Rolling and unrolling, then.

It makes a couple cycles, but then doesn't quite unroll all the way, and twitches but doesn't roll again very well.

Loril frowns and inspects it. "-Ah. You'll need a new leaf, you've broken the veins, it lost structure."

"Huh, I thought I was being gentle enough but I guess this is what practice is for." New leaf.

New leaf can be curled and uncurled just the same.

"Shaping can go straight past structural integrity more easily than meaning. That is, it's easier to just break something by pushing it too hard. Many industries are powered by undead beast legs on bicycles, however."

"Wow, I guess they would be, wouldn't they."

"They are efficient, if not exactly portable or maintenance-free. You can accomplish the same thing with a binding on a looping water-trough moving a water-wheel, but the capital costs are greater and it's not better enough to be particularly worth it, as I understand it."

"Looping - like a wave pool?"

Loril makes her 'confused' face.

She focuses for a moment on a nearby fountain and then presents a torus of water floating in front of her hand, flowing in a loop.

"Ah, not like a wave pool, thank you."

Well, she'll continue teaching Bella with that characteristic style of not saying much but always being helpful when she does say something. Motemancy exercises for her lately include fucking with stone in various ways, implementing a basic plumbing system, the really tricky finicky 'siphon' that lets ordinary people recharge bindings, a somewhat fiddly process to produce liquid oxygen (separate from liquid nitrogen), and sterile barriers and dust-collector bindings. The biomancy work continues, with her practicing meanings on plants and occasionally insects for now, and shapings on twigs and leaves if she's still too squeamish for preserved mouse.

Other outstanding matters include Loril's borrowable book on the nature of mana, and any socializing or exploring the Riverwalk she wants to do.

Is the primary use case for producing liquid oxygen then being able to have gaseous oxygen later? She'll try the mouse if there are things best learned from the mouse. She will also borrow the book and heads to the Riverwalk every couple days to browse and get accustomed to the value of mana in this economy and become familiar and familiarized with the other space angels.

There are multiple uses for liquid oxygen, principally as rocket fuel, coolant, and feedstock for industry. And yes, she should at least learn the basics of working with undead, the basics of all the major disciplines. She might be able to get up to the point of the scrapes-and-bumps-trick, and to the point of making nice one-piece-as-if-it-grew-that-way furniture and doing slightly more sophisticated things to plants, by the end of the training. The book is called "Subtle Weave - The Fabric of the Multiverse and how to get Something From Nothing".

The Riverwalk seems to be largely a social place as well as a commercial one; There's date spots and amphitheater-type spaces and board game groups and seminars and meetups and schools and ballrooms and bars and cafes. The actual riverwalk part of the riverwalk is quiet and peaceful, a lot of winding gardens and arboretum type spaces that manage not to feel too crowded despite how many people visit them by clever use of mirrors and winding paths and such.

Her fellow Earth-import seems to be a serious introvert. A lot of these people seem to know each other very well already, and be pretty entrenched in their routines and likes, and she can sort of join them or just go her own way, but the spice store girl will chat about recipes with her and the Gardening Department that owns like two entire blocks of the place will hire her to make pretty paving stones and pots and such. Reystrom, owner of the Riverwalk, manages to badger Loril into delivering a fancy gilded invitation to her- A 'garden social' described as a party with her as the guest of honor. Or she can drop by his place for a chat instead if she wants.

Oooh. She will be happy to do her magic practice as gainful employment making pavers and pots. And she will attend her garden social too.

It's not great work, but as low-skill practice goes, gainful employment indeed.

The garden social has fancy decorations and live music and trained (clean) exotic animals wandering around like some kind of petting zoo. Reystrom introduces her around and asks what's so great about the internet and wonders what daily life is like without any magic at all. The last Earthling, the one from Senegal, didn't really seem to want to talk about it!

"I don't know much about Senegal except that I think generally speaking the continent it's on is less developed than the one I'm from," says Bella, picking up a passing jerboa to pet. "So he might have had a worse time of it. The internet is great because it's a universal reference - all the effort necessary to create a reference about anything can go into the internet and then everyone with internet access can read it. It's also useful communicatively but I couldn't get that here, just the reference function."

Patrons make interested noises. "Something like a library, I suppose? A place of great scholarship and art? It must be terribly expensive to maintain so many copies of things."

"It requires high tech but it's not expensive for individuals in a society wealthy enough to have it."