type to fit into the print-rollers, she shows a safety bar on the guillotine that cuts the paper into individual sheets...

She even gets her calculator out to do some unit conversions and figure out material tolerances, assuming no troportation assistance.

"I've never built one of these myself, but with what we have on hand, this is how I'd try to."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- what is that?" the printer asks about the calculator.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Graphing calculator.  It does math.  I'd be trying to build this if it wasn't like three generations of tools to make tools away from here."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How does it do math?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Very carefully!  Okay but if you actually want to know, let's talk about binary logic, first.

"...no, actually, let's talk about the Jacquard loom, before even that.  I'm not sure how the fuck mechanized sewing works, even less than printing, but industrialized weaving was the first programmable machine - you could tell it to lay a thread, or not, via holes punched in a card.

"This paved the way for the initial design of the Turing machine: a wholly mechanical device that could do math by manipulating binary (a number system that counts zero, one, one-zero, one-one, one-zero-zero, or off, on, on-off, on-on...).  I believe it may have been steam-powered, but regardless of whether you could hand-crank it, and now that I think about...no, the ENIGMA machine was powered.  Anyway, I'm pretty sure it remained mostly a theoretical curiosity to mathematicians until the proper introduction of electricity - which is, broadly, bottled lightning - a while further on, though my understanding of that era is somewhat foggy save for that Turing himself was around to do codebreaking during a definitely-electrified war.

"Regardless.

"After that war's long since over, people much smarter than I dust off the ol' Turing machine, and put that together with the more recently popularized field of semiconductors, instead of sticking with the early-computing-era use of vacuum tubes, yes, you heard me correctly, they used the absence of stuff to store data somehow - anyway.  Semiconductors are invented, and suddenly, you can make a computer that's not as big as this room do something useful.

"So someone takes the desktop mechanical calculators that got put into stores to sum up prices and such, figures they can put that into handholdable silicon real easy and that people would want one, instead of having to use things like slide-rules, and starts the company that makes this calculator.

"Theoretically you can do arbitrary computing on it but I never learned the programming language this thing uses and I don't have an electrical generator, so I'm not going to waste power trying to learn.

"...I never did actually explain how it does math, did I, just that it does.

"Do you actually want me to try?  I probably can't reconstruct math from the basics of hardware logic, I should warn you - NANDgame kicked my ass when last I tried to play the damn thing, and the whole premise of that game was doing that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh. Never mind."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I kinda figured.

"It's just a bunch of complicated automated flipping of switches, really, that then gets turned into something we can understand by yet more automated switch-flipping and blinking lights.  ...Well, this particular display is liquid-crystal, I think, but still.  On or off."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's the advantage of the crystals being liquid?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure if it's that the crystals are liquid or if there are crystals in liquid, but the tradeoff here is that because this display's 'active' state is dark, rather than bright, it's more easily read in bright environments."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I don't know what that means but okay..." She turns her attention to the rollers diagram. "How do you keep the type from falling out of the rollers?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, did you see how the actual blank is shaped?"  It has a T-shaped tab at the end, that then fits in to the roller.

"It'll probably be a process to make the first tab, but the slots and other tabs should be easy to copy from the existing piece."

Permalink Mark Unread

"A process like what?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Take the existing piece and use it to make a mold for the new ones."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You said a process to make the first."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh.  No, I didn't have specific steps in mind for that - 'process', there, was metonymy for 'that'll probably take a while to get done properly'.  Was figuring it'd either be sculpted or whittled, and while troportation is so much cheating at making stuff, you would have to work to a pretty tight tolerance for error, probably with fallible human hands since I still have no fucking clue what a lathe is.  It's gonna fucking haunt me, I swear.  ...That was a joke, just to be clear, I'm not actually haunted, nor expecting to be haunted.  Just annoyed with my memory."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...ye-ah, I'm probably overcorrecting my how-to-talk-to-people models somewhere.  ...Where were we, anyway - any other questions?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not - especially? I'll show this to my boss later and we might work up a model of it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cool, that's good.  It is my design, I want to be clear.  If I'm giving you industrial revelations, I want fair compensation.  If nothing else because I have nothing else to offer, and can't yet make something from nothing - though I'm sure that I'll try, someday."

She sighs.

"At least here I'm somewhat useful, if mostly only in theoretical matters."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't actually know what would typically be fair for something like this."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Admittedly, I don't necessarily have too much of an idea either, but I know some things.  Regardless, that's probably a matter for your boss.  You know when they'll be around?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"In a sand or so."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mhm."

Well, she can occupy herself by re-designing bicycles, in the meantime.  Or maybe tricycles, or quad-cycles, but still, wheeled, geared, pedal powered people movers.

Has she seen people with hand-pulled wagons-or-similar?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yup, people have wheelbarrows and animal-drawn carts and stuff.

Permalink Mark Unread

...English or Chinese wheelbarrows?  Now that she's thinking about them.

Permalink Mark Unread

More like Chinese ones.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, that's...good.  Vaguely annoying, honestly, but much better that they have it than she need to introduce the idea.

She could invent tires, though.  And possibly the modern suspension.

Permalink Mark Unread

Eventually another person shows up.

"Who's this?"

"I didn't get her name. Some kind of eccentric inventor," says the printer.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'd hardly claim all the credit for what I'm designing, there's a whole history of invention that I'm pulling from, but that's a decent gloss.  Mira Grant; pleasure to meet you both."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm Parsley," says the first printer.

"Prism," says the boss.

"What does Mira Grant mean?" asks Parsley.

Permalink Mark Unread

"It doesn't, really; my home nation's primary spoken language and associated culture mostly doesn't name people after recognizable things, though as with all things English-language, it's riddled with exceptions.  I suppose 'Grant' - grant," she names several different meanings, "- has a meaning, but that's more often a verb than a noun."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You have a different native language? Say something in it," says Prism.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure, I can do that."  She stops doing the translation thing.  "This is a test; this is only a test.  The Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device is functional under temperatures of up to 3000 Kelvin.  According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bumblebee should be able to fly.  But bees fly anyway, because they don't care what humans think is impossible.  To be, or not to be, that is the question; whether 'tis nobler to face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms, and by so opposing, end them -"

She resumes translating her words.

"How's that for some random English?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wow, wild," laughs Prism. "Are there lots of you, do we need to start making English letters?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm the only one of me I know is anywhere around here, and given how weird the way I got here was, I wouldn't expect to see anyone else from the same region unless someone actually shows up.

"So I wouldn't think there's much of a market for English type."

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right. And you're here because you're an inventor, I guess?" says Prism, glancing at the double-sided printing spec that Parsley has handed him.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I'm looking for a way to get some of the conveniences of back home re-invented, and while that's probably a lifetime's work or more to get it done properly, I'll settle for hot and cold running water, and indoor lighting that doesn't involve fire.  I'm here in particular because I figured y'all'd have some of the relevant skillset to build industrial mechanisms, or know who would have it, since the printing press is fiddly."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And you... want to hire us?" Prism asks.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I think hiring you or working with you would definitely help me?  I'm not sure how much additional help I am to the field of printing, though, so I'm...

"Kind of expecting that you wouldn't necessarily be invested or interested in the wider project?  I dunno.  Of the many things I've cursorily studied, business negotiation is not one of them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We don't have to be interested in whatever your thing is for you to hire us to do stuff," says Parsley. "But we need... to get paid..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And there's my problem: I don't have startup capital.  Which is hopefully where the rotary printer and ancillae help us both out: you get an increase in throughput, I get seed money because you're using my inventions to increase throughput.  ...Should see if we can develop a faster-drying ink, really...my brain for some reason suspects that there's alcohols involved, but damn if I know what fluid this thing uses.  At least I know a local chemist.  Maybe he'll help."

She has a highlighter, apparently.

"Oh, and the ballpoint pen.  Could probably re-make that easily."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think we have seed capital amounts of money even if we start taking in twice as much work," Prism says, as Parsley goes and gathers up all the dry pages on the racks and starts printing a new batch.

Permalink Mark Unread

"How much does one of those cost you to make?"  She gestures at a press.  "And given that the limiting factor on throughput is drying...Well, I might need to get Wheat involved and invent fractional distillation or something, but if you had an ink that dried as fast as you could print it, you'd be getting way more than twice the work done.  And this dries fast enough to write with.  Let alone however my pens work, since they definitely do work and I've never had to worry about smudging them or the like.  Plus the idea I had for casting type with existing presses, which would allow you to do work with fancier type even if the drying doesn't pan out very well."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If we had twice as many orders we'd... get more drying racks," says Parsley. "We don't."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ah.  Botheration.  Well, that's how the economy is, I suppose, and I'm not going to change it by myself.  If only I had any market data.  ...What's the state of the art in information dissemination, anyway?  And putting information together."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...do you mean something other than books?" asks Prism.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Yes and no?  The process of informing people that new books exist, I suppose."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, they have a rack for that in the library."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And what about new things in more generality than books?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Like what?" asks Parsley.

Permalink Mark Unread

"The construction of new buildings, changes in business ownership, births, deaths, discoveries of novel materials, the happenings of assembly meetings, changes in law, crimes, criminals, judgements thereof...Catastrophic events like a housefire..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The assemblies happen on a schedule, and you can see it posted in the place they meet. I think the other stuff - if it's actually important, not, like, some rich jerk no longer has a house - gets around by word of mouth, mostly? Or they tell everybody who runs a restaurant or something, I've seen stuff like that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Back where I'm from, 'the press' is more often used to refer to people in the trade of finding out new information, verifying it, and publishing it, than actual presses."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- well, that sounds like a pretty different skillset than the one we have."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, that's certainly true.  But it has to start somewhere if it starts at all.

"Also, you can sell ad space in a newspaper, so it'd be a great source of revenue, if journalism sold well in the first place.  I think it probably would.  Or maybe introduce serialized novels..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think you have... too high a plans to capital ratio," ventures Parsley.

Permalink Mark Unread

That statement prompts a wordless frustrated noise.  "...Unfortunately, that is probably true.  But I don't know what else to do."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I hope you don't starve before you figure it out."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You and me both.  You're a business owner, what would you recommend as an unmet need in the present market?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know why you think operating a printshop gives me information about that," says Prism.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Because you're part of the economy and would know at least your own needs if not the needs of those that buy things from you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"When I try to buy a thing, I can generally buy it. I can't think of anything I set out to buy recently that wasn't there. There's mice and food and water and clothing and so on to go around. I suppose dreamward space is a bit dear."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Well, I suppose I ought to go investigate the state of the art in that, then.  Dreamwards are very necessary, and if there's anything I have that could improve production...

