She's a few miles up, tumbling through the air over proud young mountain range, snowy at the peaks, blanketed in forests lower down, and dotted with lakes and... what even is that, actually. Some kind of structure, clearly, from the artificial colors and regular shapes, but it's huge, built partly into the mountain but extending at least a quarter mile from it.

The nearest lake is in the next valley over, if she wants to aim for that, or there's a river running under the structure - it's not very wide or deep, though. Or plowing into the mountainside at speed is always an option.

When Weeping Cherry planned her experiment, plowing into a mountainside was not actually one of her expected outcomes.

She pushes the forb's diagnostic windows aside and scans the landscape. She grabs onto as much air as she can, which proves to not be much at all. She fires it in brief jets to control her tumbling, and then in one large jet as hard as she can manage to slow her descent.

When that proves insufficient to overcome gravity, she decides that the lake does look like a better prospect, and angles herself that way.

There are a few people on the shore of the lake, fishing or walking along the shore or just enjoying the scenery, and a few more people out on the lake in boats or on rafts; they mostly look mundanely human, though one has royal blue hair and a few appear to be addressing members of the local crow population. The boats and rafts are made from some clearly-artificial material, perhaps plastic, in a variety of colors and patterns, no two alike or even particularly similar.

It is, fortunately, not too hard to find a big patch of lake without anyone boating on it. The water is clear and cold and her splashdown startles a school of fish, who mostly manage to swim away unharmed.

She is not buoyant, but water is much denser than air, so she has no particular trouble moving enough water to stay on the surface.

She quickly checks through her forb's diagnostic messages for anything relevant and, finding nothing, scans the local radio and neutrino broadcasts, just in case something dramatic happened to all the forbs and there's a coordinated emergency response.

Her current best guess is 'alternate world'. She could just sink to the bottom of the lake and let her forb repair itself, but it will repair itself just as well if she goes exploring, and if she were the kind of person not to take the occasional risk, she wouldn't even be here.

She uses jets of water to skim across the top of the lake towards the nearest boat.

The nearest boat - gold-flecked burnt umber with midnight blue trim - is making pretty good time towards her, itself, though it slows when she starts jetting towards it. The person aboard the boat has a long-handled net (burnt umber handle, blue rim, gold net) to try to fish her out with, if she gets close enough for that.

Sure, she'll let herself be fished. If she needs to escape she can jump back into the water.

"Hello!" she says. "I'm Weeping Cherry. I was in an accident and I'm not sure what happened. Could you tell me where we are?"

The woman with the net looks very confused at Weeping Cherry speaking to her, and doesn't reply, but pulls her in closer - it seems like the net is actually retracting toward her, the handle getting shorter, though there's no visible mechanism for that.

With the net retracted to arm's length, she flips the handle over to more fully enclose the forb, and gets out a lump of - clay? moldable plastic? - and a two-inch-tall miniature lidded bucket, both in the same burnt umber color as everything else; with a moment's concentration, the lump takes on the shape of the bucket, but larger, and she carefully deposits the forb inside.

"What?" she says to herself. That pretty much confirms she's in an alternate world. You could do the same thing with a fixity device, but she didn't sense any fixity fields at all.

It looked as though the person could just make buckets, so Cherry doesn't feel bad about disassembling the side and climbing out.

... about trying to disassemble the bucket. It does not appear to be made of atoms.

"Really! Why was I expecting the magic bucket to be made of atoms," she complains to herself. Experimentally, she tries grabbing the side and shaking it. If that works roughly as expected, she tries using the sonic return to figure out how heavy it is.

It does work as expected! The bucket is slightly more dense than plastic, with a diameter about three times the length of her forb, so it's not very heavy, just a couple of pounds in weight.

Perfect! It is light enough to move, which means that she can still jump.

"Hey! Let me out!" she calls. As she does so, she aligns herself against one wall and throws herself into the lid of the bucket hard enough to make it jump a few feet into the air.

"If you don't let me out, I'm going to launch myself into the lake," she warns.

She can hear startled caws from outside the bucket!

Also, the thump of something heavy being put on top of it.

You know, she should have seen that one coming. It feels like she's been a bit wrong-footed this whole time. She thinks for a moment.

She briefly considers whether the bucket is thin enough that she could press herself against one side and use the air to do anything, but she's not sure what she would actually do with the air.

And she's on a boat, so she doesn't really want to play with temperature in a way that will get the boat stuck in ice or cause a fire.

It's possible that the person who enbucketed her is deaf, but it's also possible that they just don't speak English and didn't recognize her as something intelligent. Or they don't care whether she's intelligent, and would have enbucketed her anyway.

In the end, she's not in a rush. Her forb has plenty of room to repair itself, and once it does she can just construct a body outside the bucket. She clings to the roof of the bucket so that she can escape once it's opened, and makes loud wordless keening wailing sounds that should hopefully communicate distress even across a language barrier.

After a few seconds of the keening sound, the bucket stops vibrating along with it; it's been soundproofed.

The boat speeds along, taking only a few minutes to reach the shore, and then its captain deploys its legs to walk onto the beach. The crows have by this point confirmed that the forb wasn't dropped by anyone flying overhead - there are a few people up there, and even one with yellow as part of their signature color scheme, but he doesn't have any crystals like that and hasn't dropped anything today. With this established, the woman carries the bucket out of her boat and sets it on the sand before using a long stick to open it.

Weeping Cherry is a bit annoyed at being soundproofed. On the one hand, totally fair, she was deliberately making distressing noises. On the other hand, they could have just let her out!

When the bucket opens, she leaps out fast enough to hopefully be hard to catch, but gently enough to not do more than bruise someone standing in front of her.

When she lands on the sand, she'll grab some and use it to scoot out of reach of any arms or nets. If anyone tries to surround her, she'll spit sand at them.

There are a bunch of crows around the bucket, who quickly take to the air when she jumps out, but only the one humanoid, who's standing well back and doesn't try to catch her again. Half a dozen of the crows follow her, and two of those seem very legibly curious, well beyond what she'd expect to be able to pick up from their body language.

That's very strange. Is this ... a psychic crow hivemind?

She peers around at the other nearby humanoids, keeping an eye on whether they're getting closer. The crows are less threatening, although maybe they can also make spontaneous buckets. She flashes the first dozen prime numbers at the crows, in case that prompts a response.

The other humanoids are watching, but not approaching at all, and the nearest few seem braced to run, aside from one who's sitting in some sort of legged bubble that wasn't there when she was falling.

The legible crows seem excited when she starts flashing at them, and one is very clearly wondering what she is and who made her and for what.

Okay! She was totally guessing about the psychic crow hivemind, but apparently this is her life now.

She tries thinking hard in the crows' direction, in case that helps, although she hopes that it doesn't because that would be really creepy.

They seem to like the flashing, and she's noticing a lot of brightly colored designs, which makes sense if the crows are in charge. She tries putting her selftree's coat of arms on her exterior. It's a bright green fractal leaf pattern over a light blue Cartesian grid on a black background.

They don't appear to be able to hear her, but both of the crows are excited about the coat of arms! One of them breaks off from the group to go ask the humanoids whose design that is.

After a moment, one of the other crows becomes legible, wondering if she can understand them.

Weeping Cherry thinks for a moment about how to reply. At least visual communication is working.

She clears the coat of arms, and shows a picture of the crow and herself instead. She draws little orbs of leaving the crow's head and reaching her, and then some differently colored orbs leaving her, but vanishing before they can reach the crow.

This is very startling! They've never heard of a rock that was a thinking creature before! There's a lot of excited cawing about it and another of the crows leaves to go tell everyone.

Oh good! That's the important thing to communicate. Now that they know she's a thinking creature, presumably they will be less likely to imprison her and she can ask more questions.

