When her current book finishes, she will start downloading the dictionary.

"You have book of Crafter talk to neighbor?" she asks. "Crystal person want talk good. Crystal person want have talk of talk to Crafter good."

There aren't really books on communicating with crafting, kids pick it up before they pick up reading almost always, and... they wouldn't have a book on that for the same reason they wouldn't have a book on how to walk, basically, it's the same kind of thing you just do without thinking about it.

"Not book of crafting talk. Book of to Crafter talk," she elaborates.

She shows an animation of a person with a forb connected to their head sitting outside. Another person with a forb walks up to them. They wave at each other and say "Hello!". The scene changes to one person giving another a gift. The person who takes the gift says "Thank you!"

"Crystal people talk special talk to good neighbors. Talk of good neighbor is good," she continues. "You is good neighbor of crystal person. Crystal person want talk good neighbor talk to you."

He thinks Crafters don't have that, they tend to talk to other Crafters all the same way and thinking animals usually the same way as that, except for, like, close friends will have shared references they'll refer to sometimes, and that doesn't generalize.

... huh.

The Crafters being so similar to humans might have lulled her into a false sense of security. Either she has failed miserably to convey the concept of politeness words, or they don't do those. She supposes that if they're less social, they might just ... lack a lot of rituals for social cohesiveness.

She feels pretty awkward about not getting to express her thanks, though. It feels as though she's being ungrateful, even if they aren't expecting anything.

She's about done with the chocolate anyway, so she finishes it up and pushes it towards him.

"You find second book?" she requests, because she's not sure she can put together a coherent, specific request until she's finished digesting this thought.

Sure. On computer-making, or something else? Kid-level or adult? The glyphs for computer and kid and adult are this and this and this.

She's not having trouble picking up concepts, really, what with the helpful telepathy.

"Adult, not-computer," she specifies.

Crafting, then? Crafting books for adults are pretty advanced, though, anything covering the basics is going to be for kids.

She doesn't particularly want a crafting book either. A story where characters do a lot of interacting with each other and various objects would be perfect, but she doesn't think she can really specify that.

"Kid crafting is good if you talk is good," she agrees. On second thought, maybe he's suggesting crafting books because they talk about many different objects? If so, that's probably a really good idea for vocabulary.

If she wants something else he can try to figure that out, it just seemed like she wanted a crafting book a minute ago, and it does seem like she should learn about what it can do at some point.

"Crystal person talk not-good. Crystal person want (not crafting book or crafting book). Crystal person want book of a lot (messages or talk or thing)," she tries to explain.

"Crystal person not talk of enough thing. Crystal person want talk of a lot of thing."

...oh. Yeah, it does make sense that she'd want a lot of just basic vocabulary. They have kids books for that... he'll have a look through the catalogue...

Rather than look through the catalogue itself, he actually looks up a parenting magazine type thing that has an article recommending books for various purposes; while it's printing, he tries a nibble of the chocolate. It's tasty!

Cherry takes a moment to check on the dictionary's transfer progress, and see if it will be done soon enough for her to grab the book before he starts reading, but she can't really tell. Worst case, she'll just have to take notes on what he reads aloud and then grab the corresponding book once the dictionary finishes.

What he comes up with is a children's illustrated dictionary set, which prints without the illustrations but is set up to be read to a child; he makes her a copy of the first book before he begins reading it, which only takes a moment once it's printed. The first book is focused on basic vocabulary and grammar, and is reminiscent of a Dr Seuss book, showing a group of animal-of-the-illustrator's-choice as this one and that one eat a snack, this one takes a nap but that one does not, this group sequentially walks down a path, and so on.

This is perfect! She'll use the provided example sentences to straighten her grammar out a bit, and start matching words to adult-dictionary definitions as they go to try to multiply her vocabulary.

