Redweld nods, as he suspects he's going to be doing a lot in the near future, rubbing the back of his neck in preparation. "Yes, I-- we have some knowledge of how the brain functions, and you're correct there are several chorismic rituals for emotional regulation, my brother and I have had...personal experience with that. And, duct tape is a tape you put on a duct, I assume? I can imagine maybe as a way of showing whether it's flowing and in which direction. Or maybe to patch a hole if it's sticking tape. though I'm not sure why you'd call it duct tape then."

"It was indeed invented to patch ducts.  Pretty strong stuff; there was a crew of - theatrical engineers, best-guess approximation, their stock-in-trade was taking all those old 'a watched pot never boils'-type sayings and apocryphal occurrences and seeing if they were real - who made things as varied as cannons to boats to survival gear to trebuchets out of the stuff."

"Fascinating! There's a niche genre of teletheater that I think 'theatrical engineering' would be an apt description, something my brother and I watched quite a bit when we were young, and these fellows sound like they'd have fit in quite well."

"They literally did both engineering-for-teletheater - television in my language - and engineering but theatrically!"  She grins.

"Yes, exactly right. There's a whole little sub-culture of people who develop the engineering skills for teletheater production who then go on to put their work into the spotlight, especially as the echonet becomes more widespread, cheaper and easier to access. I should show you some. Welkonn watches a few of them religiously." This prompts a single knock on the window from the aforementioned brother.

"Ohh, this is great.  I'm going to live through the great revolution that is the birth of the Internet, do cool magic, and keep y'all from doing some stupid shit!  Aggressive implicit type conversion," she grumbles.

...She almost seems eustressly overwhelmed by the idea, of the vistas spreading out before her; her eyes water a bit, and she can't seem to stop smiling or drop her 'victory pose' - a fist pulled in, clenched tight in satisfaction.  "We're gonna do great things."

"Are you...alright?" Redweld asks with some genuine concern.

"I dom't know, but I think I'm better than I ever would have been back home, and isn't that sad?  But I'm just...too excited to properly care about that!  There's science to be done!"

"Well, I wouldn't say that it's hard for being Recognized to improve your life, but, I'm glad that you're feeling good about things. And indeed there is! In fact..."

The carriage begins to slow down significantly, then turns off the magical stone road and onto a short dirt path, continuing to slow down until stopping at a metal gate. Redweld gets up and out of the carriage, and Maria can hear him speak. "We're with the volunteer corps. We found a lost woman down on the Old Road after receiving a call from the shuttle bus, and we believe she's been newly Recognized, and wants to speak with the researchers."

"Oh, wow!" A young man's voice, maybe around the same age as Maria, maybe even a little younger, exclaims. "Right, yeah, let me open this up for you. I hope it goes well!"

There's a bit of squeaking as the gates are opened, probably a bit in need of greasing, as Redweld walks back up to the carriage door and offers his hand to help Maria step out. "Welkonn will park the auto while we find some researchers."

"Sounds like a plan."

She hops out on her own - she is very tall - but nods thankfully to Redweld nonetheless.

Welkonn drives the carriage around once the two of them are out of the way.

Inside, there's a lobby with plenty of seating, with a tall (though not as tall as Maria) dark-skinned woman sitting at the front desk, waving at the two of them as they come in. "What brings you two to the Swarthwalls Echoic Research Facility today? There was some unexpected activity picked up on the scanners, just so you know, so even if you have an appointment there may be a bit of a wait."

"We're actually here about that..." Redweld says, looking over to Maria and waiting, in case she'd rather explain herself.

"Hi!  I'm pretty sure I was that unexpected activity and I have so many questions!"

The receptionist makes a surprised expression, before quickly schooling it into a smile. "Oh, wow! I'm sure you do! Ah, let's see..."

She picks up a metal plate from a slot in the desk and holds like a phone, speaking into one end with a distinct 'talking to Siri' manner, with strict cadence and clear enunciation. "Office of Director Goodbarthson."

She waits for a moment. "Exactly right, sir. One of the volunteer corps members says he's brought the Recognizant, a young lady, they're here in the lobby right now. Yes sir." She hangs up, placing the plate back in its slot. "The director wants tests to make sure we have everything straight. Please head down to the scanner bay," she pulls out a little map of facility, indicating the location and giving some instructions on to navigate there, "they should be getting ready for you right now."

After navigating various hallways, descending a couple flights of stairs, and passing several painfully academic-looking older men rushing around the facility, they arrive at a large room dominated by a single and towering construction, a sort of metal tree with what must be at least dozens of different instruments tipping its branches. Some are vaguely recognizable to Maria, but many are utterly inscrutable, including a large number of seemingly featureless flat metal panels sticking out at various angles.

Attending to this construct are several lab-coated scientists wielding more metal plates in their hands. One of them, a thin man, not old but not young either, with shortly cut black hair, seemed to be watching the door that Maria and Redweld entered through and quickly walks up to them. "So, which of you is the Recognizant?"

Redweld gestures to Maria, and the scientist turns to her. "So, uh, we're still setting up, since we just got word a few minutes ago. If you have any questions about what we'll be doing, what we're measuring, that sort of thing, I can take those now? I'm researcher Orchard, by the way." He offers a hand to Maria.