She shows a picture of her lab (a clean, brightly lit, wood-paneled room full of strange machines), followed by a swirling explosion of color, followed by her falling and ending up in the lake.

The crows have no idea what that's all about.

Valid! She doesn't have much idea what happened either.

She thinks for a moment. Without the crows bringing up topics, it seems harder to make drawings that come across unambiguously. The primary things she's interested in knowing are where she is and what the crows and humanoids can do. The latter seems hard to ask about.

She tries putting a picture of her next to her coat of arms, and then a picture of the crows next to a blank space with a question mark next to it.

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.

What an interesting material or family of materials! If they weathered down to this size, presumably these fragments can be broken apart?

What happens if she tries cutting a fragment in half repeatedly? Is there a minimum size she can make? What happens if she tries abrading a fragment instead of cutting it?

The material can be broken apart or abraded, and maintains its properties when that happens, except that it reverts into ordinary molecules once it's worn down to molecule size; they're all molecules she'd be able to find in nature, and mostly they're molecules she'd find in plants but ones she'd get from dirt or stone are also common.

Weeping Cherry vaguely feels like conducting experiments is supposed to make you less confused rather than more confused, but that's not actually how the world works.

If she takes a piece that just broke down into molecules, and tries to shove the two halves back together, does that make it go back to being crafting-material? She's not really expecting that to work, but if it does than it suggests that maybe she can figure out how to synthesize more.

Nope, that doesn't work, the molecules behave exactly like she'd expect any other molecules of their type to behave.

What happens if she takes two different shards of crafting material and smushes them together agglomerates them? (She's a scientist. She totally knows words like agglomerate and can use them in a case report.)

Does it matter whether she tries agglomerating shards with similar properties or not?

With rare exception they aren't really inclined to smoosh together into a single undifferentiated mass rather than remaining separate grains that happen to be closely adjacent, and would crumble if she tried. The few pieces she has that are soft enough for that without already having been worn away into molecules can be mixed to form a mass with properties in between its constituent parts, proportional to their masses.

Weeping Cherry spends a few minutes trying to think of other tests and skimming through the sand for more fragments. She tries wrapping her growing lump of softer material around one of the pieces of harder material, in case they'll assimilate given time.

While she's waiting for that, she goes through her forb's various diagnostic messages to see if they shine any more light on what happened. They don't, really, but she does see that automatic repairs are working, albeit slowly. Her forb should be completely repaired in a handful of weeks.

She could sit and wait quietly, but she's in another world with telepathic aliens. She tries seeing if she can get the crows to play tag.

She can get the crows to play tag! Or, mostly, anyway, they have a little bit of a tendency to lose track of who's it when they get too excited. They're definitely having fun, though!

She considers shining a laser pointer on whoever is it to help them keep track, but that sounds like an unneeded complication.

She's happy to play tag with the crows while doing little additional experiments as she thinks of them for as long as they'd like. In particular, she tries melting the fragments that don't have a constant temperature and seeing how the material behaves as a liquid, or whether this lets her combine harder fragments.

A few of the fragments soften when they're heated, but none of them seem willing to melt. Some of them combust, instead; this is mostly the ones that are  mimicking wood, but not all of them, and a fair portion of the bone-mimics and a few of the stone-mimics and others do, too. The smoke they make is made of mundane molecules, again mostly plant-based ones.

Huh! She's tempted to just keep pumping heat into the ones that aren't combusting to see how far she can push it, but probably that is a bad idea on an inhabited beach. She adds that to her todo list to check later.

Actually, how many crows are there playing tag with her? She's seen a lot of them, in the boats and so on, and she's not sure whether this is a normal density of crows. Maybe these crows are more social and/or have more plentiful food than Earthly crows? Or maybe she's just bad at estimating what a normal number of crows is.

There are about a dozen crows playing tag, and another few dozen around and above the lake. (One of the ones out on the boats is a little weird-looking, now that she's paying attention, bigger than the others and with a longer face and tail.) She does seem to have attracted a crowd of them, but it's a big lake, it seems plausible that the overall number is reasonable.

Weeping Cherry zooms in on the bigger one with the longer face and tail. Are those the only differences? It's possible this is a different (sub-)species, but it seems a bit odd that there would only be one out of dozens of crows.

...that's not a crow, that's a dinosaur. Or at least that's the impression - they have a snout rather than a beak, and their tail has a long bony base supporting the feathers, and there are fingers at the joints of their wings. They do seem to be a very crow-like dinosaur, though, and they're hanging around with a normal crow as if there's nothing unusual about that.

Weeping Cherry pauses for a moment, but only a moment. Finding alien dinosaurs on an alien world is in some ways less surprising than finding species that she can immediately analogize to crows. Is there a humanoid in the boat too, or is this maybe the dinosaur's boat?

Yep! There's actually two in that one, an adult and a child; the boat matches the adult's outfit and the child's clothes are a different set of colors.

Weeping Cherry will wait until there's a stopping point in the game, and then try to ask the crows about the dinosaur and any other local sentient species.

She draws five pictures: herself and some other crystals, a flock of crows, a group of local humanoids, the dinosaur, and then a question mark. If that doesn't provoke a response, she'll try putting those things in a circle and a few plants and rocks outside the circle and then pulsing the circle a little.

They don't know what to make of that! When she puts the group in a circle and rocks outside the circle one of the crows will venture that all of the creatures she's showing are thinking creatures, unlike dogs or chickens or whatever and definitely unlike plants and rocks.

She adds dogs and chickens outside the circle. Then she shows them an elephant on the border of the circle, and wobbles it in and out.

Mastodons are thinking creatures, so that probably is too, but they've never met one.

She continues playing this game with intelligent animals (octopi? dolphins? ravens?), just to make sure that she doesn't accidentally mistake something for being non-sentient.

These particular crows have never met an octopus or a dolphin; one of them thinks the dolphin looks a bit like the thinking-creature fish they heard about from a traveling Crafter once. Ravens are thinking creatures! So are parrots and prairie dogs!

Weeping Cherry tries a few more marginal guesses to try and find a lower bound. How about ants? Cockatiels? Rats? Spiders? Woodchucks?

They've never met a cockatiel; of the rest, only rats are thinking creatures.

Weeping cherry makes a note of all the things they categorize. If all of these species are telepathic, she probably doesn't have to worry too much about hurting something that can think without being made aware of it.

But it seems like the sort of thing where it's best to be sure. She adds all of the species they mentioned to her forb's sentient-being-noticing software, and bumps the safety factor up. The environmental controls, etc., are already tuned not to hurt even non-sentient animals, but in an emergency her forb will now prioritize the welfare of these animals on the same level as other humans, instead of on the same level as the scenery around her.

That done, she's not sure what to ask next. She wants to ask about what the crows like to do, and to eat, but she has the feeling that if she grabs some biomass from the edge of the beach and turns it into edible food that this will cause confusion and consternation.

She decides to see what other games they like. How do they feel about hide-and-seek?

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.

Once she's found the library buildings, she's going to circle around them and try to get an idea of whether there's a main entrance or any signage. Starting there and checking with a librarian about whether she's allowed to just start reading the books or if she needs a library card sounds like a good first step.

A bit of looking near where the library structure meets the mountain will reveal a large stone landing pad, with a blue signboard standing against the cliff wall at one side of it and a tunnel next to that leading into the mountain; the mouth of the tunnel is flanked by blue monoliths. To the other side of the sign there's a smaller opening with a hematite-grey flap covering it.

Language!

Weeping Cherry carefully examines the sign to see if she can pick out different glyphs. How is the writing arranged? How many distinct glyphs are there? Are they joined up by a line or written separately?

