The next two dictionary volumes are about Crafters and Crafter lifestyle and about crafted objects and tools; does she have a preference for which one they do first?

"First book," she requests. If she needs to indicate an object she doesn't have words for, she can just draw a picture. Depicting Crafter lifestyles seems harder. And also she's still vaguely hoping to find some evidence of conversational politeness norms, because it's still weirding her out a bit not to know any.

This dictionary starts with spots for illustrations of male and female crafters, to give the glyphs for all the parts of the body; it seems like they don't shy away from depicting nudity, here. The next page is intended to show illustrations of the common fleshcrafted additions people might get - tails, whiskers, prehensile and sensory tentacles, fur and feathers and scales and shells and bioluminescent patches, even digitigrade feet. (Extra limbs with bones inside are notably missing.)

It then briefly discusses the stages of life - a familiar baby-through-elder progression, with the ages more or less matching human development - before getting into how ownership claims work and the vocabulary related to that and to unclaimed objects and areas. (They have a mild taboo on making large changes to unclaimed areas - trails are obviously okay, and from the imagery he sends about shared social spaces clearing out some trees and putting up furniture is fine, but you wouldn't put a permanent building there, or pave a path, there's a definite sense that unclaimed space is meant to be essentially wild.) It also discusses teenager areas, a kind of liminal state between a public area and a private claim, where Crafters who no longer feel comfortable in their parents' territories but don't feel ready to claim a territory of their own live for a few years with their agemates.

Reproduction is next, and as was hinted at in the discussion of fleshcrafting, this doesn't seem to be a purely heterosexual affair; apparently with the right kind of fleshcrafting any two Crafters can have children together, though it doesn't go into detail as to how. It does explain that crafters with the appropriate anatomy can have children long after their last meeting with the child's other parent, and give a little vocabulary related to the mechanics of that.

Relationships are next, parents and children and friends and neighbors and pen pals and all the other ways people relate to each other, with the noticeable exception of any concept of marriage and with the addition of the concept of a chosen-parent, some neighbor a child gets along with particularly well and might essentially move in with. After that, it discusses roles, first showing how to change a glyph for an activity to instead refer to a person who does that activity and then giving a long list of activities not mentioned elsewhere in the books. (The do have a word for trade, and by extension traders, but there's no reference to money or any other purely mercantile activity.)

At the end, it discusses letter-writing, which finally gives her the politeness words she's looking for; in person, emotions are expressed by just showing them, and they're taken not to translate very well to written language just like taste and smell don't, but there are glyphs for the basic ones including appreciation, enjoyment, hoping-for, regret, and so on.

Oh, that's really neat! Both the morphological variety and the adaptations for a less-social species.

"I appreciate you reading to me," she says as soon as she has the word for it. "I enjoy writing"

She thinks for a moment about bones, and then shows a picture of an octopus using sticks as 'bones' to get leverage.

"You can't fleshcraft bones? Crafters use crafting-material stick for bones?" she asks. Then she shows some pictures of people who have used forb-puppetry to give themselves extra arms, or turn themselves into centaurs.

Aww, he feels warm and fuzzy about her appreciation. If she wants to write a book they'll be very happy to distribute it!

He doesn't recognize the octopus at all, but he can answer her fleshcrafting question: It's possible to fleshcraft bones, but hard to get all the muscles and ligaments and so on working right for a bony limb, only the best fleshcrafters can do something like that, so it's not common to run into someone who's had it done. The most complicated thing he knows of anyone having done is wings, which aren't good enough for real flight yet; he's pretty sure a centaur body like she's showing is beyond even the most advanced fleshcrafters.

Tails like his one coworker has are an exception, he thinks to mention after a moment; there's a simple genecrafting trick to unlock a Crafter's body's ancestral ability to grow a tail, and then it can be fleshcrafted from there.

"Crafters not like too many Crafters. Crafters like Crafters-with-tails more?" she asks. "Crystal people like neighboring lots of people. Crafters like me better if I make body with four feet and tail?"

A Crafter with a tail is just a Crafter for territory purposes; people might well be more comfortable letting her come and go from their territories if she has a four-legged body like an animal, though. But it'll be on a case-by-case basis - some Crafters don't even like actual thinking animals being in their territories - and he expects she'll also find that some Crafters have trouble thinking of her as a fellow Crafter-tier person that way.

Hmm. Honestly, that makes it sound like she should A) shapeshift as the situation calls for it, and B) check whether the population of people who would have trouble thinking of her as the same tier of person is correlated at all with the people who still wouldn't want her to visit anyways.

"After I make a body, Crafters like me to make them more legs and more arms?" she asks.

If she can do that safely she'll definitely be able to find people who want it, yes.

Weeping Cherry makes a note. It's not top of her to-fix list (that would be 'death', followed by 'scarcity'), but she wouldn't want to forget something like that.

Hmm. She's got a pretty good vocabulary for basic things, now, although not as many different objects and she feels as though her grammar probably needs to improve via exposure.