"It's my civic duty to help out, as far as I'm concerned."

...Well.  Time to go back to the library.

Permalink Mark Unread

It is there as ever.

Permalink Mark Unread

What's the actual dreamward production process look like?  Accumulating property X from sources thereof, she knows, but how do they actually do it?  Is there a specific procedure they follow?

Permalink Mark Unread

It doesn't have to be done all at once, which is good because it can be very time-consuming to find enough objects that have the property. People choose an object, usually a stone, often a sculpture - and then transfer the klaon-repelling property into that sculpture, thousands of times. Very small dreamwards are sometimes set up in rural areas so farmers don't have to travel into the city to visit their kids but mostly you want huge ones for a cityful of children to sleep in until they have grown up enough to move in with each other.

Permalink Mark Unread

Do parts of those objects retain their warding properties, if they're separated from the whole?

Permalink Mark Unread

Depends! Spiderwebs don't seem to but it might be that it's hard to bisect something like a spiderweb without making it not really a web any more. You can use just-cut wood, and live wood is one of the most easily accessible sources, so it's common for troporters to go out with their dreamward-to-be chopping up trees and quickly using each piece before it dies.

Permalink Mark Unread

Once they're actually dreamwards, she means.

...Also she is absolutely going to figure out bonsai, if the volume of the material troported from doesn't matter.

Permalink Mark Unread

Complete dreamwards are normally made extremely durable since if one broke klaonso could get in and eat everyone's children; no one has tried to double-or-nothing their dreamward that this library knows about.

Permalink Mark Unread

...what, none have ever broken, chipped, been struck by lightning?

Permalink Mark Unread

Not as far as the library knows.

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh.  Well, she has an idea for how to double-or-nothing the actual klaon repellance factor, anyway.

So she'll just need some live wood, and...

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384...

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15...16 for good measure, objects that break in half easily!

Permalink Mark Unread

...What time is it, anyway?  It feels like it's been a day and a week at the same exact time and one of her intuitions must be wrong.  ...probably the one that points to 'a week'; she'd've died of dehydration.

Anyway, she'll head to Wheat's office; is he in right now?

(...She misses actual clocks.)

Permalink Mark Unread

Wheat is not in right now.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, darn, but okay.

Is there anyone here who has a convenient "studies troportation" nameplate?

Permalink Mark Unread

Nope, the doors have names of people on them. ("Blackberry", "Quilt", "Ink", "Rose", things like that.)

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, she'll ask at the front desk then.

(She's abominably curious about what brought up this naming tradition, but right now is time for SCIENCE!  By which she means MATHEMATICS!)

"Hello, I was wondering if you could direct me to your professor of applied troportation, or whoever would be closest?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- or whoever would be closest?" asks the front desk person.

Permalink Mark Unread

"In field of study."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, that makes more sense. Professor Beryl is probably in a class now but will have her office sand afterwards; the blue building, second floor."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thank you for your time."

To the blue building's second floor!  ...Huh.  Funny coincidence of colors, that one.  She thinks.  Beryl might not be blue.

Permalink Mark Unread

There is an office with "Beryl" written on it, and a couple chairs in the hallway she can sit in to wait.

Permalink Mark Unread

And wait she shall, idly trying to figure out how gearboxes work.

Permalink Mark Unread

Here comes someone who might be Professor Beryl, letting herself into the office.

Permalink Mark Unread

And she shall let Professor Beryl get herself situated, then knock and presumably enter herself.

Permalink Mark Unread

"- hello, have we met?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are you a student?"

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"- are you a student somewhere else?"

Permalink Mark Unread

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

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...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..."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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!

Permalink Mark Unread

"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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

She nods.  "Where is your papa?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"He's under the apple tree there."

Permalink Mark Unread

Ah, good.

 

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

...She'll wave politely at him?

Permalink Mark Unread

He furrows his brow quizzically at her.

Permalink Mark Unread

She blinks bemusedly at him.

Permalink Mark Unread

He returns his attention to his kids and then his book.

Permalink Mark Unread

What is he reading, anyway?

Permalink Mark Unread

She can't see the title from there.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, she'll wander by, then.

Permalink Mark Unread

He's holding the book in his lap; she can see a chapter heading that says The Clockwise Migration, though.

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh.

"That book any good?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's all right," he says absently, checking on the kids again.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mmhmm.  What's it about?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"History - look, who are you, I don't recognize you, if you're looking for Fox he'll be awake in two sands."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not looking for anyone in particular, just thought I'd strike up a friendly conversation.  You can call me Mira.  's foreign, it doesn't mean anything in the slightest, since I imagine you're wondering.  Would you rather I left you to your reading?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes." He looks at the kids again, perhaps making sure that they don't look drowsy.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, she'll leave him to it.  "I can't make any promises, but if what I did to it worked like I expected it to, that tree should actually be dreamward-y."  At which point she yawns, and drowses a mouse.  "Speak of the sleep problem."  The one she didn't drowse last time, hopefully.  "Just wish I could actually see klaonso worth a - ahem," she catches herself before actually swearing.  "It'd be easier to check the results."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Saw one going that way," he says, gesturing vaguely. "Lost track of it though."

Permalink Mark Unread

Well.  She'll try thataway.  "Thanks, that's more than I had."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh-huh."

Permalink Mark Unread

Time to go hunt a klaon.  And then...Probably throw a rock at it?  ...She'll turn her phone on to record the results if she actually spots one of the damn things.

Permalink Mark Unread

There is a faint ripple in the air, like a heat mirage, over there, trundling along at about five miles an hour. Its shape is indistinct but it seems largely vertical, a bit smaller than a human. It's not touching the ground.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Record...and..."Troportation-based redoubling and harvest of a tree's anti-klaon properties test one, pebble..." ...yeet!

Permalink Mark Unread

If this does anything it's very subtle.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...fffffrack.  No visible effect just yet."  Well, she'll reclaim the pebble.  What if she property-transfers klaon-repellence to a bigger item, and then tries it again?

Permalink Mark Unread

This time she misses the klaon. It does not react.

Permalink Mark Unread

...And if she tries again, just to be sure?

Permalink Mark Unread

The klaon changes direction around then, which makes it hard to tell if it's slowing down. And then it goes through a wall and she's lost it.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...fucking hell.  Test results, inconclusive.  I'm leaning towards 'no' since it didn't fucking bottle rocket, but I don't know if that's just to be expected."

End recording, turn off phone.

Permalink Mark Unread

"The really annoying thing is that I can't be sure if I just mucked up the technique.  And with no experimental results worth noting, I somehow doubt I'll get anyone else interested in trying this.  Fucking hells, this is annoying."

...She vacillates a bit, before settling on - oh.  She needs food.

Maybe there's anywhere that's not obviously failing food safety but is 'coins-I-picked-up-from-the-ground' inexpensive, but if there is, she has no idea where it'd be.

Permalink Mark Unread

Near this park there are carts selling roasted corncobs and potatoes, fruit salad, whole rotisserie chickens, beef stew, lentils with vegetables, boiled eggs, cheese balls, and steamed buns. Some of the carts are cooking the food on the spot, others have small fires going but are just heating up little objects to swap the warmth into a potato or a chicken on demand.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Fresh-cooked food seems pretty reliable.  ...Say, where does one get drinking water around here, anyway?

Permalink Mark Unread

There are big ice cubes melting into dispensers, and somebody wanders by with a tree stump or a chunk of dirt every now and again to swap the sizes of the ice and the object they're wheeling on the dispensers that have melted the most. It appears to be a bring-your-own-cup situation.

Permalink Mark Unread

Neat.  Well, she has something that'll at least work for that purpose.

 

Having sated her immediate biological needs...back to...hm.  The university, she thinks.  Is Beryl still doing her office sand?

Permalink Mark Unread

She is, but she's with a student.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, that's fine.  Is Wheat in?

Permalink Mark Unread

Nope.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, that's great.  And by great she means frustrating.  May as well see if Beryl will humor her some more.

Permalink Mark Unread

Beryl shoots her an irritated look when she spots her loitering.

Permalink Mark Unread

What are you expecting her to do, not seek knowledge?  She's not interrupting the office hours!

Permalink Mark Unread

Beryl continues explaining nutritive troportation to the student, who seems confused about Mira's presence. Eventually the student leaves.

Permalink Mark Unread

Mira seems pretty fascinated by the discussion, as it happens.

"...Tried an experiment, but I can't tell if it failed qua hypothesis disproven or failed qua my troportation sucked.  Can you tell if this rock has the klaon-repellent property at all, perchance?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not a klaon," says Beryl flatly.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, yes, obviously, you're not a mirage.  What I do not presently know is if an experienced troporter can tell the," she wibbles a hand, "volume of a trait they're trying to troport, when that trait has a magnitude that's not already visually evident.  And I'm really not an experienced troporter since I've only been able to for...what...two days, times - ...sixteen, divided by two...a grand total of sixteen sands, or so."

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, you can't tell."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Damn.  That's rude of whatever caused troportation to exist.  Well, in case you want to steal the credit if it works," she gives a wry smile, "what I did was repeatedly grab a twig from a live tree and attempt to transfer the klaon-repellent property back to the tree repeatedly, which should, because math, result in an exponential doubling thereof, instead of having to get thousands of individual bits of wood - if the tree sustains the now-troported property, at least."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I suppose it's slightly cleverer than ripping a sheet of paper into a thousand pieces. Was there anything else?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nope.  Thank you for the help.  Shall I leave you be, then?"

She's about flat out of things to do, right now, if so.

Perhaps she'll read up on history.

Permalink Mark Unread

Beryl does not seem to want her to stick around.

There is plenty of history in the library! What is she interested in?

Permalink Mark Unread

She'll pick something out at random.

(How the fuck do they have so many books and no industrial presses!  It's confusing!  Okay it's not really confusing but it's certainly something.  Really, it's the paper and ink supplies that surprise her.)

Permalink Mark Unread

This random history book is about the Pansh Dynasty of a faraway kingdom. It incidentally can teach her interesting background about how families work when everyone has four parents; the Pansh Dynasty solved some of the problems of bloodline dilution by making it customary for royal siblings to cohabit.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ugh, royalty.  Not even once.

Say, are there any surveys of demons and their traits?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yup, the zoology section has lots of books of demons complete with block print illustrations.

Permalink Mark Unread

Cool, she'll just...leaf through those for a little while.  She's got nothing better to do.