The sign contains thirty-two glyphs, divided into six sections, each with a circle around it; the fifth circle contains a round patch of hematite-grey and there's two slots about the width of a sheet of paper, one rimmed in grey and the other rimmed in blue, plus another circular grey patch, below the sixth one. Many of the glyphs are also inside smaller circles inside the main ones, with markings around the edges of many of the inner circles; there are seven different kinds of circle edge markings present. The glyphs themselves are mostly moderately complex, suggesting that each one might be a word, with a few of them being markedly more complex and drawn a little larger to accommodate that; within each outer circle the glyphs are arranged roughly in horizontal lines. The most common glyph is present four times.

In particular they're arranged as follows, with parentheses for circles, G for glyphs, cG for especially complex glyphs, and M for circle markings:

(G1, G2, (G3)-M1)

(G4, G5, ((G6, G7, G8), (G9, G10))-M2)

((G11)-M3, cG1, G5, (G12)-M4)

((G11)-M3-M4, cG2, G13, G14)

(G15, G6, G16, G17 (on hematite circle), (cG3, cG4)-M5)

(((G5, G18), (G17, (G19)-M6))-M7, G13, G20, G6, G21)

Weeping Cherry spends a while puzzling over this. The circles give very clear groupings, which is nice. She's fairly certain that each large circle contains something like a single statement. The complexity of the glyphs suggests that the writing system is possibly ideographic, which is going to be a pain but makes sense if they use telepathy instead of a spoken language.

She spends a moment trying to see if there are any rules she can figure out for what order glyphs appear in, but ultimately she doesn't think the sign is big enough to infer anything. She guesses that the more complex glyphs are names or proper nouns, but that doesn't really give her enough to go on.

Based on the coloring, she's going to guess that statement 5 has to do with the hematite flap. Probably grey is a 'neutral' or 'public' color, and blue is a library color?

The blue monoliths flanking the entrance look like claim markers. How big is the hematite flap? Does it look more like a book deposit, or like somewhere that the local humanoids could fit through?

It's a bit bigger and particularly more square than the type of aperture you'd see used as a book deposit at a library on Earth, more like a laundry chute. A smallish humanoid child might be able to fit into it, or a crow if they had help keeping the flap up, but even a slender adult would have a hard time.

Probably that means that the flap is not an entrance. She'll call that plan B, because while there are probably books in there, going through a space not meant for people seems more hostile than going through an open door, even one that requires you to be a ... library patron? Something like that.

She slides down the tunnel, keeping an eye out for additional signage or anything that looks like a circulation desk or a librarian.

The tunnel only goes a few feet in, and then curves to the side and meets a door. Made of crafting material, of course.

Of course. Does it have a latching mechanism of some kind? Or are people expected to shape the door open and closed?

There's a handle, yes.

In that case, she'll try scaling the surface of the door and sitting just under the handle. Can she twist the handle at all? Is it made of discrete parts, and if so, what does the interior of the mechanism look like?

The handle isn't a separate piece from the door and doesn't turn. The door itself does shift a bit when she climbs it; it might not be latched shut at all.

She slides back down to where the door meets the floor, and tries tugging it.

It's hard to get started, the floor under the hinge seems to be slanted to encourage the door to stay closed, but she can pull it open with some effort.

Oh, that's a clever design! She'll pull the door partly open, scoot around to the other side, and then close it behind her. What does the area inside look like?

Friendlier! The ceiling is lined with glowing crafting material, the floor is padded, and the walls are done up in sky blue with realistic-looking clouds, with handrails in a slightly darker blue. The corridor goes a little ways deeper into the mountain, perhaps another ten feet or so, before splitting into a T intersection; there's another door on one side, perhaps matching were the book drop would lead, and a long hallway on the other with several open doorways leading off of it.

Hmm. This is looking less like a circulation area and more like librarian offices.

Still, open doors are promising. Cherry will go down the long hallway peeking in each of the doors.

Most of them lead to large rooms full of plants, generally no more than two or three of any given type, arranged neatly in rows and looking well-cared-for; there's also a room that's serving as a pen for half a dozen chickens, and one housing a family of rabbits.

Perhaps the Library lends things other than books? She wouldn't have expected a library to lend out rabbits, but maybe they reproduce quickly enough that you can borrow a few and then return their offspring within the lending period?

Or maybe she's just looking at the Librarians' lunches, and she's in the equivalent of a break room.

Regardless, this corridor does not seem like a good prospect for books. She back tracks and tries the other direction that might lead to the book drop. Maybe she can read some recently-returned items.

This door has the same kind of mechanism as the last one; it leads to a workroom full of tables cluttered with lengths of pipe and inscrutable pipe-moving mechanisms. There's a horizontal nook in the back with bedding inside, and the book drop lets out into a bin here; the bin is opaque, but at least not full enough that she can see any books sticking out of it.

There's a woman at the workbench, doing something with the pipe-related clutter; she doesn't seem to have noticed the door opening.

Oh! A librarian!

Weeping Cherry slides across the floor to the side where the librarian might see her if she glances up from her work. When she looks like she might be at a stopping point, Cherry will make a gentle dinging noise to get her attention, and show a picture of a book and a question mark.

The librarian seems confused and startled! She reaches for the forb.

Probably if she touches the forb, she'll notice that its not made of crafting material, which would be helpful because it might cause her to realize that something strange is happening.

But on the other hand, the man who was helping her earlier was very distressed at the thought of touching her, which at least suggests that if the librarian had all the information he did she wouldn't want to touch her.

She's not sure exactly why he was distressed, but plausibly she shouldn't let the librarian touch her without knowing more about her in case she regrets it? She slides back out of the librarian's reach and shows: a picture of her (in her current crystal form) in her lab, an explosion, falling into the lake, the path she took through the woods, and then another book with a question mark.

The librarian startles when the forb moves, and examines it uneasily; she doesn't seem to know what to make of the pictures. Instead of answering, she goes to get the bin from under the book drop - it turns out to be empty - and puts it on the floor under the edge of the worktable, then goes around to the other side of the forb, so that if it backs up again in the same way it'll fall off the table into the bin, and reaches for it again.

Okay, this is looking like maybe a repeat of the bucket incident. Weeping Cherry will scoot sideways to avoid being grabbed this time.

She tries showing herself sending pictures to a humanoid who sends little bubbles back, a picture of her reading a book, and then a picture of herself exchanging glyphs with a humanoid.

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.

Well, in that case she's going to spend the time making sure her language software is set up to handle the new language correctly and trying to think ahead about what pictures she might need to communicate with the formatting team.

It only takes a few minutes for someone to show up, anyway; this new person is ambiguously gendered and has teal hair and a long furry tail that's dexterous enough that it might be prehensile, and they're wearing a pale yellow outfit with accessories that match their hair.

The first librarian explains that, implausible as it might sound, they appear to have an alien visitor, in the form of this shiny crystal; the alien doesn't communicate normally - she's not sure why; she's vaguely guessing that the crystal is not actually the alien and is a machine that they're piloting remotely that can pick up on communication somehow, but she hasn't asked - and also doesn't know their language yet, so she was going to ask the newcomer's team leader's son to illustrate some kids' books for her to learn with.

The newcomer peers dubiously between the first librarian and the forb.

Weeping Cherry will show her lab, explosion, landing in the lake sequence again, even though it hasn't exactly helped so far. It's the closest thing she has to an explanation.

She also wants to contest the idea that she's piloting the forb remotely, but neither 'first' nor 'second' seems like a reasonable word to do that with.

...okay, fair enough, there's a communication issue, thinks the newcomer.

The engineer and the alien can come down and wait in the lounge while they look for him, if they want to.

    The first librarian - or, the library's engineer, apparently - thinks that sounds reasonable, if Weeping Cherry wants to; there'll probably be some other people there, though, so it might be a little overwhelming for her. Does she want to go, or stay here?

"First," she displays. She definitely wants to meet more aliens!

