Yeah, of course! She could make a little cart Weeping Cherry can pull, too, if she wants one.

She's certainly strong enough, she just didn't want to drag the terminal along the ground.

"I like a cart!" she agrees. "I appreciate the help."

All right, she'll just grab the cart model and they can get going.

Does Weeping Cherry want to go anywhere in particular? It is technically possible to get down from the formatting team's landing pad on foot (including with a cart), if she just wants to start there and see where she winds up (or for that matter just hang around on the edge of the landing pad, she's small enough that she won't be in the way), but that's not a very pleasant walk and she won't mind taking her up or down the mountain in her airship.

She thinks back to the layout of the mountain from the air.

"The side of the pad is good," she says. "I can read and come back with questions, or I can go down the outside. Can the cart have hooks on the corners? I can put a balloon on it if I need to go down a place that carts don't."

Sure, of course!

The walk out to the landing pad doesn't take long; once they get there she wants to know how Weeping Cherry wants her personal design to go on her cart.

"I don't understand. Do you ask what the design is, or do you ask how the cart will be that way?" she asks. "My design looks like this," she says, projecting her fern pattern on the ground.

"If you don't want to make it, I can make it like this?" she suggests, pulling in a few grams of air and turning them into a scrap of cloth and a bit of paint, and then applying the latter to the former.

She was planning on doing it, but - well, for a Crafter it'd be important that it look the way they want it to, anyway. She might want the fern pattern to sit like this, or like this, or like this, or some other way; she might want to separate the design out so that some parts get ferns and other parts get swirls; she might want certain areas just gold or black or purple, she might want some raised detailing, things like that.

Oh! That makes sense.

"Crystal people don't have territory designs. I made the design for talking to Crafters so they understand, but I don't want the design one way or the other like a Crafter would," she explains. "All the ways are good."

...it's really weird to make that kind of decision about someone else's design, but sure, she can do that. The cart ends up with purple-swirled black legs and a pulling harness that's black with raised gold ferns that extend horizontally off of it by an eighth of an inch or so, with the main body left hematite-colored for the moment. Next she makes the reader, with similar flourishes - the swirls fade out near the viewing window, and the ferns become raised and extend just into the border of the clear section, while the number buttons are gold and the tray holding them is black with purple swirls; she includes a pair of hematite handles on either side of the reader to let her move it into the cart. The roll of paper is next, black by default and set up to change to gold when lit, or back to black when cooled; next to it she packs a cooler for the paper, with a roller inside to pull the whole roll or a smaller scroll over the cooling plate and a box underneath to take a book or a stack of sheets. She has to think for a minute about how the sunshade should work, but comes up with a design where pressing a forb-scale foot pedal will stiffen or relax the place where four support rods meet at the top of the shade, allowing it to be popped out into a stiff structure or folded down for transport.

Is there anything else Weeping Cherry might want? Does she want to leave the handles on the reader? She'll color the rest of the cart as soon as she's sure she's done interacting with it.

"That's very pretty!" she reassures. She thinks for a moment.

"The handles are good. Can you make straps to tie to the handles, so that the machine is safe if the cart tips?" she asks.

Sure, that's easy enough. Does she want them integrated into the cart, the reader, or neither?

If they're attached to the body of the cart, that probably makes them more secure, and she can detach them by abrading the crafting material if she has to for some reason.

"Make them on the cart," she requests. She nearly phrases it as 'Can you make them on the cart', but she's not totally certain that would make sense right after neon bubbles said that she could, because she's still not totally certain whether or how this language does politeness circumlocution.

She doesn't seem offended, at least. She adds a little winching mechanism on each side as well.

Anything else?

"No, this is good!" she replies. "I appreciate the cart. If I can do something to help you, I hope that you let me know."

She will!

And the body of the cart gets Weeping Cherry's fern pattern, and she goes back in.

Weeping Cherry hops up on her new cart and settles in to read. She has her forb continue to pull down library books, occasionally looking at the queue and re-ordering them to get more interesting looking texts sooner.

She starts off reading more of the children's section, focusing on getting her grammar straight, and then branching out to finding more precise synonyms for her basic vocabulary words.

Every once in a while, she'll take a break and stare out over the valley below, watching the distant flying machines.

Once she feels like she's gotten a handle on the language, although that takes several hours, she pivots to searching more broadly for books that explain large systems (how projects like the library get organized, if they have some form of organized mail system, etc.) or that explain introductory philosophy (Why do things have value to Crafters? Do they have a concept of rights? Of exchange? Of labor and capital?).