Permalink Mark Unread

The demons are of various rarities, sizes, and shapes, and have different vulnerabilities and patterns of attack; the books are mostly aimed at people who might be going into the wilderness and need to fight them. Most of them are black.

Permalink Mark Unread

Vulnerabilities, you say?

Permalink Mark Unread

Some of them can be killed with physical trauma but others are too tough and will only die to fire or drowning or something.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Too tough for physical trauma to take?  How the heck is that happening on a biological basis, you don't normally get that sort of thing outside of deep-sea geothermal magnet harpoon snails!

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, it might just be that they haven't invented machine guns.

Permalink Mark Unread

Sure, she'll get right on that in between the thousand other inventions she can't secure workshop space to start making.

Have they invented guns yet?

Permalink Mark Unread

Nope.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, there's a start.

Sulfur, saltpeter, charcoal.  She has a vague impression of a 5:3:1 ratio in some factor to be the best, but she can probably just make a best guess at the products and stoichiometry out the rest...

S, KNO3, C (plus various, but mostly just...C.) -> CO2, N2, SO2?, K???/KN??? - do the lookup...

Well, she'll need paper first, this is a bit much to do in her head.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Sure would help if she remembered how electron shells work, but it is the periodic table...

s shells contain 2 electrons, p shells contain 6 electrons...

s p -> 2s 2p -> 3s 3p -> 4s 3d 4p ...d shells contain 10 electrons but weirdly...Okay she doesn't need to worry about d shells, K just barely scrapes 4s.

K -o, O ----oo, C --oooo, N ---ooo, S ----oo...

K2S?

S, 2 KNO3, 3C -> K2S, N2, 3CO2?

Potassium sulfate?  Potassium sulfide?  ...those are different chemicals, hmm.  ...SO4 is a thing, H2SO4 is a chemical she remembers existing from a truly horrible black-humor sort of poem...

(That might change the math, ugh.)

S, 2KNO3, C -> K2SO4, N2, CO2?

Alright, she has any idea.  The rest is just shutting up and multiplying.

Probably.  Maybe.

6.02*10^28, don't fail her now.

...wait, she doesn't need mass-in-grams, ratios are dimensionless.

C=12.0

N=14.0

O=16.0

S=32.1

K=39.1

32.1 : 2(39.1+14.0+3(16.0)) : 12.0

32.1 : 2(39.1+14.0+48.0) : 12.0

32.1 : 2(101.1)(39.1+62.0) : 12.0

32.1 : 202.21, adjust sigfigs after math, dangit... : 12.0

32 : 202 : 12

/ 4

8 : 50.5 : 3

...Well, it's close to 3 : 5 : 1, like she was expecting originally, if you squint really hard.  More like 3 : 16 : 1.

Mythbusters did determine that ratio empirically, anyway.

(And it didn't create a diamond-shooting cannon in conjunction with bamboo, though it probably would've worked with enough duct tape.)

 

...Maybe she should check the other one, too, just in case.

32.1 : 202(.1) : 36.0

32 : 202 : 36

8 : 50.5 : 9

2 : 12.5 : 2.25.

Well, she'll test both.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hah!"

"...ssh, me."

Alright, now to invent the breech-loading rifle...

And maybe see if Wheat's around.

Permalink Mark Unread

Wheat is in in his office again this time, doing some kind of paperwork!

Permalink Mark Unread

"Heya.  I come bearing gifts.  Namely, the correct ratio of elemental sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal - elemental carbon, really - to make gunpowder with, for when you need to make things explode.  And also probably gun design tips, but that's a matter for militarily-minded folks, not ourselves."

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right, sounds exciting," says Wheat. "This is for, what exactly, I don't often find I want things to explode..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can think of plenty of things that need exploding, right over on the other side of the Barricade!  ...Probably not right over there, but, y'know, demons are very explode-able!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They can't usually get over the wall, but yeah, that's true. Do you like, throw this stuff at them, or -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can wrap it in a metal casing and shove it down their throats, but it's more often used to propel metal or rock at things, very fast, from a safe distance.  That's why I mentioned guns; they're weapons suitable for that purpose.  You stick the 'gun'-powder in a metal tube with a closely-fitted projectile, you ignite the gunpowder, the gunpowder goes boom and launches the projectile out, faster than the speed of sound."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, interesting. That does sound like it might puncture some demons' armor."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure would, yep!  Wish I knew the formula for smokeless powder, honestly.  Black powder, the iconic example of gun powder, very definitively creates smoke.

"On the other hand, once we have electrical generators and can reliably troport electrical resistance...I bet we could make railguns.

"...or coilguns, or other sorts of 'shoot a projectile really fast, but this time with magnets'.

"Because the main problem was - is - well, partially power draw - but more keeping the electrical resistance from melting the gun, if I recall correctly, and if you transfer that out of your wiring, boom, you have a room-temperature superconductor.  And those are just bullshit."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I've lost you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, it's not stuff that I really understand the theory of myself; I just know that you can create nonzero net force, and therefore motion and work, from electrical current slash electrically-induced magnetic fields.  Electricity and magnetism are actually the same fundamental particle interaction, just...perpendicularly.  ...You do have lodestones, right?  ...oh, hell, would you?  I don't..."

Are north, south, east, and west meaningfully directions?

Permalink Mark Unread

The language does not appear to have words for them!

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Well, anyway, if you've ever found a rock that iron sticks to, that's magnetism at work!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, magnets are useful, I use them for stirring sometimes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Magnetism is quite literally perpendicular to electricity, I should note.  You can generate electricity by moving a magnet through coiled wire."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- that's so... random," says Wheat.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not if you understand electromagnetism, apparently!  Ironically, despite the simplicity of modeling it, the least-understood fundamental force of my homeworld was gravity.  Which is...actually plausibly a lot weirder, around here, because infinite planes do not make pleasant equation-fodder...Also, fun fact, light is also part of electromagnetism.  In addition to a whole bunch of other weird shit that goes on with light, because sometimes whether it's a particle or a wave depends on whether you're looking.  Not that we'll have the infrastructure to repeat the double-slit experiment anytime so-ooooh, but chemical photography might work... but...yeah.  Light's weird as fuck.  ...I should probably sit down with a physicist, if you have any, sometime soon.  I don't want to forget what I know, and I have less study material available."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure we have anyone who studies the kind of thing you keep talking about. But I'll try coiling up some wire and dropping a magnet through it. Does it matter what properties the wire has?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Dropping a magnet through it just the once won't produce a steady current, but it will produce any current; you really want to have a back-and-forth.  Also, I will probably be able to jury-rig a charger for my electronics with that plus some additional hardware, which would be really useful because then I can use them properly instead of hoarding charge.  ...I have no idea how I'd actually make something that regularizes pedal power, but it's surely somehow possible.  People out in the middle of nowhere could charge their phones by pedaling a stationary bike."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...And the wire...Most people used copper, back home, but I think that was just that gold's scarce; circuit boards for electronics sure are gold-on-silicon."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why was g- oh. So, gold is good?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah.  And it's not like copper doesn't work.  Most metals should, it's a property of being-a-metal that does the thing.  Electrons can flow freely between the various atoms.

"...Wow, I wonder what that'd look like troported on to other materials.

"...That's for later.  Reconstruct the foundations first, then push the boundaries of knowledge, future me..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I use troported tools but generally don't want to troport my ingredients, so I don't know if that's ever been done."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I doubt it, electricity's not exactly a thing yet that most people would think of troporting - unless, do you have lightning rods?  You stick a conductive wire up on top of things that get struck by lightning, run that wire down to the literal or metaphorical electrical 'ground', and lightning goes through the wire, and not the building, if it finds it, because electrical discharges always seek the path of least resistance.

"I think the infographic I saw once said lightning had about a 60-meter search radius when it 'jumped' point-to-point on its way to earth, not that that's a number I'm confident in."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We don't have those - search radius?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not an actual search radius, it's not intelligent, just that - you know how it's jagged?  That's why it's jagged.  It's made of individual line segments that leap point-to-point, rather than being smooth direct flowy...whatever."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. How did your people learn that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Photography, confusion, and really good computer models, probably.  Plus math.  There's lots of math in physics."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I should talk with a mathematician.  I wonder if y'all have calculus yet.  Abstract math isn't my most studied field, but you do have quite a bit of a math requirement to really do computing.  Boolean logic, if nothing else.  ...Truth tables.  And then I studied simulating things on computers."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The math professor I know is called Feather."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then maybe I should talk to them.  ...I bet they'll love my calculator," she laughs, subduedly.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I bet she will. She takes a lot of classes in her schedule, though, I'm not sure when she'd be in her office."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I could probably just slide some of my homework under her door with a 'talk to Wheat to find out where all this math came from' note and wait."

 

"...That's half joking."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't exactly have a way to get a message to you. You just show up sometimes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I don't really have an address, for mail or otherwise.  If I'm not here, though, I'll probably be in the library, reading stuff.

"...really want proper timekeeping to exist already, that would mean actual scheduling could happen.  It's impossible to define 'tomorrow at three,' and I will fail at keeping track of passing sands."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't understand what's so difficult about it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"My brain is very bad at understanding the passing of time, so I cheat by having deadlines instead.  Now I can't have deadlines for time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why can't you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Because sands are a rate of time passing, rather than a fixed point in time.

"...Taking a whole tangent into spacetime being a thing and relativity and the speed of light in a vacuum is not actually going to help explain that.

"But yeah, uh...I can't look at an hourglass and see a number, and I need a number."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are you colorblind?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No; what, do y'all have a standard pattern for that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- yes, of course. That's why my glass is green right now, I'm copying the one in the courtyard to make sure I don't get off track."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Right, I can make that work, even if it's an awful system requiring orders of magnitude more manual intervention than necessary.  How does it go?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Right now it's light green, then light blue, lavender, grey, most people switch during the grey sand if they don't have some reason not to, dark red, brown, dark green, dark blue, dark purple, clear, again most people switch during the clear sand, pink, yellow, and then light green again."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...grey red brown green blue purple, clear pink yellow lime cyan lavender.  Okay.  Rainbow-progression timekeeping, and then dark and light.  And you work light cycles?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm awake light cycles, I don't spend all my time at work."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, my bad on the imprecision there.  But your work hours are light-cycle.  ...Work sands I mean.  ...That'd make for a pretty clock face..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you say so."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sorry, ran off on a tangent.  Anyway, when do you want to arrange to meet?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to try any of these ideas you've given me; do you want to just slip a note under the office door if something comes up and I'm not here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, sure.  Also, I was wondering if I could borrow a bit of clay's malleability from your wife?  Seems like one of those properties that're useful to have handy in your metaphorical tool belt, just in case you need it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can get you a pinch of clay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That'd be wonderful, thank you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Anything else? I'm a little behind on student assessments."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nope!  ..What're they working on right now?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Stoichiometry."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...oh, that's actually something I could help with!  Seeing as it's mostly just math.  ...Wait, how are you doing stoichiometry without - how much understanding of atoms and molecules do you have?  I suppose you could do it by mass just as well, but that's going to miss gases...well, unless you're very careful about doing your work in sealed vessels..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, we seal the environment when we're taking data."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...volume of gases..."