The next book is about crafting, and describes in basic terms what can be done with it - changing crafting material's shape and color and density are all simple actions, making it glow or keep a temperature are a little harder, and programming it to react to what's done to it is harder still, but grown-up crafters can usually do all of them, and a kid has probably seen examples of all of them right in their own bed-nook, with sheets and blankets that stay just the right temperature and spots they can press to turn a light on or off, or run a fan, or get a drink of water. Fleshcrafting is another important kind of crafting, since it's where most of a Crafter's food will come from; more advanced fleshcrafting can do things to animals, too, and if they ever get really sick or injured or want to look very different or have their body be able to do new things, they can see a fleshcrafting specialist to get help. Like normal crafting, fleshcrafting can't make new matter, and for animals it can only use material that's already part of a creature's body, so if you have a health problem where you're losing weight it's important to get help right away while there's still enough of you for a fleshcrafter to work with! Fleshcrafting is also used to make fancier kinds of food plants; it's good for being able to make just exactly the kind of plant you want, but the plant's seedlings will be the same as if you hadn't changed it, whereas if you do it the harder way, with genecrafting, the crafted traits can show up in the seedlings, too. Genecrafting can also be done to animals, and the easiest thing to do with it is change living things back to how their ancestors used to be; it's also possible to add new traits with genecrafting but it's very hard to get right and not usually done to animals.

Wow! That is a lot more versatile than she was imagining. Some parts, like maintaining a constant temperature or reacting to stimuli, is just straight-up magical. A forb could do that, but only by actively spending effort on it, not just making a material that does it by itself.

And likewise the fleshcrafting and genecrafting sound really interesting. Forbs can and do get used to change people's shape or tweak their genetics, but usually by means of actively-maintained puppetry, not just creating whole new traits or bodyplans from scratch.

She had not, until the thought of genecrafting came up, thought about whether humans and Crafters could be cross-fertile. Hopefully that doesn't matter for language learning.

She shows a picture of the dinosaur she saw. "Fleshcrafted it is? Or not fleshcrafted it is?"

That's usually genecrafting! Most crow populations have some dinosaur genetics floating around, so it's not too uncommon for dino-crows to just pop up at random from time to time.

That is wild! Also so not how genetics works.

"Why not-Crafters lost? Not-(Not-Crafter genecrafting things in Crafters)? Not-(Crafters genecraft Crafters)?" she asks.

The previous humanoid species? It's not really clear what exactly caused them to die out - there was an ice age a few thousand years ago and they started having a lot of health problems partway into it, and that was the proximate cause, but nobody managed to figure out why that happened. They did do some genecrafting of Crafters, back around the time Crafters were first learning to craft; Crafters have a couple tweaks that make it easier for them to have children that came from them. Complicated genecrafting is hard to get right, though, and Crafters have a hard time being around each other to help if something goes wrong and someone's not able to take care of themselves, so it's rare for a Crafter to get anything more than very simple and straightforward genecrafting done these days.

"Crystal person sees!" she responds.

She takes a moment to see if she has other questions about crafting. She's getting the impression that they might not have good enough clocks to meaningfully answer this, but maybe it turns out to work at the speed of sound or something.

"Do here react there thing: fast or slow?"

Ansibles react immediately over any distance; other crafted objects can go pretty much arbitrarily fast, but there are risks involved with being around fast-moving objects, so usually people keep things to more reasonable speeds.

She's taking 'immediately' with a grain of salt, because Earth is only about 42 light-milliseconds across, but fair enough. That could be really useful!

If they can go arbitrarily fast, though ...

"Crafters go to <picture of the moon>?"

People have tried! The air gets really thin if you go too high, and they haven't figured out how to keep going up when it's too thin to float on. There's a concern about how much air you'd need to carry to get there, too, they don't know how to freshen air with crafting.

Oh, that makes sense. If crafted objects have to push on something to accelerate, they're going to need developments in rocketry to go any higher.

She briefly debates explaining how air compressors, electrolysis, and rocket nozzles work, and then decides that this probably isn't the time.

"Next book?" she asks. She can see he's got two books queued up, which suggests he's been thinking about what should come next.