They're pretty enthusiastic about playing in general! Not too keen on staying in one place to hide, though; instead the game turns into more of a team-based stealth tag kind of thing. (They seem to have some kind of preexisting understanding of who should be on which team.)

Oh interesting! She considered making little colored bobbles for them to use for team games, but decided against it. Is she lumped into a particular team? Can she tell by looking what team people are on? If she scans back through the last hour of footage, were the crows in these same groups before they all came over to examine her? How do the crows behave with members of their own team versus other teams?

They do seem to be expecting her to be on one of the teams in particular, possibly just because it's the one with fewer birds. These crows aren't any more distinctive to her than any other crows, so she may be having trouble telling them apart at all, much less determining who's on which team.

When they aren't hanging around her, the crows tend to be singletons or in pairs, with the occasional trio; all of the crows that were paired or trioed before coming over are on the same teams with their friends now. They do seem perfectly friendly with the birds on the other team, though, in general.

Weeping Cherry's whole selftree is moderately faceblind, and their personal software writers are perfectionists, so her forb already comes with software for tracking people that adapts cleanly to birds after a bit of tweaking. She has the forb invent glyphs for each crow, and doesn't have problems tracking them even if she looses sight of them momentarily.

In any case, she'll play team-based stealth tag and try to figure out crow interpersonal relationships for a while. Does it look like her library-escort is making good progress on his fishing?

Yep, his buckets are pretty full and she can catch him occasionally glancing over, though he is still fishing for the most part.

Well if she is waiting for him and he is waiting for her, that is ridiculous. She will wait for another break in the game and stop playing with the crows.

She'll find a spot on the shore in clear view and settle down to wait. She can spend the time annotating her recordings and writing down her observations so far.

It takes a bit for him to spot her, but he heads over eventually.

Is she feeling better now, he wants to know.

She's not sure how to answer that -- strictly speaking, she's not feeling any better now than she was, because she was feeling fine before, but that's clearly not what he means.

She's also not sure how to answer that -- she doesn't know if he remembers the light-for-yes, dark-for-no convention from an hour ago.

She settles for just showing the two of them moving away from the beach, and moving in approximately the right direction. She'll feel a lot better about all this once she's had a chance to look at the writing system.

That's fine by him. They do have a healer if she wants someplace more private to stay for a while but if she'd rather be about her business that's understandable.

He hasn't bubbled back up, but instead has his crafting material following behind him in the form of a smaller legged cart that he guides with a long handle on the front of it. Most of the cart is done up in his red/white/black color scheme, but there's a small hematite-grey platform with a lip around it that he points out is available for her to ride in if she wants to.

Weeping Cherry is so glad to have landed on such helpful people! She jumps up on the platform and orients the main face she's been displaying things on in their direction of travel.

And off they go! He's not very talkative, possibly because he won't be able to see her replies; he does explain what's down each path whenever they come to a crossroad. After a bit, they come to his claim - the border of it is marked with a chest-high red monolith - and he indicates that she can come in while he picks some things up for the rest of the trip, or wait ten or fifteen minutes for him just outside, whichever she'd prefer.

She'll come in with him and take a look around. What kinds of things does he have? What does he pick up to take along?

He has a shed, not too far from the border of the claim, where he unloads his fish buckets into a chilled locker and takes a large dense lump of crafting material out of another section to expand and form into a more substantial walking vehicle than his current cart or his previous minimally-material-requiring bubble - this one isn't enbubbled, but is more of a padded chair with spider legs and a control panel. He adds an armature coming from the back of the chair and a hematite-colored platform to the end of it, and then invites her to move to the new vehicle so he can stow the material from the one she's on.

Sure, she'll hop onto the new platform. When he controls the crafting material, does he have to be touching it? Can she tell whether it takes him any longer to change large items compared to small ones, or complicated items compared to simple ones?

He doesn't have to be touching it, though he prefers to, and he does have to pay attention to what he's doing. Large changes take somewhat longer than small ones of the same complexity, but complex changes take significantly longer than simple ones, unless he's using a model of what he's changing the crafting material into - he has one for the mechanical base of the vehicle, for example - in which case the complexity doesn't matter.

Weeping Cherry speculates about the mechanism for a moment, and then has a thought that is either stupid or very clever.

When he changes something following a model, how closely does it match? Clearly he scales it differently, but other than that is it identical?

What happens if she asks him to duplicate her forb?

She makes a little pinging noise to get his attention, and then shows him pinching off a small amount of crafting material and turning it into a duplicate of her forb.

...uh... ... ...sure, he can ...do ...that?

He actually has a really hard time trying; it's clearly an act of will for him to bring his hand that close to her, and then a second after he manages it he pulls it back as if he'd touched a hot stove.

Her forb isn't made of crafting material? What the heck??

Oh dear. Now she feels bad about imposing when he's been so helpful.

She hops down onto the forest floor and grabs some dirt and fallen leaves. It has plenty of carbon, so she pulls that out and makes it into a little diamond replica of his walker. Then she takes the tiny blob of crafting material from the beach, and holds it next to her, trying to conspicuously fail to do anything to it.

Earlier he thought she was turning the sand into crafting material, but maybe now he'll inspect the statue and see that she isn't. She scoots away from the model so that he can pick it up without getting near her.

...he isn't sure what's happening here but he wants it not to be happening in his territory; he is very emphatic that she should leave now.

Ah.

She will grab onto the forest floor and slide away from him back the way they came as fast as she can without tearing up the ground. She doesn't really have a way to thank him. She makes a note to come back and drop off a letter once she knows the writing system.

Once she's outside his claim, she'll just have to do her best to make her way to the library without local guidance.

She follows the path in whatever direction seems most libraryward, stopping and backtracking if she comes to a dead end, and trying not to pass any more of those chest-high markers.

It's not that hard to figure out; the trails do meander a bit to avoid the Crafters' claims, but as long as she doesn't go into someone's claim she won't find a dead end, and as long as she keeps heading uphill she'll find the pass eventually. It's a little more complicated from there; she still won't run into any dead ends, but the paths tend to turn away rather than continuing all the way to the river.

Hmm. At some point she's fairly sure she's going in circles. She finds a tall tree and climbs it. Can she see the library from here? About how far away is it?

The library is very visible, yeah! She's not too far away, but the path she's on doesn't go there and doesn't have a turnoff that does.

Well, she's done her best to respect people's claims so far, but she might have to trespass a little to get there. She gets as close to the library on a path as she can, and then heads off path through the woods.

This works fine, at least in the sense that she doesn't encounter any people. (She does startle a family of llamas.) She also won't see any structures, here at ground level, unless and until she makes her way to one of the legs holding the library structure up overhead or to where the main structure juts out of the mountain on the other side of the valley.