She pulls out a pencil, fidgets with it...

"...Still pretty opaque, though, because - oh, hmm, I wonder if you could differentiate gaseous byproducts by their freezing point.  ...Not very lab safe, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure what you're imagining."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, troportation can just casually make an absolute zero temperature.  So you monitor what percentage of the resulting frozen solids melts and-or sublimates at what temperature.  You'd probably want a reservoir with a very high specific heat, to make actual observation easier because it'll go up in temperature much more slowly that way, and the glass to have a lot of thermal insulation so as to not freeze the observer...  ...wonder what happens when you transfer specific heat out of something.  It might just suddenly gas-ify.  ...plasma-ify, even.  No, there's still the energy necessary to actually state-change as separate properties...but yeah it'd probably have plenty of that to go around.  ...scary to imagine, that."

Permalink Mark Unread

Wheat doesn't seem to think this especially calls for a response. He grades papers.

Permalink Mark Unread

She'll hang out, then.

"Lemme know if running numbers will help any.  I'll be outside."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You should probably in the long run have a place that isn't the university to hang out," Wheat remarks absently.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I also have the library!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, that's a better choice, since it's public and the university isn't actually."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah."

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"...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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

Feather is in! "- hello?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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..."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's 45901 times 89226?"

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

Feather double-checks this.

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ah. What kind of workspace?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...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.

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm a math teacher."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"...the students. By paying tuition."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Right, don't know why I expected not-that.  Well, no, I do know, it's because every single university back home got into the habit of soliciting wealthy alumni for donations.  Who funded the initial set-up, then, was it the assembly, or private citizens?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know, actually."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh.  Well, I've got a place to rest my head to find."  She blinks, and then facepalms.  "...I'm going to be digging sleep-related idioms out of my language for years, aren't I.  Well, anyway, thank you so much for hearing me out!  ...Is there anyone who you'd recommend I talk to about architecture or mechanisms?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have things they want, or do they just have things you want?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm pretty sure it's the former, but I will admit that I'm not sure how immediate my usefulness will be.  I'm very certain that I can develop architecture simulations, though, once I have electricity working enough to power my laptop.  That's what my degree's in.  ...Well.  My course of study."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have a time estimate on that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...t equals a few decacycles to be in a position to do more than punch numbers on a calculator, t equals maybe another month on the actual development, then add some cushion...

"I don't foresee even the most ambitious goal of 'having a minimum viable building simulator' more than a hectacycle or three from now, and that's not all I have available for either field."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...that's very confident."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Most of my error bars are in the make-electricity-reliable part.  I've already got nine tenths of the physics simulation, because that's part of my profession's toolkit; the rest is mostly data entry.  And maintaining focus, but I do think it's honestly conservative.  ...To be clear, 'minimum viable' is just 'this will break', not anything like showing how."  She is so glad she never uninstalls shit.  She has Unity and UE4.

Also any chance of surprisingly-helpful Minecraft modpacks, depending on their installed mods, but she's not including that in her time-estimation.

Permalink Mark Unread

"The things you want - a workshop, food - those are ongoing expenses," says Feather. "Are you selling the calculator or renting it out?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Renting, I should think.  It's mine; it should stay mine.

"...Right, I'm just going to ignore the yawning pit of psychological issues in potentia that that line of thought reveals.  Moving on.  Yes, renting the calculator short-term, and eventually hopefully transitioning to providing programming services.  Or just having some sort of passive income from having developed something that's actually useful to y'all.  ...Maybe the necessary tech for indoor farming; I imagine that'd be pretty useful."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...why would indoor farming be useful?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's demons outside the walls, yeah?  And therefore if you can fit farming inside, it's better?  Or am I thinking on the wrong scale and the Barricade is really big?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...there are demons outside the walls. But if you already... have room for a farm... then it doesn't seem like it would help anything to also give it a roof."

Permalink Mark Unread

"A farm that you can put a roof on, is a farm you can put stuff on top of, e.g. another farm, or housing, or...so on and so forth.  Think vertically."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think a lot of people currently find it worthwhile to have gardens on their roofs. Anyway, I don't really want to rent the calculator."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Well, yes, because a, dabbling won't generate sufficient yields to make it worth their while, and b, the actual farmers exist and civilization is the gradual process of specialization of trades.  But what I'm talking about is 'making it profitable and space-efficient to have the farmers, inside the city walls'.  Hydroponics actually have even bigger yields-per-square-foot than traditional farming; the biggest reason it wasn't used more back home was because the land would have sat around anyway.  But here you have monsters; even if the threat's less present than I imagine, cleared land's precious.  You want to maximize the use you can get of each safe square meter.  Thus, building both downwards and upwards, and seeking to compactify where you can.  There's a concept called an arcology, back home; you put up a huge dome and inside that dome you fit an entire self-sustaining polity.  I'm thinking on that scale."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't want to rent the calculator," repeats Feather. "Do you have anything else that I, a math teacher, may want?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Calculus of infinitesimals?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Go on."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So what sort of math do you normally do, to - know what I'm working with, I guess?  I need to know where you don't know what I know, to know how to tell you what I know that you don't.

"...Let's try that again without the tongue twister.

"So, I've taken a whole damn lot of math as prerequisites for my field of study, and it's kind of all over the map.  Geometry, trigonometry, a bit of drafting, formal logic, use of the modulus operator, a bunch of proofs of this that and the other that I mostly just memorized the results of but could plausibly reconstruct, finding the slope of a curve at a point, finding the area under a curve, the very utmost basics of complex numbers - taking the square root of negative one, but honestly I'm not very sure of how to work in the complex plane instead of just the reals, just that it's definitely possible - matrix operations...do you have matrices, actually, I don't know - and then I have 'applying all this math I know to construct models of objects' physical behavior' as a specialty on top of the math.

"And I can definitely formalize at least some of it just by myself, let alone the stuff that I can probably reverse-engineer from physics engine documentation and other such things."

Permalink Mark Unread

With all that laid out, and some additional demonstrations done...Mira finally has someone interested in seeing her through the period she'll need to find her feet, all for the price of some math tutoring, which, frankly, she's happy to do.

It's not manual labor.  She is not built to enjoy that sort of work.  Avoiding that and teaching someone?  It almost makes her happy.

 

Then, shortly after leaving, an idea strikes her like a bolt from the blue as she muses about how the fuck rectifiers, and making signal from noise, could possibly exist.

"Eureka.  The answer is crystals!"  Quartz timing crystals in watches!  Crystal radio sets, signal selection simply done by wire placement!  It's going to take experimentation, but it's something experimentally verifiable!

And even if she's wrong, there's probably some useful knowledge to be found in failure!  ...She really hopes, at least.

Still...it's time for office-hunting!

Permalink Mark Unread

Various buildings exist in this city and some of them may be offices! What is her search procedure?

Permalink Mark Unread

...Mostly wandering at random, honestly, and looking for 'for rent' signs.  She's not exactly done this before.

Still, her requirements are actually not very strict at the moment; she just wants some tinkering space slash somewhere to keep her stuff slash somewhere to get mail.

Permalink Mark Unread

Storage spaces seem pretty common, if she'll settle for those - they mostly don't have windows or ventilation, but people stash objects in them and sometimes even hang out there with their doors propped open.

Permalink Mark Unread

...She cares about having some airflow, stagnant air's bad for thinking, but yeah, that'll do.  ...Say, do they have skylights?

Permalink Mark Unread

Not in the storage unit, but they do appear to have been invented and appear in some houses.

Permalink Mark Unread

She'll settle for a storage unit provided they allow her to make non-damaging modifications to it.

Permalink Mark Unread

"What kinda modifications?" asks the rental guy suspiciously.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Shelves, probably.  Maybe a half-door.  If I'm still here after a while and feeling particularly gutsy, possibly a skylight, but anything exterior-affecting or involving potential fire, water, or electrical damage risk, I talk with the ownership first and you have a veto."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can do shelves. Leave the door be."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ayup.  Not like I have anything lined up for that anyway."

Well, she's just going to...buy a chair and - troport tiredness onto a mouse - make a note 'can demons be drowsed, if so can mouse be demoned' - take a moment to relax.

One moment.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Okay that's enough relaxing.

Permalink Mark Unread

What's she going to do first...

Get some material samples.

She knows you can measure temperature with the flexion of two joined metals, because that's how most thermostats do it; she wonders if that property could be used to make self-deflecting contacts for troportation-powered heat engines.

Does anyone actually work with metals around here, perchance?

Permalink Mark Unread

In this storage unit complex? No.

In town? Probably.

In the radius she can easily search by looking around herself? There's a lady making wire jewelry and mouse cages over there.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh, cool, she'll just watch that for a little while.  How's she going about it?

Permalink Mark Unread

She has a wire-drawing bench and turns the crank now and then, but is also liberally troporting between a supply of various thread and her supply of metals (mostly gold) to get the shapes she wants. Right now she's working on a pendant with ultrafine gold threads and a bunch of sapphire.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...wow, that's really pretty."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thank you," says the jeweler absently.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I don't want to be a distraction, but if you do have a moment, there's some things I'd like to talk about?  And perhaps purchase."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Priced as marked," she says, "bulk discounts available."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...surely bulk discounts make no fiscal sense if you've already sunk the same amount of labor-hours into...oh, whatever.  I'm looking to get some specifically-shaped metal parts, and was wondering about commissioning you.  ...As well as getting some metal samples to troport, though selling that's probably someone else's actual job."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can sell you samples but I won't give you a great deal on that," replies the jeweler. "What kind of specific shapes?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"A very tightly wound coil of wire, of a specific diameter, in gold or copper; ideally it would be minimally troported lest it inadvertently lose the reason I want it in metal to begin with.  ...I'll likely end up wanting to add some sort of crystal to it, but it'd have to be a specific sort and I don't yet know which sort, as is the peril of attempting to reconstruct things with broad knowledge of the underlying mechanism but no actual specifications.  I just need the coiled wire for now, anyway.  ...Well, the coiled wire is the one thing I'd want to specifically get a jeweler's help in securing.  There's some other parts I'll need for the project overall, but will probably make myself or secure as other crafts."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can coil some gold or copper for you. I assume you want it drawn instead of shaped from string, if you prefer it minimally troported?" She gestures at two piles of string, one thin and even, one chunky yarn.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I would like it drawn, yes.  Do you have tools for bending the wire as it comes out of the drawing die there, incidentally?  I could probably make something happen, if you don't; it'd be easier to handle that way."