"You enjoying reading? If you enjoying, I hope for next book. If you not enjoying, I try read to me," she says.

He could use a break, if she thinks she can manage by herself for a bit. His printer has stopped, having produced three more books (which he hematites) - does she want him to set her up with another one first? The magazine mentioned an early-reader series that's supposed to be good for practicing reading that should be available as a whole set, if that's the kind of thing she's looking for.

"Number of book?" she asks. "I read with machine," she elaborates, making an arrow that points at the still-operative transparent terminal.

It's, let's see... 5698-3286. He doesn't mind her using his printer if she wants to do two things in parallel, though, the real question is whether he should hematite it for her before he goes.

Oh! That makes sense.

"You craft it," she agrees. "You craft it so I see things?" she asks, showing the top turning transparent like the other one.

Yeah, he can do that - he hematites the keypad and the spool of paper and the area around the paper intake and output slots, and makes the top of the machine transparent and hematites a border around that as well, leaving the main body of the machine lilac.

Anything else before he goes to stretch his legs a bit?

"No. I appreciate you helping me," she says.

She turns her main facet to face towards the second terminal, keys in the magazine code, and then grabs the already-printed books to read while she waits for that to load.

The next book in the dictionary set appears, after some examination, to be about tools Crafters make, but without illustrations or translation it's hard to figure out much in the way of details.

The one after that is a catalogue of animals and common plants, with the plants grouped by use and the animals organized by family and with an interesting fact about each one, which makes it much easier to follow. If she's paying attention, she may also put together that this planet appears to be an Earth, more or less: the spots set out for each animal have a glyph representing where they live, and some of the glyphs look remarkably like South America, Africa, and Australia, and others look quite a bit like North America and Eurasia except that the northern coastlines are quite different. The animals seem to be more diverse widely distributed than she'd expect at home, for example both elephantoids (fun fact: a very good fleshcrafter can give you an elephant's trunk!) and cameloids (fun fact: these animals spit when angry!) are attested in North America and there seem to be several kinds of animals she won't recognize at all - large predatory birds, most strikingly. There's also a section at the end about domesticated animals: they have dogs (fun fact: dogs are the only non-thinking animal that can understand what it means when you point!), chickens (fun fact: chickens are omnivores, and will eat any bugs or small animals that get into their pens!), and a few kinds of small meat animals, but no cats, horses, cows, pigs, goats, or sheep. Octopi are also missing from the book, but so are a lot of other marine animals, so that may only mean that Crafters haven't explored their oceans very much.

The final dictionary discusses natural phenomena, including weather and terrain; it's tricky to make sense of, but unlike the book on tools, there's enough discussion of things for her to puzzle it out.

Ooh! That was more fun animal facts than she was expecting.

Weeping Cherry will contentedly read through all the alien children's dictionaries, and then start matching vocabulary words to descriptions in her adults' dictionary to build out synonyms and try to pin down category words, etc.

If nobody interrupts her, she'll pull down as much of the library's index as she can, just to have some idea of what's available. Occasionally she'll interrupt the download of the index to grab a book that looks particularly edifying.

She also plots the latency and throughput figures of the downloads, and idly considers whether this demonstrates anything about the library's internal architecture.

She will happily dive further and further into the library until somebody comes to interrupt her, or until she should sleep to synchronize with the local solar cycle.

It doesn't take too long after she finishes the last of the kids' dictionaries for... come to think of it, the Crafter dictionary didn't mention the concept of names at all... the lavender Crafter, anyway, to stop back in: the teal argyle one didn't find the team leader's son, he reports, and it's getting to be evening; does she need anything before the group turns in for the night? Did she want him to make her a sleeping nook here?

"I don't need a nook," she replies. "My crystal is comfy! I can stay here without a nook?"

She can if she's comfortable with that! Most Crafters have trouble relaxing enough to sleep without a nook, and he wasn't sure whether that was a species trait or not.

Weeping Cherry's expanding vocabulary has not gotten as far as 'virtual', and she's not confident that she's gotten weak synonyms like 'pretend' worked out correctly either.

"Crystal people want nooks to sleep also sometimes, or other crystal people to sleep with. Crystal people can sleep without a nook if they want to," she explains. "I have a nook in my head in my crystal."

She displays a picture of a nest of multicolored blankets and stuffed animals, although she leaves her simulated body out of the picture because she still isn't sure how much looking like a Crafter is a problem for the lavender one. The picture also shows a dent where her body is not being pictured, a mug of hot cocoa, and the books she's been referencing, although they are formatted and bound in the Earth style instead of in the Crafter one.

That certainly looks cozy enough!

He can also leave a call bell with her if she thinks she might need someone in the middle of the night; it's quite safe in here though so he's not expecting any problems.

"I like a bell," she agrees. "I appreciate you helping me. I hope you sleep good."

Aww <3

He takes a pinch of crafting material from the embellishments on his outfit and focuses on it for a moment while he splits it into two, then makes a little box with a button on top and one half of the ansible inside; he'll hook the other end up to a bell in his nook.

If that's all, he hopes she has a good night!