The crows don't have designs, that's a humanoid thing. One of them thinks it's a little weird that she has one, now that she mentions it.

The enbubbled humanoid is approaching now, slowly enough that she'll have no trouble leaving if she doesn't want to deal with him. His bubble is clear all around, with a white sunshade on top and a deep red base where the spindly glossy-black spiderlike legs attach; it's a bit surprising that legs that slender can support a structure that large, particularly with a humanoid inside.

Well, being approached slowly is probably fine. She is a bit small right now, so she's a bit hard to see from far away. She makes sure she has a clear line to the water if she needs to bolt, and pivots so that the face she's been using as a display is facing towards both the mass of crows and the approaching humanoid.

To answer the crows, she makes the middle section of her crystal 'transparent' by pulling photons into/out of her simulated environment. She is a human with brown hair with dark green undertones, wearing a white and silver filigree one-piece garment like a cross between a jumpsuit and a summer dress. She quickly changes it to match her coat of arms pattern. With the scale of her forb, the simulated photon trick makes her look maybe 5cm high.

Once she's sure the 'window' is working correctly, she waves at the crows.

Woah! How'd she get so tiny!

She turns off the window and shows the lab-explosion-falling sequence again. This time she makes sure the picture of the lab includes her and her forb-fragment, showing her as being her proper size.

Hopefully that communicates that she used to be larger, the accident happened, and now she's here and small. If it doesn't, she's really not sure how to explain that she's running on a computer inside the forb using diagrams. That sounds like a longer explanation.

They still don't get it but maybe this guy who's coming over will. They hop to the side to make room for him, and fill him in: There's a tiny humanoid in that rock! So tiny! They're having trouble communicating right now like humanoids do sometimes when other humanoids have messed with them, probably because they were stuck in a bucket for a little while. It seems like they'll probably be okay though?

The guy in the bubble settles it on the sand a few feet away from her, and wonders if there's anything she needs right now or if he should have the crows leave her alone so she can recover a bit.

Oh, the humanoids are psychic too! That's good. Cherry was half preparing herself to learn that they were being puppeted by the crows.

She takes a moment to figure out how to say that she doesn't mind. She settles for showing herself, the bubble fellow, and the crows all together on the beach and then a smiley face.

Then she tries the lab-explosion-falling sequence again, this time followed by a map of the terrain that she saw surrounded by grey fog filled with question marks.

He doesn't recognize that glyph. He can make a model of their surroundings, if she wants. Can she show light for yes and dark for no?

Yeah, she's going to have to learn their writing system and/or figure out how to teach hers without a shared language.

She shows a bright, clear white color.

Good! Does she want to see a model of the area?

She briefly blinks the color off revealing her natural golden color, to indicate this is a new response, and then back on to indicate she wants to see a model.

Okay! This is going to take a few minutes.

He draws in the bubble's legs, reconstituting them as a thin sheet in front of it, and then starts deforming and recoloring it into a map of the nearby terrain, lighting up the different regions briefly and explaining what's there as he goes. The part of this valley above the lake is pretty thoroughly claimed, with the lake serving as public land on one end and the last section of land before it gets unpleasantly mountainous reserved as public land on the other, and a network of trails leading between them and to all the individual claims, which he marks out with their colors. There are teenager accommodations in a few places as well - he points them out - but visitors usually come by airship and stay in the sky to sleep, or land on the mountains, rather than having space in the valley set aside for them. The next valley over to the south is fairly similar, though they don't have a lake and do have a larger chunk of forest set aside for hunting. The next valley over to the north is claimed by the library all the way from the eastern mountain to the river, and beyond that it's more individual claims. To the east and west it's mountainous for as far as this map shows, except that there's a lake up in the mountains to the northwest that he says has a few people living around it. There are claims in the mountains as well, but he's not really a mountaineer, he doesn't know the details of them.

Huh! That is all good to know. The library especially -- that sounds like the place she needs to go to figure out their written language. She doesn't know what a 'claim' entails, though. Is she, like, allowed to pass through them? Or will she have to wait until she can fly to leave the lake?

She puts up her own copy of the map and marks off the places he's talking about as he goes to show comprehension. Then once he's finished, she tries drawing a few little paths that wander through public areas, showing her crystal moving along them. Then she tries showing her best guess at a good path through the mountains to the library, which passes through or nearby a few marked claims. She moves her crystal along it until it reaches the boundary of the first claim, and then hesitates there and turns into a question mark.

This might be too complex for pictures. She's a little worried that she'll inadvertently offend her interlocutor somehow, this being a worse error than merely being misunderstood. Her backup plan is wait until she can fly again, but that's going to take forever, so it would be nice to know if she could just climb the mountains.