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, I bend it once it's drawn to the right thickness."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Well, that's something I have ideas about fixing.  How long are you going to be here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I switch at clear and gray, and I'm usually here when I'm awake even when I'm taking a break."

Permalink Mark Unread

What time is it now?

"Alright, I'll be back soon."

And now it's time to improvise some tools with troportation!

She'll just need something she can score grooves into, the protractor in her bag, and two inclined planes, for scale-swapping!

Also probably a clamp.  Hmm.

That might be a bit harder than the bending jig.

Ehn, getting any backstop fitted shouldn't be too much trouble.

Permalink Mark Unread

It's mid-lavender right now.

Permalink Mark Unread

...she hates this timekeeping system.

Grey's up next, though, she thinks, so she'll come back 'tomorrow'.

...And maybe track down some gears and a weighted stick for forays into clockmaking, while she's looking for stuff, just for her own sanity.

She has no idea how the Swiss managed to make pocket watches, though, which is probably going to be frustrating.

Permalink Mark Unread

Gears are not trivial to find; sticks are easy.

Permalink Mark Unread

...okay, really what she needs is a log, a knife, drafting tools, and some clay.

Permalink Mark Unread

Entire logs she will have to go somewhat far afield for. Drafting tools, in their local variants, are not hard to come by, and clay is abundant.

Permalink Mark Unread

Not necessarily a whole log, just, y'know, something round.

Anyway, with materials secured...

It is time to develop proper goddamn timekeeping for fuck's sake.

 

In this case by making a grandfather clock from scratch.

 

...Do sands happen to neatly match up to two-hour periods, perchance?  She's certainly been glossing them to be that.

Anyway, carving out some gears from a clay-malleable log should be relatively easy, if time-consuming.  Determining the precise form she needs to make the mechanisms might be harder, but it's still doable.  And then, once it's done...she can use the holes she's cut out as molds for more parts.

Not that she needs to make more parts just yet, but she will eventually find a clock market...she hopes...so she'll prepare for that eventuality, and be happy, rather than scramble and be sad.

 

...She spends approximately an entire demi-cycle just getting everything ready for assembly, working on a blanket on the warehouse floor, but eventually, she's ready to put the clock together, take friction off the now-golden gears, set the pendulum in motion, and see if her new clock ticks.

 

The design is pretty simple, if timekeeping allows; the pendulum rocks back and forth, pushing a gear fitted with a ratchet; the ratcheting gear turns a 60-tooth second hand gear, which, with an extending pin, turns a gear (from the same mold as the ratchet) that turns the minute hand's gear, made from the same mold as the second hand; the minute hand's pin turns the ratchet for an hour gear, twenty-four per cycle, and also makes a chime bong, because she could make that happen and therefore did.

Permalink Mark Unread

Sands are very close to being two hours long but it's not precise.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, she'll precise it for them, then.  Really.  Institutionalized hourglass timekeeping.  It's just so...absurdly inefficient.

Permalink Mark Unread

Anyway.  What time is it?  She should probably visit...somebody.

Permalink Mark Unread

It's late brown.

Permalink Mark Unread

...she hates this timekeeping system.

 

Well, all she needs to do is find a market for clocks.

Maybe the library...?  Yeah, she'll go there.  Even if they don't want one they might know who would.

Permalink Mark Unread

The library is as ever. "Hello," says the receptionist she approaches. This one is bothering to wear a nametag! It says "Fern".

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hello, Fern.  I don't suppose you'd know if the library would be interested in acquiring a novel timekeeping device that requires much less active maintenance?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You have some kind of counterweight hourglass? The problem with those is they don't change color on their own."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...The colors go around in a circle.  I haven't gone to the trouble of actually updating the colors myself because frankly color is a horrible way to run a timekeeping system, but -"

She demonstrates how she's fitted in some adjustable-color wedges that the timekeeping hands can trace over, in addition to the numbered hours (for her convenience).  "You can do this, and it's already set up to have the right number of colorable face pieces."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. But this would make it hard to tell how much of a sand has passed from across the room."

Permalink Mark Unread

"No it wouldn't, that's why there's more than just the hour hand.  ...sand hand, excuse me; timekeeping back home uses a different half-a-sand unit.

"See, you have the sand hand, the stubby one, but then you also have this; this is the minute hand, and it goes 'round the clock face every - half sand because sixty-sixty-twentyfour gearing was easier to produce on account of having two of the same gear, but I'm sure I could make a hundred-twenty-tooth gear if you wanted.

"And there's the second - excuse me, grain - hand, which is honestly mostly there so you know if the clock is still ticking without listening for the noise; minute-to-minute timekeeping's not especially important for library tasks to begin with, though sometimes it's useful elsewhere."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess maybe you could see those from across a room. Are you donating this to the library? What would we do if it got out of sync with the glasses?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Am I donating...Well, if I must; I was hoping I'd be able to sell it, but getting the idea out there in the first place is kind of important.

"As for what you do if it gets out of sync, you can turn the hands like so, but honestly unless everyone's glasses start disagreeing with it all the same way at once, or it's not been kept swinging reliably, I'd trust the clock's accuracy more than the glasses?  Of course, I have some obvious bias here," she jokes, "but I did try to keep it calibrated to the average sand."

"Actually, hmm, we could just run a live test of how close it is; it'll make a chime like this - " she rolls the minute hand around demonstratively - "and when it's done that twice, you should be able to watch the last few grains drop from your standard sand glass."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I have no idea what you think accuracy is for but if this thing is showing that it's blue when it's purple then anyone looking at this and then trying to make it to an appointment with someone who looked at anything else is going to be late. As long as we can twiddle the 'hands' - why are they called that - it should be fine though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Accuracy in timekeeping is a function of drift in measured time versus a reference time measurement derived from physical constants e.g. acceleration due to gravity; they did something very complicated back home, but we're not there, so probably gravity's the best available reference.  There's a whole system of defining units in terms of others, actually."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay, but, no other timekeeping in the whole city uses that. We use hourglasses and have to match them if we want to get places at the same time as other people."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And that is why, out of all the possibly useful projects I could have started over the past...I have no idea how long it's been since I last drowsed a mouse, I should probably do that...that I picked making clocks.

"Because hourglasses just..should not be the highest-precision unit of time.  They're not even necessarily self-consistent, require constant human monitoring, and minute manufacturing differences can grossly impact the flow."

She yawns, and subsequently drowses a mouse.  "Excuse me."

"Whereas a pendulum clock keeps the same time as all other pendulum clocks sharing the same length pendulum - that're kept in the same gravity, at least; gravity's not precisely constant but that's effectively irrelevant - because the way the physics works out, the forces in play that aren't simple sine curves amount to a rounding error."

Permalink Mark Unread

The receptionist looks unimpressed. "If you're donating the clock, I can help you find a good place to put it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"..."

"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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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.)

Permalink Mark Unread

"...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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

...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.

Permalink Mark Unread

Doesn't work at all.

Permalink Mark Unread

...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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"What, like the kind a donkey turns?"

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"Differences in temperature, basically."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"...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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't have room for a gigantic pinwheel."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You don't need a giant pinwheel.  I'm just using them as an example of the thing you're doubting, working.  They powered cities off of those."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...cool story?" says the jeweler. "Anyway, there's your coil, hope it's as you has in mind, let me know if you need another."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Will do.  And once I've got a proper heat engine, I'll bring 'round a demo model for you, shall I?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe it's less dumb than it sounds, sure."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Alright, see you around, then!"

 

Right, now to make another clock for the university, and also assemble an electrical engine!

Which is to say, a magnet on a stick, hooked up to some bicycle pedals.

Permalink Mark Unread

This will consume quite a lot of time. Her mice have run out of food and water and she hasn't eaten in awhile either.

Permalink Mark Unread

If 'quite a lot of time' means 'approximately an hours' sculpting and troportation, now that she has proper tooling developed', she supposes it could be that long.

Nonetheless, she can't just let her mice starve.

Ergo, it is time to get food.

Permalink Mark Unread

In the environs of her storage unit there are carts selling spicy rice with eggs, fried dough full of bean paste, lamb skewers with assorted vegetables, and fresh fruit.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Can't go wrong with - oh, apparently you can, gleh, icky beans mouthfeel.  ...Can mice eat beans?

 

Well, she'll grab an apple to take the taste of that off her mind, and head to the library, because speaking of not-starving, she wanted to see if demon mice a) existed and b) worked as a drowsing target.

Permalink Mark Unread

Mice are apparently willing to eat beans.

Demonic mice don't exist.

Permalink Mark Unread

What, no-one's tried making one ever?  Especially if demons don't senesce!

Permalink Mark Unread

Apparently demonicness doesn't transfer.

Permalink Mark Unread

...But not-starving has been transferred.

Permalink Mark Unread

No, the urge to eat souls has been transferred. The test subject didn't live very long after attempting to eat some souls.

Permalink Mark Unread

...And did the demon starve, afterwards?

Permalink Mark Unread

Nope! It was fine! Demons may just be an infinite font of the desire to eat souls!

Permalink Mark Unread

...what the fuck is this bullshit.

And nobody tried again, she presumes, because getting zombie in your brain helps no-one.

Still, did anyone do animal testing?  Surely they didn't try humans first!

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, you can make animals try to eat souls too.

Permalink Mark Unread

And do they still starve?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yup.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Well, that suggests there's another trait involved that someone missed.  Were the sources of soul-eating still interested in soul-eating afterwards?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yup!

Permalink Mark Unread

...has anyone tried troporting soul-hunger off of something that wasn't...well. they can't actually reproduce, but - something they put soul-hunger on in the first place?

Permalink Mark Unread

Doesn't work. Soul hunger is very sticky.

Permalink Mark Unread

...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?

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Does it feel like anything, if you do?

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

...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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

 

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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?

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

...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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

...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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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?

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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?

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh, good, an obvious unfilled market niche.

Mira Grant Metalcrafts, here she comes, she supposes.

That and something about presses.

Permalink Mark Unread

...What time is it now?

