"Hmm."

She looks kind of half-distracted, crystal slowly crawling up the side of the cup and receding, like the tide.

"That's all that can happen?"

"If you are crystallizing with a substance like that? Yeah. I guess it's not impossible to set it on fire or grow it so fast that it shoots out? But it sounds unlikely. And there is danger if you are dealing with explosives, which. I hope is not a common material for cups in your world. Are you trying to do anything in particular?"

"...Growing something so fast it shoots out sounds like it could be pretty useful if you could control it.

"No, cups don't explode.  Though C4's been used to cook with ever.

"I'm trying to just...store plasticness.  Not the whole cup."

"My understanding is that it is easier to grow a mechanism that can then shoot things. Though, I admit it would be very useful to skip the intermediate steps. And to store the material, the trick is to store the material devoid of the shape. Let me guide you through the process."

"...Yes, that's...what I'm trying to do.  Maybe I need a different metaphor for..."

She promptly descends into muttering about things like 'laser ablation'.

Henry tries not get too distracted with questions like 'what is lase ablation'.

She doesn't have the concept of 'laser ablation'. What it would feel for something that was 'laser ablated' to have been crystallized and be a data pattern in a crystal.

...Sure she does.  You blast the thing with the laser (eat a really tiny part of it with the crystal) and observe the emission spectrum (store its chemical composition in crystal-format).

Does the magic agree with her on that, though?  ...She supposes she'll find out.

She sure knows a lot of about laser ablation intellectually and with her other senses. But that doesn't immediately translate into the ability to figure what the data/texture inside the crystal would look like.

"Do you have a... laser capable of ablation with you?" Henry asks.

"Fuck no, do I look like I'm carting around an entire laboratory or seven?  Quiet for a moment please, I'm thinking."

Crystal, she swears to fuckall, if you make her write a file format specification for this she will - be very annoyed, how's that for consequences?  You're eating it!  You can store the data that comes in as you deconstruct the material portion-by-portion, molecule-by-molecule, atom-by-atom!  Then non-destructively stream it to her data storage!  It's simple file copying!  And then maybe she'll slap a name on top if necessary or useful!

Agh.  Fine, she'll just pretend this is the Most Zachtronics Game Of Her Life, then.  Opus Magnum meets Infinifactory meets TIS-100 meets Spacechem meets Exapunks meets MOLEK-SYNTEZ, and toss in a dash of Magicmaker, which isn't even from Zachtronics, because at this point why not.  Mix well, cook on high imagination for thirty seconds, serve when she's damn well ready to store plastic already.

She's still honestly expecting it to not click yet again, but she's damn well going to try this throughline regardless.

It doesn't really click.

But where before it felt like she was trying to push something in the wrong direction, now it feels like... a spin? The tactile-texture metaphors only goes so far.

Maybe if she thinks of the puzzle designers really hard?

That results.... in almost a click? Something about the frame of mind is close if not entire there yet.

...and the crystal is the game board, between the input and output?  Does that help?

It does, it isn't the solution, but now that she has that in mind she can metaphorically move her pawns through the game board instead of metaphorically spinning them in place.

After some trial and error, she has a crystal that has the data of plastic without a shape, it isn't shapeless as Henry was advising, but its shape works like a variable that is easier to change on the fly.

"Ha!  The trick isn't 'the material without a shape', the trick is 'a shape of producing-the-material'!"

"I wonder if I can do that for arbitrary stuff I know the composition of without having to actually eat the source material first, or if the magic just won't let me do it even if I think I know how I would.  Hmm.  What would be safe to start with, though?  Carbon, maybe?  ...No, that's not quite it.  He2?  But that's molecules.  Elemental sulfur's stable-ish, but not very healthy...  I don't even want to start thinking about metals.  Too much risk of loose neutrons if I go about that from scratch naïvely."

Does the shaping process seem to have underlying similarities to molecular, atomic, subatomic...well, anything that she could find a replicable pattern within to intuit?  And how much does she have a, reservoir of things-that-make-up-plastic, versus some fungible unit of crystalstuff?

Henry analyzes the crystal and is deeply impressed.

"I appreciate your enthusiasm. And greatly admire your skill. But two things: I am not sure if you should be experimenting like that. That sounds like it could get dangerous. The other is that it might be a good idea to apply what you learned and get to more practically build a repertoire of materials. It might be easier than working from just a single material. Also, third, that I didn't think before. Maybe take a rest, stretch your legs? Put down your book."

"Yeah, you're not wrong that it'd be easier; I just want to know if I can.  Doubt I'll need elemental sulfur anytime soon unless here be monsters, though!

"The more annoying thing would be the potassium nitrate, anyway, and then hooking all of those crystal-mechanism-things up, in appropriately-stoichiometric ratio, to a gun.

"Also I'm pretty sure the book has me, rather than the other way around.

"Still, yeah, time for a break, I think.  Once we have electricity y'all should play my Zachtronics games.  They're useful for developing the mindset for doing this.

"...hmm.  Wonder what'd be best to grab as starter supplies...

"Silver's contact-antimicrobial, so's copper I think, gold's really hard to corrode and actually better at being electrical wiring than copper is...I should definitely get sterile water...need to figure out micronutrients...maybe I should try and find a spiderweb for rope...or would I want carbon nanotubes?  Are spiderwebs carbon nanotiubes?  ...Don't think so, there was the thing with genetically modified goats...

"What do we know about the ecosystem here, anyway?"

"At some point, I am going to need to start writing down all the questions I have. You are some kind of scholar, right? I don't know a lot because I haven't had the opportunity, but most of what you say raises so many questions. First and foremost. Aren't you a little worried about the book having you? Regarding the ecosystem. This is a terraformed, the lifeforms derived from Core's. Not as dangerous as it could be. Animal life seems rare and sometimes weird-looking?"

"I'm barely a dilettante, really, when it comes to doing actual science, but I do know a whole bunch of random stuff about random fields.  As far as the book - I can't exactly do anything about that, so...I'll deal?"

He looks at it suspiciously. "Are you sure you can't? Or is it just that you can't think about it... or?"

"...I haven't noticed anything like that, I simply just don't have the tools to even really poke this guy yet.  I mean.  I could probably crystallize them but it seems rude to do that to a person in non-exigent circumstances.  And I'm pretty sure they're a person.  They can communicate."

...She should probably open them.

When she does, it lands on the initial page as before. There is addition to the text that was previously. ...apparently just a narration on what happened since she last looked at the thing. It mentions her passing out, thought it doesn't directly say that the book did it. It does mention her "book-acquired translation" without elaborating on it. The book narration has also been labelling the various people as "Henry-5" or "Vera-2" and so on. It is also referring to her as 'Lucy Starwalker' instead of the previous 'UNDECLARED ERROR 404'.

"...Yeah, see?

"Anyway, any comments, magic book?"

She flips the page back and forth once.

"The pages are blank."

"...huh.  Well I'm sure seeing writing."  She shrugs.  "Magic book is a magic book, I guess."