She won't be able to go that way, the Crafter who has that claim isn't that friendly. She can go around, or the next one over might be willing to let her through, or the crows will probably be willing to show her where the unclaimed paths are if she doesn't think she'll be able to remember it, or she can wait an hour or so and he can go with her, if she wants.

That sounds very helpful!

Weeping Cherry shows pictures of the two of them leaving the beach, and then clears her surface again. She's not sure what to ask next. She's probably got the best answer she's getting to 'where am I', and the locals aren't likely to have any idea what happened either. Getting into questions about how they're manipulating objects sounds like it would be easier with actual vocabulary.

Are the crows still around?

Yep! A few more came in while she was looking at the map, too.

She doesn't want to metaphorically turn her back on her interlocutor, but she also doesn't know what to say. While she thinks, Weeping Cherry gathers up some sand and makes little glittering holographic glass beads, gently tossing each one to a crow who doesn't have one as thanks for their help.

She isn't sure why he wants to wait an hour -- if it's because he's got something to do in that time, she should let him do it. If it's because he's waiting for a process, she has time to ask more questions.

Is there a way she can ask that which isn't going to be rude?

She tries showing two side-by-side pictures, one with the two of them exchanging thought bubbles, and one of her waiting alone while the shadows change, with a pink swatch under the first and a green swatch under the second.

That's a neat trick, turning bits of sand into crafting-material and then into shinies that quickly; he's impressed. The crows are pleased, too.

He doesn't recognize the thought-bubble glyph, either. Probably she should rest, if she's still having trouble communicating? And the sooner he gets back to his fishing the sooner he'll be ready to show her where the trails are.

That's enough of an answer for her to go on; she really does want to expedite library access. She'll briefly turn green, and burrow into the sand a little bit, to indicate that she's fine to wait here.

'Turning bits of sand into crafting-material' sounds like an important clue to how their ability to change objects work. Presumably 'crafting-material' is the not-made-of-atoms stuff that the bucket was made out of. If turning sand into it sounds like a neat trick, probably that means that they have a limited supply of it?

That explains why they would need to fish -- if they have a limited amount, presumably they don't want to rely on it for food. Although maybe it's not edible, since it isn't made of atoms.

Can she actually turn sand into crafting-material? She scrolls back through the forb's scans of the bucket and tries to see if there's an obvious approach to try first, although she's aware it's probably a bit of a long shot.

The guy in the bubble is briefly confused at what the green means, but interprets her burrowing as wanting to be left alone, and rebuilds his vehicle's legs and goes back to his fishing.

It's not at all obvious from her scans of the bucket how she'd turn sand into crafting material. If she checks the sand itself, it's mostly perfectly ordinary crushed rock and shells, with some particulate-sized crafting material pieces in a rainbow of colors mixed in.

... huh! Well, that makes sense if they use a lot of it.

She tries suspending one of the crafting material pieces in the air beside her and poking it. What physical properties does it have? Is it malleable? Ductile? Flammable?

If she grabs a second piece for comparison, do they have the same physical properties?

The first piece isn't very malleable, ductile, or flammable, and seems to be mimicking granite in its properties in general. The second piece is slightly more malleable and also maintains a constant temperature a few degrees cooler than the current temperature of the air, even when she tries to heat it.

Weeping Cherry is perfectly aware that her forb also violates the laws of thermodynamics, but she wasn't really expecting to find something that just ... doesn't get hotter?

What happens if she tries hitting it with individual air molecules? What happens if she tries making it colder instead?

It continues to maintain its temperature! The air molecules get cooler when they touch it, as you'd expect from them touching something the temperature that it is, but it doesn't get warmer in the process.

Fascinating! She will spend some time sifting through the sand to see if she can find any other crafting-material fragments with different properties.

Most of them are fairly mundane, either mimicking the properties (but not the appearance) of naturally-occurring materials or at least riffing on them without doing anything strange. A fair portion have other traits, though; holding a steady temperature in the range that humans find comfortable is fairly common, and she can find a few that are much cooler than that and a smaller handful that are much hotter. There are also some that change shape or size when interacted with, in a variety of ways; these all obey conservation of mass, either maintaining the same volume as they change shape or becoming more or less dense as their volume changes. All of the particles have properties that would allow them to have weathered into the size they are, but there are a few examples that are significantly harder or softer than the rest, suggesting that crafting material can come in varieties too hard or soft to weather into particles like this. She may also notice that hematite-grey particles are over-represented compared to other colors.