The librarian startles again when the forb moves to the side, actually hopping back a bit this time. She looks worriedly around the room and edges toward the door.

Oh dear. Weeping Cherry supposes that being spooked by an unknown crystal is actually a pretty reasonable reaction.

Now that she has someone's attention, she could try backing out the way she came until she's outside the blue area. Maybe the librarian would be less spooked if they weren't in this ... machine shop?

But doing that probably involves spooking the librarian more by running around her to the door.

Ultimately, the least frightening thing to do is probably to behave predictably. And the librarian hasn't exactly asked her to do anything. She will sit quietly on the counter and try showing a picture of her exchanging English text with other crystals of different colors.

The librarian peers at the new images - she's not close enough to see such small pictures very clearly, but she doesn't seem willing to get any closer.

Entirely understandable! Weeping Cherry is a bit small right now.

Is there enough clear space on the table between them that she could project the images on the table instead? If so, she'll try that.

She'll show herself exchanging English with other crystals, some humanoids exchanging vague glyphs, her looking up at the sign by the library entrance, her flipping through a book with the glyphs from the sign written in it, and then her exchanging vague glyphs with a humanoid.

There is enough space for that; the librarian flinches again at it, but watches, and then asks if she's some kind of alien or something.

Yes! Finally!

Weeping Cherry will show some pictures of of the view from her apartment in Luna City: a look out over brightly colored domed buildings that give way to pale cratered land with the full Earth visible hovering about thirty degrees above the horizon.

Okay, that's... she doesn't actually know what that is. But the alien shouldn't be in peoples' spaces like this without permission. She can have this room, the damage is already done here, but in general: Don't Do That.

Oh dear. She didn't mean to ... steal the librarian's break room? Office? House? And she doesn't know how to give it back, or if that's even possible. It suggests that maybe the man wanting not to touch her is a ritual purity thing and she's also not supposed to touch other people or their possessions?

She also isn't sure whether the other hallway she explored is a problem or not. She shows her journey from the landing pad, down the hallway, back and then into this room. Then she shows which areas she looked at on the outside, trying to find the entrance.

The librarian tenses up a bit at this, where she'd relaxed just slightly on confirming that Weeping Cherry is some kind of alien, and sighs.

She will do her best to ignore that, and if it turns out she needs to build herself a new garden, so be it. Weeping Cherry should absolutely not go there again.

Presumably she didn't just come here for a lecture, was she looking for books?

Oh dear. In retrospect, it being a garden makes more sense than the library lending out animals.

To answer, she tries showing pictures of books, scrolls, tablets and tapestries. Anything with words on it.

Yeah, okay. This is not actually the best place to be, for that, she doesn't have a printer of her own, but she can figure something out. Does Weeping Cherry know any of the language already or should she be getting somebody to illustrate baby books for her? Uh, this glyph is 'first' and this glyph is 'second' and these are how you draw 'not' (it's the first circle modifier she saw on the sign) and 'or' (the second circle modifier).

She is so happy to be learning words! And their library prints books on demand? That's pretty neat, and explains why there doesn't seem to be a circulation desk or anything. She wonders what their computing technology is like.

She shows 'second', and then tentatively draws a circle around it.

All right. That's probably going to be the formatting team manager's teenage son, he likes to draw; Weeping Cherry can come meet him if she likes. Can she get up the chute, or does the librarian need to figure out how to set up another exit first thing?

"First," she writes.

She scoots along the table in the direction of the chute, because she's not sure if that means she should leave immediately, or if the librarian has more questions.

She'll meet her outside in a few minutes, then, she needs to get her airship from its hangar.

Great! Cherry will jump off the table and slide across to the chute and then up. She's assuming that she'll be able to push aside the flap covering the chute from this side. Does that prove to be the case?

Yep! It's not heavy at all.

It takes the librarian about ten minutes to show up with the airship. It's something like a miniature zeppelin, with the gondola sized for one person to be able to comfortably move around in and the balloon proportionally rather smaller than airships she might have seen elsewhere; the balloon is also shaped like a stratus cloud, flat and layered. The librarian brings it down from above, but pauses before touching down to clarify that Weeping Cherry shouldn't try to come aboard until she explains how that works.

Weeping Cherry scoots back a little bit to make it clear that she won't come aboard without permission.

She'll touch down, then, and transform a section of the gondola wall into a set of steps that she'll then sit on.

So, the basic thing to understand about ownership is that each person - each Crafter, thinking animals largely don't do this kind of thing and couldn't do it this way in any case - has their own design that they put on any objects they claim, and that they use to mark the edges of their territory. Hers is blue with clouds, for example, and Weeping Cherry can tell from that that the airship and the signboard and her clothes are hers. The monoliths by the tunnel entrance mark that as the start of her territory. She should never touch someone's things or enter someone's territory without their explicit, in-that-moment permission; Crafters basically can't do that, under normal circumstances.

There's also various ways of marking something as un-owned; territory is rarely marked like that, at least around here, but objects or parts of objects will be if it's okay for anyone who happens to come by to interact with them. The local custom for it is for those things to be made or marked in a plain hematite-grey color. If something is partly hematite-grey and partly some other color, she can interact with the hematite-grey part but nothing else; if it's entirely hematite-grey, and she doesn't need to interact with anything of another color or pattern to get to it, she can just have it. If she goes far from here they might use another color to designate things as un-owned; that's usually a shade of grey, or a plain earth tone of some sort, but if she's at all unsure she should ask, and if it's not a plain single grey or earth toned color she should assume it's not unclaimed.

- she should also not touch people without their explicit in-the-moment permission, outside of medical emergencies where they might die otherwise or similarly dire situations; even then it's likely to really mess them up and she should try to avoid it if at all possible. This again only applies to Crafters, thinking animals aren't like that.

If someone invites her into their territory she should still not go anywhere or touch anything they haven't invited her to; the exception to this is that she's always allowed to leave, by the shortest path she knows and without dawdling.

For the flight, she's going to recolor part of her ship to hematite-grey for Weeping Cherry to use; she expects her to stay in that area and might lose the ability to fly the ship if she leaves it. Is that clear and something Weeping Cherry expects to be able to abide by?

Weeping Cherry isn't sure if this is a language where two negatives make a positive or not, so she settles for showing "first" again.

She'll move closer but not touch the airship until the librarian makes a hematite area for her.

She stands and hematites the steps and roughly the back quarter of the floor space, then extrudes a portion of the gondola wall to become a ramp up to a viewing platform at railing height with a clear dome over it that Weeping Cherry can use to look outside without risk of falling out of the ship.

Is this enough space? Are there any problems with it?

"First. Not second," Cherry agrees. She hops up the steps and then slides up into the observation bubble and turns her largest facet back towards the librarian.

All right. This will be a pretty quick flight, but they might have to go looking for him if he's not at home.

She fixes the wall of the gondola back up, adjusts the propulsion fans on the outside, does something to the balloon that makes them more buoyant, and they're off. It's a quick flight, as promised, just a ways around the mountain and up a bit to another landing pad, this one with a shiny green signboard and green monoliths beside the door. The librarian touches down gently and re-opens (and re-hematites) the side of the gondola, and goes to touch the hematite circle in the middle of the fifth piece of writing on the sign - this will call someone up from the formatting team, she explains.

Cherry hops down the steps to wait outside the gondola, since that seems polite. Does the librarian look as though she is open to more conversation while they wait?

It's a bit hard to tell; she certainly doesn't seem inclined to start any.