These people have all been very courteous about the possibility of overwhelming her, which is nice of them. Probably this also means that she has to be careful about overwhelming them, though, since she seems to have more tolerance for people than they do.

That's definitely an impression she might get about the locals, yeah.

The engineer relays this to the newcomer, who offers her their hand to lead her past the threshold, then turns to check if Weeping Cherry is following.

Weeping Cherry makes a note about the hand-offering in her cultural notes and follows after them. The hard surfaces of the library floor make it easy for her to keep up.

Their guide seems satisfied with this, and leads them in; the setup is similar, with a door separating the rough-hewn outer tunnel from the much more finished hallway inside, but this time the hallway's walls are colored in a much more complex way; the shiny green from the sign outside is used to divide them up into large sections, each of which is colored either plain medium grey, or in one of seven different patterns; one of the patterns is the teal and yellow of their guide, arranged in an argyle design with pale blue accents.

The group goes down the hall a ways, and then turns off into a spiral ramp that brings them down a story; the lounge is a large room with a mixture of shiny-green furniture and pieces matching the designs from the walls, with the side walls devoted to countertops with cabinets above and below and a row of plants growing against the back wall. There are two Crafters here, one in forest green and coral and the other in shades of lilac. Their guide goes and hematites one of the green couches for them while the engineer explains Weeping Cherry's deal to the other two Crafters.

Weeping Cherry will obligingly hop up on the hematite couch and turn her largest facet to indicate where she is looking as she peers around the room.

The brightly-colored territory markings are certainly cheery. She debates with herself whether she should cover herself in her coat-of-arms pattern again. On the one hand, simple colors like her default pale gold surface seem as though they might be more used as 'team colors', with more elaborate patterns used for individuals.

On the other hand, she's not sure if giving herself a pattern has other implications, or if it will be confusing for her to go from being one color to being another color.

Ultimately, she decides that as an alien being slightly confusing is probably her prerogative, and she's not going to find a less awkward time to claim a pattern. She decides to change her coat of arms a little bit, though, to avoid the colors she's seen in use so far.

She makes a show of examining the different designs on the walls, displaying a little animated thought bubble, and then covering herself in pale gold fractal fern patterns against a black background with subtle dark purple swirls.

By the time Weeping Cherry is done with that, the Crafter who guided them in has left; the green-and-coral one is still talking to the engineer, with the two of them seated on a couch in the former's colors, and the lilac one is on his way over to talk to her.

So, Weeping Cherry is an alien, huh? The engineer said she isn't communicating normally, which is pretty unexpected; should they be prioritizing figuring out why that's happening? He'll understand it if she shows light for yes and dark for no.

Weeping Cherry has to think about that one for a moment. On the one hand, it's normal for her not to have telepathy, and she doesn't want them to waste time figuring that out when getting language seems more important.

On the other hand, if the widespread telepathy is a function of the planet or environment, spending a little bit of time narrowing down what she would need to do to tap into it is probably worthwhile.

Ultimately, she decides that being able to ask questions about the telepathy is probably more worthwhile than playing twenty questions about it. She shows a dark charcoal grey, but with wavering, uncertain patches of lighter grey drifting across it like fog.

He thinks that means 'probably not, but there might be reasons to'; she can show... he thinks about it for a second... yellow, to get him to go back and correct an assumption like that.

Is she here on purpose, as opposed to by accident or something?

She did technically come to the library on purpose, but it's probably more true to say that she's here by accident. And it was an exceedingly accidental accident -- she didn't even know that other worlds existed until she was in one.

She momentarily absorbs all the photons that hit her, leaving her a pitch-black void in space.

Okay! That looks like it was an accident and not one she's very happy about!

They're working on figuring out how to teach her the language; is there anything else she's going to need in the next few days? She can stay here if she wants to, they can put in a wall nook so she can get some privacy, but he has no idea whether crystal aliens eat or anything.

So on the one hand, she doesn't need anything. She would be perfectly comfortable in the void of space. On the other hand, what an excellent opportunity to try and get someone to make more forb crystal.

She shows a plain charcoal grey with a little spot of light grey, followed by a picture of him turning a small blob of crafting material into a duplicate of her crystal and setting it on the couch next to her.

Sure, he can do that, if it won't bother her to be touched. He's wearing some crafting material in the form of embellishments to his outfit, and spends a few moments taking off bits from various sections to leave it still looking nice, and then offers his hand for her to hop into and/or lean against.

Sure, she'll hop into his hand! She's a bit heavier than she looks.

It's interesting that he has such a different response to being asked than the fisherman she met. She's not sure what's different about this interaction. Maybe it's that he (implicitly) offered to help and the fisherman didn't? Or maybe its that if he lives and works with other librarians on the formatting team that he's less touch-averse in general?

...huh; he was assuming her crystal was made of crafting material but it's not. Which means he can't copy it directly; he could make something that looked like it and had the right heft and things but he'd have to do it the long way. Does she still want him to?

She'll switch to a uniform charcoal grey and hop off of his hand back to the couch.

She wants to demonstrate that she can make things for herself, just slowly. She briefly checks how much air she can grab because she doesn't want to chew up the couch, and is excited to note she is already up to about 2.4 grams.

She gently pulls in a gram of air, creating a brief draft towards her, and slowly rearranges the component neutrons, protons, and electrons into a tiny flake of yellow sapphire, which she holds up so that he can see. Making more forb crystal isn't actually that easy -- it involves creating high energy temporal nuclear crystals, and then weaving them into the existing structure in a very specific way -- but the forb is doing that in the background anyway.

Hopefully that will get the right impression across.

Huh! That's weird! Crafters can't do that - they can make any solid-enough material into crafting material but they do have to have something to work with.

That...might be related to her not being able to communicate? Since the communication and the crafting are fundamentally the same sort of thing, just done differently. Does that seem plausible to her?

The crafting and the communication are the same thing!? She supposes that makes more sense in an Occam's razor sense, but she has no idea how such a thing would work.

She'll turn a bright cream color, because that seems very plausible.

Okay. What else - there was a question about whether she was the crystal, or was in it, or was piloting it remotely somehow; he's guessing if this was an accident and she's still running around doing things it's that she is or is in the crystal. Is that right? (He doesn't think it matters very much but the others are going to wonder.)

Gosh but she can't wait to have a vocabulary.

She'll show a pale ash grey -- light, but darker than the brightest light she's used. Then she shows a picture of her normal body standing in her lab with a forb floating next to her, with dense lines moving between her head and the forb. Then, a sudden explosion, her human body crumpling to the floor, the lines stopping, the forb shattering into fragments, a swirl of color, and the fragment falling into the lake.

Then she shows her crystal self sitting outside the library while the sun and stars wheel overhead 40 times, her forb slowly growing back into a perfect sphere. Once it does, the forb moves next to a fallen tree and turns it into a copy of her body, and the lines between her head and the forb appear again.

Oh wow!! Okay! So they should be assuming she'll need to know how to function in Crafter society as someone people will assume is a Crafter - there have been mixed humanoid species societies, they have a couple books from way back then, but something happened and the other species died out, and most people don't know about them and will react to anyone who looks basically like a Crafter as if they are one. Should he explain more about how Crafters live? Probably the best way to do that will be to print out a kids' book about it and he can read it to her.

She'll show her chosen bright off-white again!

These people are so helpful.

Okay! He'll bring the printer over so she can watch it do its thing.

The printer is a boxy thing a little larger than the twenty-first century Earth object by the same name, with a slot at the back for threading the end of a roll of paper into and a keypad on the front. He narrates what he's doing once he has it set up: he happens to already have the code for the kids' educational books section memorized - if he didn't, he'd have to start at the top of the categorization tree, which has the all-zeros code - and entering that gets him a printout of the subsections within that category, which he navigates until he finds the section he wants, at which point he gets a list of about twenty books. Some of them he dismisses as too old, or for younger children; of the remaining handful he picks one based on it having been written by an author he recognizes and thinks writes well. There's a code on the printout alongside his selection, and he enters that to start the printer going on the book itself; it'll take ten or fifteen minutes for it to print the whole thing.