Permalink Mark Unread

It's late clear.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Heck it, she'll visit the print shop again.

Permalink Mark Unread

They're running off a batch of sheet music, though the notation is different than anything she's accustomed to.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oooooh.  "Say, how do you read that, do you know?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I'm not going to give you a lesson about it right now?" says the person operating the press.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, that was silly of me.  But if you're willing to, when you're no longer busy with that?  I might be temporarily disposessed of any instruments because of a recent sudden relocation, but I'm nonetheless a pretty good strings player!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not actually a musician. I know enough to not make stupid typos is all." Ink, press.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ahh, fair enough.  Who ordered these?  If you can tell me that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Music shop."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ooh, which one, where is it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Tune's Tunes, by the white bridge."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Aye.  Thanks."

Onwards!  To music!

Permalink Mark Unread

Unfortunately, the white bridge is not in any of the parts of the city she has previously explored.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, maybe she'll ask someone?

 

...haha no she will probably just look lost.  And eventually either find a white bridge or give up, she supposes.

Permalink Mark Unread

She does eventually find a river, which might help!

Permalink Mark Unread

Hooray!  A river!  She'll go upstream first, she supposes.  Less unsanitary-water smell is much more preferable.

Permalink Mark Unread

There is a red bridge and a brown bridge and then, hooray, a white bridge.

Permalink Mark Unread

Is there a Tune's Tunes?

Permalink Mark Unread

If she crosses the bridge: yes, there it is, between a grocer and a bank.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh, wonderful, a bank!

Perhaps she'll visit them after the !!music store!!.

...That isn't on fire, she's just excited about it.

They might be interested in some of her stuff!

Especially the formula for continuous compound interest she's almost sure she has somewhere in here.

Permalink Mark Unread

The music store has instruments! None of them are exactly like Earth instruments but the have the general categories of strings and percussion and wind instruments.

Permalink Mark Unread

How much are they going for, in "average price of a meal" units?  ...She should make a replica of her violin's bow; it travels better.

 

Also!  Are there music groups!

Permalink Mark Unread

No music groups are spontaneously forming right here in this shop where she can see them! There's a guy behind the counter, organizing some sheet music.

Permalink Mark Unread

Sure, but they might advertise.

 

She'll just sort of...wander?  See how things are tuned, if they let random passersby actually touch the instruments, give a string instrument's bow a disappointed look...

If the guy who's organizing music pays her any attention, she has a story in mind that happens to be very true.

"I'm from very far away and honestly just looking wistfully at these because what with having lost almost everything in the sudden exodus from there, I'm not going to have much spending-money for a while until I build up some funds.

"Things were a lot different back home, even music notation, which is kind of odd to experience.  Mind indulging my curiosity for how this works?"

Permalink Mark Unread

He does look at her when she runs her fingers over the strings of a harpish thing.

"How... music notation works? Yeah, as long as it's slow," he shrugs.

Permalink Mark Unread

"My thanks."

So how does it work?  She can compare-contrast!

Permalink Mark Unread

They use numbers and diacritics to indicate scale degrees! Note value is indicated with a series of circles or partial circles after each number, and some other features of the circles correspond to other features of the note, including dynamics.

Permalink Mark Unread

Agh why?  Who designed this?  She does not like it?  It can't even simultaneity properly!

Here, let her show you how hers works;

and here goes an explanation and concurrent demonstration of classical music notation!

Permalink Mark Unread

"- I don't know why you're complaining to me, I didn't design this."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I need to complain to someone or it'll just sit in my head forever and evernagging at me - and you're present, and at least capable of following the discussion.  That said, who did design this?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know who... invented... music notation?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Yeah, I figured.  Neither do I.  Still, if music notation had been invented recently enough, maybe I would've had a chance to give them a piece of my mind over this...thisness.  So I had to ask, for some values of 'had'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I definitely don't know and also hate whoever invented music notation."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, there's always the option to try doing something bold about it.  Not that I've had much luck trying on my lonesome, so far.

 

"...I should start making mechanical metronomes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Should you now."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Timekeeping!  It's pretty important!"

 

"Not that you even have an extant unit of time small enough to meaningfully track beat frequency against, but surely you have some idea of tempo!  Plus, it's useful for individual practice to be able to keep time without having to guess.  Assuming, at least, that someone hasn't beaten me to the punch, here.  I'm torn between my hopes, on that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think usually you just... tap your foot... or something..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...As a foot-tapper of some skill myself, it just doesn't work that way until you already have a sense of the flow of the piece.  If you're trying to learn a piece from sheet music?  You want to have timekeeping, otherwise you'll get it wrong."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe you're not actually very good at foot-tapping."

Permalink Mark Unread

She stiffens.  "Good sir, I will thank you to not impugn a skill I have trained in since childhood and honed for thousands of cycles, even if I lack the proper accoutrements to prove said skill in an indisputable manner at present."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That said, I do think I find myself inclined to corner the metronome market.  Thanks!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're welcome..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Excuse my wounded pride; she's just...very invested in maintaining a sense and image of knowing things, at the moment.  Because, despite the fact that I'd really prefer to not be the single repository of so much knowledge that would get lost if I was hit by a cart, well.  I know way too much proveable stuff that only I know, even if some of it's been spread to others.  And I do also think of myself as being a good musician; that didn't help me react with proper equanimity."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...she?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Are you actually interested in knowing the reason that word choice happened?  It's - rather abstruse.  Or we can chalk it up to inadvertent personification and leave that rabbit hole alone.  ...Damn, you don't have the story that generated that metaphor.  We can leave that entire symphonic production alone?  No, that's not really the right connotation...  We can avoid fighting that demon?  ...Yeah, close enough."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, if you're otherwise going to, say, buy something, I'd rather talk about that. If you're otherwise going to leave, don't let me stop you. If you want to have a conversation, that's what I'm curious about."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If I wasn't mostly broke I absolutely would be buying one of your stringed instruments, but unfortunately, I don't have much local money.

"...Should really see if I can find a numismatist, if there's enough coinage worth collecting around here to sustain one.  They'd certainly be interested in trading foreign money from very far away for fungible local currency.

"Still, I suppose I actually do have time and interest in a conversation about the reason I framed my wounded pride as significantly not myself.

"The answer's honestly pretty simple, for all that there's so much complexity behind it - my cohabitation arrangements are between different facets of me, rather than the 'normal' process of soul transfers."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...huh. Does that... work?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's a lot of potential confounding factors, because the sort of mental structure that enables just sort of stumbling on this trick tends to occur alongside other traits that affect what's mentally fatiguing in the first place, but - yeah?  I certainly haven't randomly passed out or anything like that, yet.  It's actually possible to induce, though I wouldn't necessarily recommend providing such exercises to children that haven't already - demonstrated specific facilities for having imaginary friends, I suppose - though young adults who're already maybe a thousand cycles past puberty, they'd probably be quite fine, and honestly if there's cohabitator matchmaking as a thing, it would be oddly easy to develop reverse-engineering hypothetical people from their partner's desired traits, and those with sufficient...mm, my model of this is surprisingly opaque, but there's relevant traits...

"...If there's anything I really ought to write down stat, it is definitely that sort of thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, we do sell notebooks and pens, over there." He gestures.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then I think I may end up making a purchase after all."  She grins slightly.

Permalink Mark Unread

He will transact with her for a notebook and a pen.

Permalink Mark Unread

...She has her own writing implements actually but what are the pens here like, anyway?

Permalink Mark Unread

It looks like they favor brush writing but they do have reed, quill, and dip pens.

Permalink Mark Unread

...uuuuuuugh.  Time to invent the ballpoint at that - no, that's too many projects again, this is the worst possible situation.

Permalink Mark Unread

When she's stared at the pens long enough the shopkeeper helpfully recommends his favorite kind of quill.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...fuck, what really makes proper ballpoint pens viable is the ink and I still don't know how the heck the fast-drying inks are synthesized...  Excuse me, sorry, lost in my own brain for a minute there.  ...and even if I can synthesize the necessary formulae, I wouldn't have the industry!  Sorry, I'm just trying to...there's so many problems I could solve with funding.  Quill pens...are not actually good, by the standards I'm used to working with.  But I'm somewhat...caught in a bootstrap paradox's logical complement - I can't make the tools to make these things with because I don't really have enough resources to get started, no matter how many ideas I have that would work wonderfully if I did have those resources."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's so great about your pens, then?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, for one, an internal ink reservoir that I've seen last for months or years of use.  For two, much smoother writing action - ballpoint pens just...glide across the page, compared to any of these, because the nib is a literal ball."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That does sound nice, though, uh, how does the ink last that long? Is the pen enormous?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not really, no; you make it about the thickness of a finger, and maybe twice the length, and the trick is to have really thin but sturdy and precise construction on the internal components, unlike," she taps an ink bottle, "this ink bottle here.  Maybe the depth of a fingernail, really, and then the ballpoint means that you don't have dripping like fountain pens.  Which are pens with nibs more like that quill pen, but also the same internal reservoir.  And I mostly use pens only intermittently; I really ought to see if I can make graphite for new pencils..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We have pencils too." And indeed they do, right over there. These look almost like normal Earth pencils except they don't have erasers attached, those are sold separately.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, good.  I've got a fancy mechanical one, but replicating that can go quite far down on the priority list."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh-huh."

Permalink Mark Unread

She can in fact demonstrate this if he wants!  Her pencil is a bright semitransparent orange, and it goes click.

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's very thin graphite," he remarks.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, it's...what, point seven millimeters?  ...Telling you that doesn't help because you don't know what a meter is.  Hold on, I have a ruler for centimeters..."  She has a ruler!  "Didn't even get troported that way.  It's just how it's made."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds like a pain in the neck but if it works, I guess."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's hard to get there, but once you've built the tools that build the tools," she has this almost dreamy or rapturous expression on her face, an outright smile - "well, it's about as easy as clicking this pencil.  That's the sort of things I want to do with my life, now that I'm somehow here.  Build those tools-that-build-tools for everybody."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...blah, I went off on a ramble again, didn't I?  Sorry!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Whatever," he says, and he sells a guy who just walked in a book of sheet music.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ouch.

Permalink Mark Unread

Guy who just walked in walks out again with sheet music.

Permalink Mark Unread

She seems to just sort of...have wound to a stop, for a moment, propped up gently against a wall, before remembering that there's actually stuff she's been meaning to look up in the library for a while.

"Thanks for humoring me; the conversation was pleasant," is her parting comment to the shopkeep.