"I have so many questions, and they start with how are you measuring and what are you trying to measure, in the first place?  And how the heck does that work at all, wouldn't you want to isolate these from eachother so their emissions don't interfere with other scanners'...oh, but you could actually be doing interferometry of some sort - okay I'm almost certain that that's just a buzzword, but if you're going to be shooting shit at me and measuring what spalls off I want to know what beforehand, that's dangerous - or maybe it's compositing if this is mostly passive...but really, why are they all on a big tree?  Surely you would want more degrees of freedom and less sticks-bashing-into-eachother?  And I'm sure it's possible to coordinate..."  Her hands move, as if trying, and probably failing, to sketch out a more free-moving sensor setup that probably involves gimbals and gyroscopes.  "Anyway, yes, hi, you may call me Maria; pleasure to meet you, I hope."  And she does, after a moment, remember handshakes exist!

Orchard shakes her hand, and Redweld's for good measures, then takes a deep breath. "Alright, let's try and answer those one by one. The array here," he gestures to the tree, "Is mostly echoic reduplicators, tuned to various quantities and qualities. There are some chorismic distinguishers and ananemonic sensors of various sorts, but echoic is definitely the predominant mode of observation, this is an echoic research facility after all."

"The array at the moment is tuned mostly to echoic activity signals, mostly in the local range, since we were...looking for you, basically. A good number of the devices will stay on that, the Swarthwalls have a relatively rare sort of echoic, uh...the common parlance is 'resonance' but it's not a literal sound, to be clear, but now that we have you here the instruments are going to go back to whichever project they were being used for earlier today, or whatever they're scheduled for next. I don't have the itinerary memorized, sorry. I was working on some astrometry when things went crazy."

"The array is shaped like that because it's part of how the array integrator lets all the instruments work together. The instrument limbs all help connect the individual inscriptions to the integrator, which shapes the exclusion zones of the instruments they're holding so that they don't interfere with one another. You're right that some of the ananemonic devices still get in each others' way though, so we keep most the rest of those on the roof or in the storeroom by the external staging area. It's a bit of hassle to work with the array sometimes, but it's better than having to space every individual instrument hundreds or thousands of feet apart."

"I hope that's a good start? Sorry if that didn't make much sense."

"A-ha!  Yeah, if chorism works like so and this is more a radar than...you probably don't have the analogy I'm trying to make, actually, but I think I get the difference, maybe?  It's not 'try to resolve one thing in a small area really well', it's 'try to resolve lots of things everywhere at once'?"

"Correct! Oh! Sorry, to be clear, the array isn't actually what we're going to be scanning you with, that is in an isolation chamber, over there," he gestures to one of the other doors on the far side of the room, "since we don't want to catch anything else. Uh..."

He processes that he may have completely misinterpreted Maria's questions and begins again, "For you specifically, we're going to be using just a smaller ree-dee and dee-gee, for now at least. Just to make sure that you're actually Recognizant and not some hoaxster or deluded or something. Not that I think you're lying, or that the volunteer corps would lie about this! Just, need to make sure, right?"

"Yeah, I picked that up eventually.  And as for making sure I'm not a fraud - I would too, in your position.  Expand those abbreviations, if you would?  Ree-dee and dee-gee?  And then I'd like to know what they do, of course.  I'm regrettably entirely unlearned in the field of wind-tech, for all that I know random stuff about everything else."

"Oh, right, yes, ree-dee is short for reduplicator and dee-gee is short for distinguisher. They, uh, reduplicate and distinguish signals? That's not helpful." Orchard considers this for a moment. "So, the winds have, uh, 'resonances' like I mentioned before, and Recognizants carry some of that. With enough precision you can figure out a lot, stuff about their invocation especially, but in a minute we're just going to be checking if you 'have' any 'resonance', above the norm for ordinary people anyway."

"That makes sense!  ...What sort of signals; is there a particular medium through which they are carried?  Have you tested them in a vacuum?"

Orchard wags his hand uncertainly. “It’s a pretty popular idea that there’s a sort of ether that the winds flow through, but that isn’t really borne out by the data. I think it’s mostly people being biased towards thinking of the winds as being…windy? Because of what we call them. As for what the actual medium is, it’s not totally clear that there is one? All of these do work in a vacuum, up to the limit of their durability anyway. Some of the inscriptions are surprisingly fragile to metal dust deposition.”

"...huh.  Waves must have a medium - unless they're also somehow particles, looking at you photons - that's how you have waves in the first place.  But then there's the whole quantum uncertainty principle business, so maybe it's some weird probabilism...And how the heck is there a mind running off of space, anyway?  Like, I can hold a conversation with Echo at the very least, and I don't think it's -

"<Hey, Echo, quick question, what's 213 times 7471?  Times 3.  'cause I know I'd have to solve that longhand.  My apologies for the math, but...gotta check my assumptions, you know?>"

"Also does anyone have something I can write on?"

“It’s not entirely clear that they are waves at all? I mean, you can make a reduplicator or distinguisher that scans for waves of various sorts, but that is not the only sort of signal it can pick up. I might be using the wrong word for that I guess? The plain dalmercian and the technical jargon have diverged a bit and I’m not really much of a science communications guy. Oh!”

Orchard fiddles with the metal plate he’s holding, whose face seems to transform into paper. “You can write on this, and just tap here,” he indicates a little rectangular symbol with five dots in it, “if you want to type instead of hand-write.”

After waiting exactly as long as it would take Maria to do the arithmetic on paper herself, and indeed possibly at the exact time Maria finishes the calculation if that is what she is going to do, Echo answers, <4,773,969!>