Once it's done he'll be able to make her a copy to follow along with, if she'd like. In the meantime he can explain how the printer works, if she wants, or get a spare that she can look at the mechanisms of? Or something else, of course.

Ooh! If she can get a look at the mechanism and work out a converter, she can probably just download their whole library. She bounces a little at the thought.

"Second," she writes.

Okay! He seems amused, and goes and gets another printer (in hematite; a spare, like he said) to bring over. He enlarges it to double its size before taking the cover off, and points out all the parts: It communicates with the library's machinery via ansible, which is one of the the main restrictions on how many printers there can be, since they have to have one end of the ansible here and they only have so many receptacles for them in the machine, though at this point it's probably up to several thousand; people really like the library so they're under a fair bit of pressure to make sure as many people can use it as possible. The ansible communicates with the rest of the machinery by changing shape to press on different bits of it, most of which cause these press-plates to touch the paper - in this printer they emit light when they're pressed, and the paper is set up to react to the light by changing color, though some people make their printers do that part differently and the method doesn't really matter much. These bits move the printing mechanism across the page to start on the next glyph instead, and these bits advance the paper to let the printer print out the next line; this part of the machinery, which isn't connected to the ansible at all, keeps track of how much paper has been extruded and cuts it at regular intervals to make the book's pages. When it's in the mode where it communicates with the library machinery rather than receiving printing instructions from it, pressing the keys on the keypad on the front of the printer activates this machinery to press the ansible into the relevant shape; these other bits of machinery add standard instruction codes before and/or after the keyed codes, to help the library's machinery keep track of what kinds of instructions it's receiving. The machinery coding is very complicated and not really his area - his job is taking hand-written books and setting up the printing instructions to make printed copies of them - but the engineer should be able to explain it if she's curious - maybe later, though, she seems busy right now. (She's still talking to the other formatting team member.)

Weeping Cherry follows along, tracing each of the levers to see how keyed codes convert to ansible-squishing, and what the set of press-plates looks like.

She shows a picture of him taking out the ansible and setting it near her.

He's hesitant to do that; if she manipulates the ansible in the wrong way it might break the library's machinery where the other side of it is. He can make her another ansible that isn't hooked up to the library's machinery, if that will do the trick; is that good enough?

Hmm. What she wants is to be able to look things up without needing to waste paper, since she can't synthesize great quantities of it yet, and the press plates are on the inside of the machine where she can't easily see them.

She shows a picture of him turning parts of the center of the machine transparent, in such a way that the action of the press plates is clearly visible, and setting the machine next to her. Then she shows a picture of her pressing the keys and the flashes of light from the press plates being clearly visible.

Sure, that's no problem at all. Or if she's just trying to figure out how the ansible shapes relate to the press plate outputs, he can get her a sheet with that already written up, would she like that instead?

She shows a dark charcoal grey.

She tries to figure out how to show 'I want to read all your books but don't want to oblige anyone to stand there recycling paper', but can't quite figure out a graphic that would convey it.

All right, he can transparent-ify this one, then; he goes ahead and does that, shrinking it back to its normal size once it's put back together.

Cherry will slide over to the device, close enough to be able to depress the keys, and key in the code of the book that she saw him order so that she can read along. Once the device is printing, she'll turn her main 'facet' back towards her interlocutor.

...okay?

She displays the incoming glyphs on her surface as the device flashes, slowly building up the first page of the book by way of explanation.

Oh, that's neat! He's not going to be able to keep up with the printer, reading, but if she has a way to store what it's printing he can get started.

Most Crafters live a settled, surface-dwelling lifestyle. They have a territory, where they can do whatever they'd like and build whatever they'd like, and not have to worry about interacting with any other Crafters there. Most Crafters who live like this live nearby other Crafters, and they'll share some areas in common. It's nice to live near other Crafters because the neighbors might be able to do things you can't, and they'll probably be willing to help you out, or at least trade for things. It also means you can have hobbies that involve other people, like playing games or singing together. Some places with a lot of Crafters living there even have computers that let you talk to your neighbors from your own territory! Thinking animals tend to like being in places with a lot of Crafters, too, so that they can get help from the Crafters when they need it, so if you like having crows or parrots around to pass messages or mammoths or mastodons around to help with moving things, this might be the best way for you to live. It's also the best way to live if you don't want to interact with anyone else, since this kind of territory is the easiest for making sure you can get everything you need without ever having to leave it.

Some crafters live a settled lifestyle, but underground, in places where there are mountains or where it's very hot or very cold on the surface or some other reason why that doesn't work very well. Instead of claiming a territory all at once, they build tunnels, and line them with crafting material so that other Crafters living nearby can tell when they're trying to make a tunnel somewhere that's already been claimed. It's a lot more work to make a territory this way, and thinking animals don't usually like living underground, but it lets Crafters live in places they otherwise couldn't, and lets more Crafters live in a given area than would be able to live in that area if they were all making claims normally, so it's good for groups of Crafters who want to work together on a project, or who need to live near each other so they can all learn from the same teacher.

Some Crafters are nomadic; instead of claiming territories, they make their houses and gardens walk or fly, so that they can go wherever they like. Most of the time when a Crafter lives like this, it's temporary, because they're looking for someplace to settle that they like better than where they were, but some Crafters like living this way and do it permanently. It's harder than living in the same place all the time because you have to bring everything you need with you, and you can't count on anyone being able to help you if you have a problem, but it does mean that if you need a type of help that the community you're near doesn't have, you can go to a different one that has it, and you're likely to have things they haven't seen before to trade with them. Some Crafters also live this way because they want to live near something that moves, like a mammoth herd, or some animals that they're studying. It's important to know how to train animals if you want to live a nomadic life, since you'll need to have animals (usually dogs) guide all your buildings besides the one you're on.

Some Crafters live on the water; this is a lot like living underground, except that they build boats instead of digging tunnels, with the added complication that it's hard to get things to make into crafting material. They also have to use special machines to turn salt water, which can't be drunk, into fresh water. It's the most social way to live; Crafters who live on boats usually have very small territories with lots of nearby neighbors and have to work together to make sure everyone has the things they need. It is possible to live on a boat by yourself without neighbors, but it's very risky; if you get sick, or can't find enough things to make into crafting material to make food out of, you'll really have a problem. Parrots and crows aren't usually willing to live on the water, but dolphins are also thinking animals and are sometimes willing to pass messages, especially if you'll trade them fish for it.

She now has so! Much! Vocabulary!

Also, apparently Crafters can eat crafting material. That's good to know. She had been planning to make people thank-you chocolate bars, but maybe they don't eat non-crafting material objects. She'll have to ask at some point.

When the book finishes downloading for her, she keys in the code for the children's index, and then sets up an automated process to pull down the entire children's section.

When he finishes reading, she tries to put together an example sentence, referring heavily to the story that was just shared.

She shows a picture of herself in forb fragment form next to "not-Crafter", and then tries to string together sentence fragments from the story to form the sentence "not-Crafters tend to like being in places with a lot of not-Crafters".

That was quick, her picking up the language like that! He's not really that surprised that her species is more social than crafters, most of the thinking species are. Her best bet if she can't get home is going to be joining a school or a group project like this one or a boating group, probably, or befriending thinking animals if that does the job for her.

She thinks the Crows she met were lovely, and certainly intends to invite some to her planned moon arcology. But also, despite having many times more vocabulary than she did, she still has no idea how to say that.

"not-Crafter like neighbor Crafter. not-Crafter like Crows," she replies.