 

She wants to go find out what this polity calls itself, where its government meets, and how the heck it secures its food suppliers from things like demons.

Permalink Mark Unread

This is the city-state of Kuigao. The assembly meets over there. Farmers have cellars they can hide in and signal flares they can use to call in a demon-hunting team if they're cornered in them by a demon; often they also have other boltholes scattered around the farm, or trained animals that can fight off most common demon types. It seems like this does make food more expensive but it's somewhat balanced by the fact that livestock will eat troported food.

Permalink Mark Unread

...What, and humans won't?

Permalink Mark Unread

They don't like it. It's suitable for emergencies or traveling or dire poverty, and accordingly nobody is literally starving, but you wouldn't want to if you could avoid it.

Permalink Mark Unread

...but why?

Permalink Mark Unread

It tastes worse. You troport the flavor and the flavor is technically there but it's just worse, somehow. A lot of cheap food uses troported food as filler but has some real stuff in there so it's less noticeable.

Permalink Mark Unread

She's suspecting something about not copying the aromatics is involved.

Permalink Mark Unread

They don't seem to have ruled that hypothesis out.

Permalink Mark Unread

...How the frak do they have sufficiently industrialized food for there to be troportation sawdust bread equivalent, anyway?  Or...no, military provisioning.

 

...She is really having a devil of a time figuring out what the heck this society is like - where she should analogize from.

Permalink Mark Unread

She could do another deep dive into random things, but what she wants to do is take a step back, and look at the structure of the library; see what's given focus, see what has the most books, the newest books, the most prolific books...

Permalink Mark Unread

They have a lot of copies of the dictionary, a particular book of poetry, and some popular novel series. One book in the novel series appears to be new.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Why, of all things, is there a surfeit of dictionaries?  How does everyone have novel-reading time?  Is she just in a 1920s that doesn't guns?  No, they had electric lights by then, albeit shitty ones.  She is so very confused.  She's half-tempted to look for evidence of past isekai protagonists.

Permalink Mark Unread

None of them have left a signal for her in this library.

Permalink Mark Unread

...If she actually received that answer as the result of her search, she would immediately have started looking for signals hidden in other places, but she didn't, so she hasn't.

 

What's the novel about, anyway?

Permalink Mark Unread

The series is about the survival adventures and romantic drama of a bunch of people expeditioning to found a new city further rimward. There's porn in it. The latest installment sees them building a raft to cross a big lake.

Permalink Mark Unread

...rimward?

 

...there's porn in it?

 

Not that porn being in it is bad, but...she's surprised it's just sitting there!  ...Though, with you-can't-leave-children-unattended being a whole thing, she's less surprised.

Permalink Mark Unread

There's porn in it! It's just sitting there!

They don't have cardinal directions; instead, since civilization is in a loose ring shape, they talk about hubward, rimward, clockwise, and counterclockwise.

Permalink Mark Unread

She'll have to see if compasses work.  Or if navigation by the direction suns travel does.

Permalink Mark Unread

There is no findable mention of magnetic north being a thing or of suns traveling in any reliable direction.

Permalink Mark Unread

...what, they just go every which way?  What's astronomy like around here?

Permalink Mark Unread

It isn't. There are basically always suns and even during the occasional "longdark" there aren't stars.

Permalink Mark Unread

...she meant to be looking up how the heck suns work, but that's neat too.

So how do suns work?

Permalink Mark Unread

They don't know. They have no way to go up and poke them and have not figured out much from just looking. They come in lots of colors and sizes and speeds and altitudes and warmths and other details.

Permalink Mark Unread

...but do they have specific directions, have they ever observably recurred...

...what, they don't have hot-air balloons?  Not even a little bit?  No flight whatsoever?

Permalink Mark Unread

They don't know if they recur because it's not that weird for suns to look similar, but they are generally seen to be going in straight lines so it's assumed they continue to do that forever and don't circle back.

They have hot air balloons (though they are not in common use) but the suns are higher than that.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Higher than that in...what way?

Permalink Mark Unread

Hot air balloons can't keep going up forever, and when they have gotten as high as they have been known to go, the suns are still above them.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Have they tried it with a weightless balloon?  Have they measured how far up relative to the suns they are?  It's triangles, for goodness' sake!  Trigonometry isn't that overwhelmingly difficult!

Permalink Mark Unread

Sure, they know how far up the suns are. Here's a chart on the heights of various suns observed over a certain period; they're normally distributed about ten miles up. They've invented triangles. They just haven't gotten a hot air balloon up that high. Not with a person in it, and they have no other way to take observations.

Permalink Mark Unread

...she is now contemplating metal-framed vacuum-filled zeppelins with density-troportation 'ballast'.

Permalink Mark Unread

They don't appear to have the concept of vacuum.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Surely, surely they have density, though?

Permalink Mark Unread

That they do.

Permalink Mark Unread

Can they make something have a density of 0 g/cm^3 with troportation?

Permalink Mark Unread

Nope. You can only troport solid objects and you can only swap, not transfer, density.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Can you transfer mass, though?

Permalink Mark Unread

No.

Permalink Mark Unread

...but you can swap it?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yes.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, if you keep swapping masses and densities around, you can get an arbitrarily light object.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Now she wants a balloon based on that principle, because she can.

Maybe she'll get some rocks and some string and start Making That Happen for the local kids.  It'll be a fun activity and train their troportation discriminance.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Are there proper schools for children, yet?  And then she should probably check her mail.

Permalink Mark Unread

Kids are taught to read and figure in the dreamward and may or may not pursue any further education once they're out.

She does not have any messages waiting at her storage unit.

Permalink Mark Unread

Then her next stop, after making a metronome and 'balloon' to go with her clock demo model, is the bank, to see if they do business loans.

The soundtrack to her brain appears to have settled on Let's Go Fly A Kite for the walk; she certainly has the spring in her step for it.

Permalink Mark Unread

There is a line at the bank and only one teller on duty.

Permalink Mark Unread

She's not busy.  Or, well, she is, but not on this particular timescale.  She'll just wait patiently, possibly sketch some things, and see if there's any gossip happening (and eavesdrop), because why is there a line at the bank, anyway?  Is it payday or something?

Permalink Mark Unread

Nobody has chosen to explain it out loud right this minute.

Eventually she gets to the head of the line.

"Account number?" says the teller.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'd like to open one, if you please; I would also like to speak with anyone that might be responsible for disbursing business loans."

Permalink Mark Unread

The teller gets her a form to fill out for creating an account. "My colleague is having a baby and will be back in a few cycles."

Permalink Mark Unread

"My congratulations to them."  Interesting.  It's surprisingly apt timing for her pitch of troportation ECE.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Next!"

There are little tables and chairs for form-fillers such as herself.

Permalink Mark Unread

And the form shall be filled!  What does it ask for, anyway?

Permalink Mark Unread

It wants her name, her mothers' names, her city of birth, her profession, the amount she wants to deposit initially, her consent to fractional reserve banking, a list of any other institutions she's banking with or has credit with, whether she wants a safe deposit box, whether she has ever been accused of fraud or counterfeiting, and whether she wants a pure savings account at a small routine fee or a no-fee interest bearing account according to which her funds may be invested in diverse low-risk ventures and not always available in full on demand.

Permalink Mark Unread

Annnd she will mark "N/A" on 'mother's names' and "Alternia" as her home city, blahdibla yes consent to FRB, presently no other institutions she's banking with 'that I expect to be available for contact short of a miracle occurring'...

Does she want a safe deposit box?  ...She might, actually.  She could store certain valuable items in it...

No accusations of fraud, yes interest-bearing account...She'll deposit a small-but-noticeable amount.

 

Oh, and her profession - Engineer will have to do, she supposes.

Permalink Mark Unread

When she gets back to the teller's window the teller looks at this and says: "...I've never heard of Alternia, which would be one thing, except you also are claiming you don't have moms? I am not allowed to open a bank account for you if you descended entire from the suns above." She hands back the form.

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, I'm claiming that there's nowhere on this plane you'll find them, and unfortunately that's the honest truth of it.  If you'd prefer I tell you my mother's name anyway, I can, but it seemed...disingenuous."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I need all four of them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...sorry, come again?  Where'd the four come from?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...four mothers. If you need to get an account with only two listed that's possible but there's a longer form."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, my bad, there was a translation issue.  If 'mother' doesn't uniquely indicate the birth-giving parent, at least."

Notwithstanding that her parents definitely aren't multiplexed.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yours and your cohabitor's."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Yes, I gathered that from context.  Would it matter if they happen to be the same people on both sides."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can get you the longer form."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I suppose it makes sense."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...do you want the longer form or are you realizing you cannot defraud a bank into accepting you as a client without a verifiable identity?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The longer form, not that it's going to actually solve my not having been born within your light cone problems."  She sounds rather frustrated.

Permalink Mark Unread

The bank teller gives her a look but hands her the longer form.

Permalink Mark Unread

What's this one want, then?

Permalink Mark Unread

Same stuff as the previous form and also cohabitor's name, childhood dreamward, date of cohabitation, and a reference.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Never a dull moment, trying to fit into a bureaucracy that doesn't have any fucking context for black swan events..."

There is a scribble of several aborted options including 'myself' before 'Ophelia Mondegreen' in the cohabitor slot, 'I'd tell you the truth but you wouldn't believe me; just pretend it's far enough away that there's no hope of finding it' for childhood dreamward, 'Fuck if I know for sure but plausibly not before I was a teenager - and what's the local time zeroed at, anyway?' on date of cohabitation, and..."I should probably ask Wheat about putting his name down, shouldn't I.  Fucking hell, here we go round the mulberry bush yet again.

"As if this is even going to go through to begin with, given my overwhelming generalized weirdness by local standards."

 

"...Am I correct in assuming that my continuing to be an outside context problem poses at-this-time-irreconcilable issues in my attempt to bank."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...yes, we need to know who you are."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, the problem with knowing who I am is that my birth certificate is zornwards from here instead of any of the normal directions, so at some point someone's going to have to take my word for it that I'm both sane and telling the truth when I answer demographic questions with 'you literally wouldn't find a record of my birth if you searched the entire infinite plane'.  Do you want to see some extrauniversal math aides to back that up?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, ma'am. I can't get you a bank account if we can't verify your identity."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...This is going to end in abject bureaucratic suffering.  Who would have the authority to declare that yes, I exist."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not me but my colleague is authorized to accept a letter of introduction from a foreign government if for some reason your birth has been irretrievably obscured."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I arrived here with the clothes on my back and no idea I was emigrating, unfortunately, but that's a start."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How unfortunate. There is a line behind you."