She can find a few other descriptions of megaprojects like the library - there's a big hospital-slash-medical-college, and a couple different places people congregate to learn genecrafting or fleshcrafting from each other, and someone's built a museum of different types of machinery that's open to the public, and a handful of other things like those - but nothing about how those projects get started. They don't appear to have a formal mail system, but crows and parrots and traveling Crafters seem to generally be willing to carry messages. There isn't much in the way of philosophy books for adults; from what she can gather from the kids' books on related topics, they just don't come up very often: There are relatively few things that crafting doesn't allow them to easily get, primarily meat and exotic plant products, and those are traded for, but not with much enthusiasm. Other Crafters' time is sometimes traded for but more often freely given when someone is a close friend or has an interesting request and withheld otherwise, and there's no reference to anyone having anything that might best be described as a day job. And the principle that one person's right to swing their fist ends where another's nose begins seems to be enforced entirely by instinctual taboo; several of the children's books discuss how coming to feel unable to touch other people or go into their territories without clear permission is normal and nothing to worry about, and she'll also find the issue discussed in books for people learning medical fleshcrafting, who have to intentionally cultivate the necessary mindset to work on someone who's too injured to affirmatively consent if they want to be able to do that, and quite often don't succeed at becoming able to.

Wow! She already knew they had taboos around territory and touching people, but that's a lot more extreme than she was imagining. Do they just ... not do collective agreements?

She suddenly has the feeling of having twelve things to do and nobody to delegate to, which she hasn't felt in a long time. She makes a note that she should make designing and adopting a non-humanoid body plan a priority, to try and trigger their instincts less strongly.

She checks her forb's repair progress and extrapolates out. She has 101 days before she'll be able to get global fixity field coverage in place, so probably at least 80 days before she can get coverage over major population centers (if they even have such things). She has time to work this out and do it right.

If she can't really start a mail conversation with dozens of people simultaneously, probably her best bet is to try and track down someone patient to explain all of the things that even a child would know about what the problems with her default plan are. And maybe she could hijack the existing library connections to get connected to people that way?

She takes another day and a half to really make sure her language is solid, because being understood well is super important, and then tugs her cart over and jumps to hit the hematite call bell.

Lilac comes to the doorway after just a few minutes, and is happy to see her and curious about what's going on.

"Hello! I'm happy to see you too. I have read a lot more books and gotten better at writing in your language. I have some things from my home world that I want to give to everyone -- primarily an emergency medical response and teleportation network -- but reading your books made it really obvious that crystal people and Crafters think more differently than I thought," she explains. "So I want to find someone who's willing to listen to my plans and point out what parts would hurt people that I didn't notice, or which parts are unnecessary. Do you want to chat about that? Or if not, do you have some idea who would?"

That does sound interesting! It also sounds like it might take a while; does she want to come inside?

"Yes, I would," she agrees. She slides over to the territory boundary and then hops across the border.

The hop is amusing; he leads the way back to the lounge, where the neon-bubbles Crafter and a new one with a design of blue and purple pentagons and triple spirals on a white background seem to be playing some kind of board game, and claims one of the couches for them.

She hops up beside him, and orients her main facet towards him.

"Go ahead and interrupt me if you have questions at any point, but I think I should probably start by explaining a bit about how my world uses fixity* crystals. That's the kind of crystal I'm made of right now, and it lets us manipulate the location of everything within a certain radius. Right now, I only have a few centimeters of range," she explains, making her range glow gently so he can see it.

"But once I'm healed up from my unexpected injury, I'll be able to build bigger fixity crystals with larger ranges. On my world, I built a crystal large enough to cover the entire planet, and then made it available for everyone to use. This lets people not only teleport by moving themselves around, but also create things by rearranging the fundamental building blocks of matter into new shapes. That's how I can pull in air and turn it into a solid, for example -- I'm taking the smallest components of the air and rearranging them into the pattern for something else. There are also direct medical applications -- closing wounds, putting back missing limbs, etc. Does that all make sense? That's more background information than my plan itself, but it's probably important to understand why I want to do this in the first place."

*She's coined a new glyph for this that looks a bit like the glyph for location

He freezes, a little, when he gets to the part about the crystal large enough to cover the planet; his eyes go wide and it takes a second for them to keep moving along the line of glyphs.

That... makes sense, sure... and he can see why that would be appealing to someone who wanted to help their neighbors... but she's going to hurt a lot of people very badly if she does that here. Like, in the sense that he's not entirely sure his species would survive it.