She's still not sure how to form questions, but makes an attempt at "not-Crafter not-crafting material food. Crafter crafting material food. Crafter if not-crafting material food usually willing if if if."

He puzzles over this for a bit, and then figures out at least the one bit of it: the book mentioned needing crafting material for food, but Crafters don't eat it directly; one of the things it can be used for is fertilizer that lets them force-grow food plants without damaging them, and that's where Crafters get most of their food. They also eat eggs and meat but they don't have any special tricks for getting them besides getting plant food for the animals the same way they get it for themselves. And domestication, if that counts as a trick.

Oh! That makes more sense.

In that case, Cherry will continuously pull in a little stream of air and extrude (over the course of the next three minutes or so), a 32-ounce bar of white chocolate (likely to be tasty, unlikely to be poisonous) in a hematite grey paper wrapper with "food" printed on it.

While she does, she tries to think about how to ask how to ask a question.

Eventually she settles for using her trusty question mark as a loan word. "not-Crafter talk. You help not-Crafter talk. Help talk (?). not-Crafter not have talk (?)," she writes. And then, to illustrate the meaning of the question mark, she draws a little dialog between two crystals:

"You sing like?"

"not-Crafter sing like. You water like?"

"not-Crafter not water like."

She's asking how to write the 'query' indicator, he thinks? That's a circle-marking, it looks like this.

If 'crystal person' is an okay way to refer to her species, he'd compose a glyph for that like this - there are a couple different ways one could do it but he'd expect most people to pick that one up just fine, and it's related to the old glyph for the other humanoid species they have records of.

Sure, humans can be crystal people. It won't be the weirdest etymology she's seen.

"Crystal person like," she agrees.

"You talk computer messages?" she asks. She hopes that either this will prompt him to read a second book and get her some additional vocabulary, or it will prompt him to go into more detail about what other queries she can give the library computer.

...he's guessing she wants another book? The glyph for book is this.

He's not sure off the top of his head what else is particularly important for her... maybe a book teaching about crafting? He's not sure if she's seen the glyph for crafting yet, that's this.

Hmm. What kind of book would be best? She's after enough vocabulary to express herself first, and then enough grammar to do so eloquently second. She'd really like to know how to say 'please' and 'thank you' and other basic etiquette.

"Crystal person like have book," she affirms. "Book of talk? Book of crafting if not-(book of talk)."

...they do have a dictionary but he doesn't think he can get through trying to read a dictionary.

"Not book of <vague glyph>, book of talk to your neighbors," she attempts.

Then, after a moment of thought, "Computer have book of <vague glyph>? Crystal person talk <shifting string of numbers> to computer have book of <vague glyph>?"

Is she looking for a book on how to make computers? They definitely have a few of those.

He also has the library code for the dictionary memorized and can share that in case it's what she's looking for.

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.

The next two dictionary volumes are about Crafters and Crafter lifestyle and about crafted objects and tools; does she have a preference for which one they do first?

"First book," she requests. If she needs to indicate an object she doesn't have words for, she can just draw a picture. Depicting Crafter lifestyles seems harder. And also she's still vaguely hoping to find some evidence of conversational politeness norms, because it's still weirding her out a bit not to know any.

This dictionary starts with spots for illustrations of male and female crafters, to give the glyphs for all the parts of the body; it seems like they don't shy away from depicting nudity, here. The next page is intended to show illustrations of the common fleshcrafted additions people might get - tails, whiskers, prehensile and sensory tentacles, fur and feathers and scales and shells and bioluminescent patches, even digitigrade feet. (Extra limbs with bones inside are notably missing.)

It then briefly discusses the stages of life - a familiar baby-through-elder progression, with the ages more or less matching human development - before getting into how ownership claims work and the vocabulary related to that and to unclaimed objects and areas. (They have a mild taboo on making large changes to unclaimed areas - trails are obviously okay, and from the imagery he sends about shared social spaces clearing out some trees and putting up furniture is fine, but you wouldn't put a permanent building there, or pave a path, there's a definite sense that unclaimed space is meant to be essentially wild.) It also discusses teenager areas, a kind of liminal state between a public area and a private claim, where Crafters who no longer feel comfortable in their parents' territories but don't feel ready to claim a territory of their own live for a few years with their agemates.

Reproduction is next, and as was hinted at in the discussion of fleshcrafting, this doesn't seem to be a purely heterosexual affair; apparently with the right kind of fleshcrafting any two Crafters can have children together, though it doesn't go into detail as to how. It does explain that crafters with the appropriate anatomy can have children long after their last meeting with the child's other parent, and give a little vocabulary related to the mechanics of that.

Relationships are next, parents and children and friends and neighbors and pen pals and all the other ways people relate to each other, with the noticeable exception of any concept of marriage and with the addition of the concept of a chosen-parent, some neighbor a child gets along with particularly well and might essentially move in with. After that, it discusses roles, first showing how to change a glyph for an activity to instead refer to a person who does that activity and then giving a long list of activities not mentioned elsewhere in the books. (The do have a word for trade, and by extension traders, but there's no reference to money or any other purely mercantile activity.)

At the end, it discusses letter-writing, which finally gives her the politeness words she's looking for; in person, emotions are expressed by just showing them, and they're taken not to translate very well to written language just like taste and smell don't, but there are glyphs for the basic ones including appreciation, enjoyment, hoping-for, regret, and so on.

Oh, that's really neat! Both the morphological variety and the adaptations for a less-social species.

"I appreciate you reading to me," she says as soon as she has the word for it. "I enjoy writing"

She thinks for a moment about bones, and then shows a picture of an octopus using sticks as 'bones' to get leverage.

"You can't fleshcraft bones? Crafters use crafting-material stick for bones?" she asks. Then she shows some pictures of people who have used forb-puppetry to give themselves extra arms, or turn themselves into centaurs.

Aww, he feels warm and fuzzy about her appreciation. If she wants to write a book they'll be very happy to distribute it!

He doesn't recognize the octopus at all, but he can answer her fleshcrafting question: It's possible to fleshcraft bones, but hard to get all the muscles and ligaments and so on working right for a bony limb, only the best fleshcrafters can do something like that, so it's not common to run into someone who's had it done. The most complicated thing he knows of anyone having done is wings, which aren't good enough for real flight yet; he's pretty sure a centaur body like she's showing is beyond even the most advanced fleshcrafters.

Tails like his one coworker has are an exception, he thinks to mention after a moment; there's a simple genecrafting trick to unlock a Crafter's body's ancestral ability to grow a tail, and then it can be fleshcrafted from there.

"Crafters not like too many Crafters. Crafters like Crafters-with-tails more?" she asks. "Crystal people like neighboring lots of people. Crafters like me better if I make body with four feet and tail?"

A Crafter with a tail is just a Crafter for territory purposes; people might well be more comfortable letting her come and go from their territories if she has a four-legged body like an animal, though. But it'll be on a case-by-case basis - some Crafters don't even like actual thinking animals being in their territories - and he expects she'll also find that some Crafters have trouble thinking of her as a fellow Crafter-tier person that way.

Hmm. Honestly, that makes it sound like she should A) shapeshift as the situation calls for it, and B) check whether the population of people who would have trouble thinking of her as the same tier of person is correlated at all with the people who still wouldn't want her to visit anyways.

"After I make a body, Crafters like me to make them more legs and more arms?" she asks.

If she can do that safely she'll definitely be able to find people who want it, yes.

Weeping Cherry makes a note. It's not top of her to-fix list (that would be 'death', followed by 'scarcity'), but she wouldn't want to forget something like that.

Hmm. She's got a pretty good vocabulary for basic things, now, although not as many different objects and she feels as though her grammar probably needs to improve via exposure.

"You enjoying reading? If you enjoying, I hope for next book. If you not enjoying, I try read to me," she says.