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, yeah, she'll get out of the way.

 

This is so exhausting.  She needs to do literally anything that's not bash her head against a bureaucratic monolith.

 

...Eh, she'll go eat something.

Permalink Mark Unread

Pork chops? Porridge? Different porridge? Bean stew? Vegetables and tofu?

Permalink Mark Unread

...she'll go for the vegetables.

Permalink Mark Unread

It's baby corn and mustard greens and carrots and potatoes and silky triangle-shaped tofu.

Permalink Mark Unread

That's definitely food.

She eats it mechanically, and doesn't forget to feed her mice.

Or drowse one, for that matter.

 

...She may as well check her mail again, she supposes.  Not that she's actually expecting anything, but...she's basically stuck.

Permalink Mark Unread

She has a note from Wheat saying that if she doesn't want this pinch of clay anymore he would like to know so he can stop devoting desk space to keeping it moist enough to be pliable.

Permalink Mark Unread

She'll stop by, then, to pick that up.

Permalink Mark Unread

...She looks indelibly worn, as she heads for Wheat's office.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I'm not sure the kind of cohabitation you have going on is working adequately," he says, handing over the clay.

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's the bureaucracy.  And the way it's not capable of handling me.  It's depression, not fatigue.  ...Or it's kind of both, I suppose, but not in the way that sleeping resets except as and if drowsing might.  Except it didn't, so.  Yeah.  Just been having a rough day, because - I don't really know how to even begin acquiring legal existence, at the moment?  Since...well...y'all hardly take Earth records.  And I need to get something like that somehow, or my dreams will mostly be stillborn, because going from zero to industrial powerhouse on my lonesome...that's just impossible.  I need to be able to do business to run a business.  ...As much as I mislike the inevitable concentration of wealth that both feudalism and capitalism provoke if left unattended."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe you need a business partner? I realize that might also be hard but it's at least not dependent on having records."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are you volunteering?", she deadpans.  "Honestly, yes I do need someone with local business experience, but I'm not sure where I'd even begin looking, yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not, I like the job I have, but if you'd met anyone else you got along with..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I still haven't actually gotten past the culture shock, unfortunately, as far as I know.  I think everyone I've met is...acculturated in a particular way I don't gel with?  It's eerie."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is... everyone in your culture more like you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm an outlier both here and there, but...maybe?  I - am having the damnedest time trying to frame it appropriately, but it's...

"No-one seems to expect the unexpected, around here, whereas the first thing I do with the slightest bit of ambiguity is find and poke at the edge cases."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think anything like you has ever happened before."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah; there's a concept in disaster planning back home, called a black swan event.  It goes something like this: You have never seen a black swan.  All the swans you've seen are white.  So, by logical induction, you predict that all the swans you'll ever see are white.

"Then a black swan shows up anyway because the universe doesn't care about that; the rules allow for black swans, so here one is, and now you have to deal with it.

"That's basically this entire thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- I assume that example makes more sense when you can't change what color a swan is whenever you want but even accounting for that I'm not sure why an unexpectedly colored swan would be such a big deal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's - you have built your worldview on a false assumption that only certain kinds of events are possible.  Also, yeah, it makes less sense when troportation exists.  Hmm.  Think of it like...well actually for all I know this happens - stars are presumed to last forever, but one day one goes out."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- what is a star?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Generally, the flaming balls of whatever-your-suns-are-made-of in the sky.  Ours are a lot bigger and further away because we don't live on an infinite plane."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Those are suns. Why don't you just call them suns?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Because suns have planets, and not all stars do.  I suppose that's meaningless over here.  You, well, don't have planets."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know what a planet is," he agrees. "The suns are suns. I'd be more optimistic about you finding a business partner if I thought you were going to reliably talk sensible Nlaaki to people you met."

Permalink Mark Unread

"A planet's what happens when there's not an infinite plane declaring that this direction is down.  ...I wonder if there's a bottom of the world, here.  Or a top.  I think you'd have probably observed something eventually happen to evidence the latter, though.

"...hang on, how the fuck do you even have minerals without stellar fusion?  Who created this universe?  It shouldn't have this much similarity to mine!  The nuclear stuff just doesn't work in - what if it's the pressure - but then you have no upwelling - and what makes suns?

"Maybe the suns and the bottom of the world or lack thereof have something in common, some sort of weird spatial shenanigans, because I'm pretty sure this shouldn't be stable, and that the suns would have to either have had some very weird universe formation conditions occur or, honestly more likely in my opinion, have been designed and then scattered somehow, leaving alone whatever the hell keeps them moving stably!

"Anyway.  Businesspersoning is Ophelia's job."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And it is my pleasure to demonstrate to you that I can in fact speak sensible Nlaaki, given the chance; despite having quite a tendency to ramble on when prompted, our Mira does know the virtue of letting professionals work in their fields of expertise.  She simply thinks that she is often the most knowledgeable in the room, or in our head, I suppose.  It's not that we don't share information, but she does find connections other mindsets simply wouldn't."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I hope that works for you... If you're going to switch that seamlessly you should maybe get a swatch to change the color of your shirt whenever you do it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It does seem like it might be useful; I'll add it to our list.  My thanks.  Might I inquire as to the appropriate nonverbal cues with which one might politely show appreciation for services rendered?  And, one supposes, other useful gestural communication.  Mira's quite curious if any particularly enterprising linguists have invented sign language, speaking of - and furthermore, if there's any analogue to Deaf culture here, given the very differing social pressures involved when it is at most an outpatient procedure to alter the capability to hear, or lack thereof, on a body, especially when it seems like that would happen in the lifecycle of a born-deaf local without particular intervention, given the nature of most cohabitation.  Then again, one imagines it is hard to determine if a child is deaf before introspection, thought, and, therefore, opinion comes to them, including such about their body and its proper form and function...

 

"...Ah.  We have stumbled on to my particular field of interest.  My apologies; that is a discussion for sociologists, and likely in and of itself a rather fraught topic.  There is certainly heated discourse levied on this subject at home, and I wouldn't recommend bringing it here without particular need.  I would, however, be gladdened to have an opportunity to talk about the workings of the mind in more detail, if you have such interests.  One thing we, Mira and I, do share is a love of spreading knowledge, even if she is a much poorer teacher than I."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...none of my kids are deaf so, yeah, I have no idea."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And in the off-chance that Mira's right about something truly absurd, we would prefer to avoid stoking discourse.

"Let's move on to some other topic of discussion, shall we?  I believe there are a few projects we could talk about, if you have the time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't have forever but I've got the rest of this sand."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Of blackpowder, our letter, and...bother, what was the third thing?  Well.  The thought will eventually come back, we hope.

"We did have an idea for arranging a method of lighter-than-air flight through troportation, in other news.  As contrasted with methods of also-possible heavier-than-air flight.  That's not your field, however."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's not, but it sounds maybe interesting? I think flying vehicles are hard to steer."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, lighter-than-air flight has quite the problem of getting tossed around in the air that it's lighter than.  Powered flight works more like..."  She finishes folding, then tosses, a paper airplane...  "This, exploiting aerodynamics, but would likely, even with troportation, require first reinventing the engine."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Like sailing?" Wheat asks, peering at the paper plane.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Something like that, yes.  Or like skipping rocks."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I've never gotten the hang of that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Me neither.  Anyway, yeah, it's something to do with airflow over the wings having less pressure than the other side because of reasons, and thereby turning lateral movement into a buoyant, contra-gravitic force.  At least I think that's the way it went.  I remember a lot more of the details of building things than the theory."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, it might be promising, but a lot of things you talk about might be promising and I don't know if this one is especially so."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are so many promising things but this promising thing wants engines to exist first."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are engines themselves promising?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Emphatically so.  Probably the most promising thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- are you still going to think they're the most promising thing in two sands?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes.  Almost everything I have the slightest idea how to make works better with engines, or is effectively a precursor thereto."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are you going to pick a precursor and stick with it long enough to get it built?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I should be able to work out a heat engine before my attention span Happens."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What does that kind of engine do?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Turns heat differentials, which troportation can easily produce, into motion."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Like with ice?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, like with ice, and with other things."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ice is good for that because it doesn't hurt people to touch it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah.  It's got less temperature difference to harvest, but the safety would be pretty worth it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Less than what, fire?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Than the difference between room temperature and absolute zero, when everything stops moving, times two.  For example, ice is zero Celsius - water boils at a hundred - but it's two-hundred-thirty-something degrees in Kelvin, which zeroes its scale at absolute zero, using Celsius's increment."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- stops moving?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah.  On the molecular scale, the thing humans perceive as temperature is motion.  If you've ever seen, like, dust swirling in the air, or how dye diffuses into water...that's a similar thing.

"...There is also a construction of temperature as specifically a measure of entropy, but I couldn't construct the math behind thermodynamic beta if I sat down and tried for a month."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I'll take your word for it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...where were we, before we wandered off on this tangent?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Engines."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Engines.  Right!  What about them?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They can create motion if you have ice, apparently."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's quite a lot of ways to get motion from temperature.  Fire's actually a bit more common as a source, because steam's easier to channel."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What does the steam do?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Move through a pipe with stuff in it that turns, then cool back down to go around the pipe again."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. Does this have anything to do with batteries? I've gotten a few zaps for my trouble so far."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Electrical engines are often powered by batteries, and the things heat engines drive are very often electricity-generating turbines, so, yes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- so you use an engine to make electricity that runs an engine?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sorry, yeah, terminology screw-up on my part.  But often enough you can run a motor backwards to make it function as a generator, what I should have been calling the things that spin turbines and whatnot."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And the spinning is for....?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have mills that grind grain, or - you wouldn't necessarily have power hammers, not with how you can cheat like hell at forging...

"Anyway, they provide a reliable source of steady motion, in a more compact form than donkey-power."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, mills exist. I think it matters that millstones're heavy? Just spinning won't grind anything."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can exchange speed for force - technically, torque - and vice-versa."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Exchange it how?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Gear ratios."

Permalink Mark Unread

Wheat puzzles over that for a moment. "I guess that could work? I wouldn't have predicted it but it's not really my field."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Actually, let me just...

"I didn't do all that much mech-e, but I think I know the Six Simple Machines...

"The inclined plane...the wheel-and-axle?...the lever and fulcrum...the pulley...what the hell are the other two?

"...Screws, and then wedges, which...honestly, those are mostly just a special case of the inclined plane.  Anyway.  You know whose field that would be, then?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...architecture?" hazards Wheat. "Or clockwork, coming the other way."