He could use a break, if she thinks she can manage by herself for a bit. His printer has stopped, having produced three more books (which he hematites) - does she want him to set her up with another one first? The magazine mentioned an early-reader series that's supposed to be good for practicing reading that should be available as a whole set, if that's the kind of thing she's looking for.

"Number of book?" she asks. "I read with machine," she elaborates, making an arrow that points at the still-operative transparent terminal.

It's, let's see... 5698-3286. He doesn't mind her using his printer if she wants to do two things in parallel, though, the real question is whether he should hematite it for her before he goes.

Oh! That makes sense.

"You craft it," she agrees. "You craft it so I see things?" she asks, showing the top turning transparent like the other one.

Yeah, he can do that - he hematites the keypad and the spool of paper and the area around the paper intake and output slots, and makes the top of the machine transparent and hematites a border around that as well, leaving the main body of the machine lilac.

Anything else before he goes to stretch his legs a bit?

"No. I appreciate you helping me," she says.

She turns her main facet to face towards the second terminal, keys in the magazine code, and then grabs the already-printed books to read while she waits for that to load.

The next book in the dictionary set appears, after some examination, to be about tools Crafters make, but without illustrations or translation it's hard to figure out much in the way of details.

The one after that is a catalogue of animals and common plants, with the plants grouped by use and the animals organized by family and with an interesting fact about each one, which makes it much easier to follow. If she's paying attention, she may also put together that this planet appears to be an Earth, more or less: the spots set out for each animal have a glyph representing where they live, and some of the glyphs look remarkably like South America, Africa, and Australia, and others look quite a bit like North America and Eurasia except that the northern coastlines are quite different. The animals seem to be more diverse widely distributed than she'd expect at home, for example both elephantoids (fun fact: a very good fleshcrafter can give you an elephant's trunk!) and cameloids (fun fact: these animals spit when angry!) are attested in North America and there seem to be several kinds of animals she won't recognize at all - large predatory birds, most strikingly. There's also a section at the end about domesticated animals: they have dogs (fun fact: dogs are the only non-thinking animal that can understand what it means when you point!), chickens (fun fact: chickens are omnivores, and will eat any bugs or small animals that get into their pens!), and a few kinds of small meat animals, but no cats, horses, cows, pigs, goats, or sheep. Octopi are also missing from the book, but so are a lot of other marine animals, so that may only mean that Crafters haven't explored their oceans very much.

The final dictionary discusses natural phenomena, including weather and terrain; it's tricky to make sense of, but unlike the book on tools, there's enough discussion of things for her to puzzle it out.

Ooh! That was more fun animal facts than she was expecting.

Weeping Cherry will contentedly read through all the alien children's dictionaries, and then start matching vocabulary words to descriptions in her adults' dictionary to build out synonyms and try to pin down category words, etc.

If nobody interrupts her, she'll pull down as much of the library's index as she can, just to have some idea of what's available. Occasionally she'll interrupt the download of the index to grab a book that looks particularly edifying.

She also plots the latency and throughput figures of the downloads, and idly considers whether this demonstrates anything about the library's internal architecture.

She will happily dive further and further into the library until somebody comes to interrupt her, or until she should sleep to synchronize with the local solar cycle.

It doesn't take too long after she finishes the last of the kids' dictionaries for... come to think of it, the Crafter dictionary didn't mention the concept of names at all... the lavender Crafter, anyway, to stop back in: the teal argyle one didn't find the team leader's son, he reports, and it's getting to be evening; does she need anything before the group turns in for the night? Did she want him to make her a sleeping nook here?

"I don't need a nook," she replies. "My crystal is comfy! I can stay here without a nook?"

She can if she's comfortable with that! Most Crafters have trouble relaxing enough to sleep without a nook, and he wasn't sure whether that was a species trait or not.

Weeping Cherry's expanding vocabulary has not gotten as far as 'virtual', and she's not confident that she's gotten weak synonyms like 'pretend' worked out correctly either.

"Crystal people want nooks to sleep also sometimes, or other crystal people to sleep with. Crystal people can sleep without a nook if they want to," she explains. "I have a nook in my head in my crystal."

She displays a picture of a nest of multicolored blankets and stuffed animals, although she leaves her simulated body out of the picture because she still isn't sure how much looking like a Crafter is a problem for the lavender one. The picture also shows a dent where her body is not being pictured, a mug of hot cocoa, and the books she's been referencing, although they are formatted and bound in the Earth style instead of in the Crafter one.

That certainly looks cozy enough!

He can also leave a call bell with her if she thinks she might need someone in the middle of the night; it's quite safe in here though so he's not expecting any problems.

"I like a bell," she agrees. "I appreciate you helping me. I hope you sleep good."

Aww <3

He takes a pinch of crafting material from the embellishments on his outfit and focuses on it for a moment while he splits it into two, then makes a little box with a button on top and one half of the ansible inside; he'll hook the other end up to a bell in his nook.

If that's all, he hopes she has a good night!

"You too!" she replies, before turning her attention inwards.

She looks at her subjective and objective time clocks, and sets her forb to gently time compress her simulation so that she can stay awake for four more hours, get nine hours of sleep, and then awake synced to the local day/night cycle.

She reads more children's books, eats a large simulated dinner, spends a long time journaling about her day so she won't forget anything important, and then falls asleep curled around a big pillow patterned in her chosen colors.

As she sleeps, her forb continues pulling down the library's index. Over the course of the night, the deepest cracks and fissures in her crystal become almost imperceptibly shallower as it continues repairing itself.

In her simulated space, Weeping Cherry is woken by the light of a simulated sun rising in sync with the real one outside. She buries her face in pillows and ignores the call for another hour or so, before finally giving in and getting up with a stretch. A few thoughts directed at her forb see the pillows and blankets cleared away and her teeth brushed. She brushes and braids her hair by hand, and then summons cottage cheese on sourdough toast for breakfast.

Munching her toast, she turns her attention to the outside world. Does anyone else appear to be up?

Lilac isn't here, but teal argyle is, and a new Crafter with a bright neon bubble design that she saw on the way in; they're having breakfast, one at a table and the other on a couch.

Oh, she's so looking forward to having a body again and participating in bonding activities like eating shared meals. Although she's not certain whether eating together does the same thing for Crafters exactly that it does for her brand of human.

Is there hematite furniture positioned such that she could join them, or not? If not, she'll just take the time to scan through the indexes that her forb turned up overnight and highlight particularly interesting looking books to be prioritized.

The table that teal argyle is at is marked half with their colors and half with blue and purple spirals on a white background, and it's not big enough that they could hematite part of their section and still use it comfortably. Neon bubbles has a small hematite table set out suggestively near her couch, though.

Oh, excellent!

Weeping Cherry will make her way over and hop up onto the table.

"Good morning!"

Good morning! Did Weeping Cherry sleep well? Does she want breakfast or anything?

"I sleep good," she replies. "I found the word for good. I didn't find the word you said. Did you sleep good?"

She shows a picture of her toast.

"I have this. I also didn't find the word for this."

Breakfast? That's written like this. And that looks like some toast, which is written as 'crisped bread', like this. (Her own breakfast is scrambled eggs with roasted vegetables on top and a bowl of oatmeal with boysenberries.)

"Crisped bread! Your breakfast looks good also," she agrees. She pauses for a moment, trying to think of what to say next. Eventually she settles on "What do you do? For book project?"

Everybody in this section does formatting - when people send in new books for the collection, they're usually hand-written, and the formatting team translates them into the code the computer uses to store the books and print them back out. And the engineer she met yesterday designs machinery to make the computer work better, and the maintenance team handles the actual physical machinery of the computer itself- if Weeping Cherry wants a tour, a couple of them offer tours of their sections - and then the programming team figures out how the computer should work and keeps everybody working together on it properly.

"All that is good! Why you do book writing down and not machines or numbers? What do you like in book writing down?" she asks.

Well, nobody's figured out how to make a machine that can figure out glyphs yet! Probably it'll happen someday but it seems very complicated. She likes how she gets to read all the books while she's reformatting them, and having work to do that helps so many people.

Weeping Cherry was trying to ask why she chose formatting over engineering or maintenance, but she seems to have gotten an answer to her question anyways.

"Reading all the books is good," she agrees. "Are there books you like most?"

She likes science fiction the best, and she likes keeping up with actual science, too. How about Weeping Cherry, what kinds of books does she like?

"I like those books too! I read books about different people meeting, like Crystal people meeting Crafters. I also read books about ... I didn't find the word. About people who live together and project together and travel together. And the book is about they meet each other, and start off uncomfy and get comfy together. I also read books about making places. Making pretty places that people like and want to travel to," she responds.

They have books like that! Not very many, neither of those are very common sorts of things to do, but travelogues in general are common enough and some of them have new people joining a group or two groups merging, and Crafters do sometimes claim extra territory and build it up into something for other Crafters to come and look at and then write about it. She doesn't think she's personally seen fictional versions of either of those, but that might also exist; there are plenty of other book formatters out there who might've gotten it instead of her.

"Many Crystal people like the middle kind of book. Lots of Crystal people write those books. There are fewer books about making pretty places, but I like them," she explains.

She puts up a few pictures of neighborhoods and buildings that members of her selftree designed. Examples include a towering spire of red and silver fluted crystal rising from the ocean, hexagonal two-story houses painted in pastel colors situated around a central grassy park, and a dark neon city slick with rain the most notable feature of which is that it is built into a ring floating in space, through which a red planet is visible.

"After I make a body, I want to help people be healthy, and have more legs, and have enough food. After that, I want to make places that are good for Crafters and more Crystal people. I didn't find what places are good for Crafters. What do you like about a place?"

She's not picky about where she lives, most of the things she cares about in a territory are built things. Forests are pretty popular among Crafters in general, but they can live reasonably comfortably almost anywhere; as long as they've brought the right starting supplies with them all they really need is a source of water and something they can turn into crafting material.

"That is good! Crystal people can't turn things into things if they don't have a crystal. Crystal people now just need crystal. Crystal people very yesterday didn't have crystals and needed many things to like a place. They needed water and food and not-crafting-materials to make with. Crystal people now don't need those things, but like those things," Weeping Cherry explains.

"How many Crafters are there? Do they have enough places?" she asks.

On the one hand, with food being more plentiful and everyone having a built-in industrial revolution, they might have a much higher population than Earth did at an equivalent tech level. On the other hand, they can also live more places without worrying about logistics. So maybe there's no particular population pressure.

She's not sure how many Crafters there are, plenty of them wouldn't cooperate with being counted; she'd guess a few million, maybe, but she could pretty easily be off by a factor of ten either way. She knows some places have overpopulation problems to where their kids have trouble getting a territory near the people they want to be neighbors with, but that's not a very common problem, and overall there's plenty of free space.

This world is doing so well without her that it's almost throwing Weeping Cherry off her game. She had to stand on the shoulders of giants and practically dislocate her metaphorical shoulder hauling Earth up to an acceptable level. But here, all the Crafters are self-sufficient and there's enough to go around. She'll need to, like, do a rollout similar to the one on Earth of item summoning and assistive technologies to the other talking creatures, and do disease eradication and teleportation and post-death services for everyone, but probably not need to urgently build space stations or cities in Bir Tawil or negotiate with hostile governments or anything like that.

"Maybe Crafters don't need me to make places. Crystal people have a machine that travels you from one place to another place fast," she says. "After I make a body, I make a travel machine and people can visit if their territories are far. Crafters are so good! Crystal people very yesterday had a million people and not as much good things. Crystal people needed more people to make crystals and other good things."

Teleportation would be pretty amazing! They're doing fine overall without it but that doesn't mean it wouldn't improve things, there are plenty of people who are skipping doing things they want to because they'd have to move for them and a lot of that is people not getting to learn advanced crafting techniques!

... huh. Either Weeping Cherry has a translation problem, neon-bubbles is very genre savvy, or something weirder just happened. She reviews her notes on the glyphs for 'travel' and 'fast'.

"You are right. Crystal people travel machine is like that. But I didn't find the word for <teleporter>," she says, using the English word. "I wrote 'travel fast'. Is 'travel fast' a phrase for that? Did you guess travel machine is a <teleporter> from its like your books?"

Oh! Yeah, she read a book with teleportation in it not too long ago, that's probably why she assumed that. The glyph for it is this (a portmanteau of 'matter' and 'ansible'). Are those little glyphs Weeping Cherry's home language? How do they work?

Oh boy. How is she going to explain English spelling to people who don't even make sounds to talk.

"Crystal people can't everybody understands them. Crystal people make noise to talk," she explains. "I show you."

She switches to writing Crafter glyphs on the upper part of her surface, English words on the lower part, and saying the English translation out loud as she writes.

"Crystal people's glyphs match the noises in our talk. Teleporter is like this: T e l e p o r t e r," she explains, sounding out each letter. "That is a simple talk of it. Breaking a word into glyphs has more complex ways, but that is mostly it."

That's pretty clever, if they don't have crafting for it! She thinks she could probably learn to understand that, but maybe not to make the sounds - some people like making sounds, for aesthetic reasons or to communicate more naturally with their animals or whatever, but she's never been inclined.

"If you want to understand it, I am happy to show you more," Weeping Cherry agrees. "I am happy to talk in Crafter writing, though. Crystal people's dogs can understand our noises, but not make our noises. Parrots can make our noises, and understand them."

She pauses for a moment, and then says "Some Crystal people sing making pretty noises that are also talking."

She sings the opening verse of "The Dreadful Wind and Rain", by way of demonstration. Her translation is a bit rough, but renders it:

There are two siblings from 'Claire' territory

Very bad storm

One is brightly colored and one is darkly colored

Bad bad very bad storm

Oh, the Crafters who sing will love that. (She likes it too, but there's a thread of stress in the enjoyment.)

Singing isn't for everyone. Weeping Cherry switches back to just writing in Crafter.

"I like to sing. I'm happy to share Crystal people songs. How do you write down singing? Crystal people write down long and short and 'high' and 'low' and word noises and more like this," she says, showing a snatch of sheet music.

She's not sure how Crafters do it - the library does have written music but she's never learned to read the notation, there's a special formatting team (possibly more than one? she's not sure of that either) for it.

That makes sense. Written music is really a different thing from normal writing.

Weeping Cherry scans through the library index she has so far to see if she's gotten any music yet, before a thought interrupts her. These people definitely have the tech level to produce a gramophone.

"Do Crafters have a machine that makes sound?" she asks. She shows a diagram of a gramophone. "The disk has bumps, and it goes around, and wiggles the needle that wiggles the paper and makes a noise," she explains.

They have sound machines but not like that - the disc part actually looks quite a bit like how books are formatted to work in the machine. For sound machines they can just set a piece of crafting material to vibrate the way they want directly, and most of them only make one or two different sounds - they're mostly used for emergencies, if a Crafter is alone in their territory and breaks a leg or something they'll set off an emergency noisemaker loud enough for their neighbors to hear, and it works as permission to come in and help them - or, it mostly works, but it works as well as anything that's not the Crafter physically escorting them over the threshold.

Oh, cool! You can probably make some really neat instruments if you can directly manipulate how a material vibrates.

"Books use disks with bumps?" she asks. She hadn't really thought about their storage technology. She had somewhat assumed that it used ansible-like materials that react to being poked in different ways.

Yep! She doesn't understand all the details, but the main type of mechanism the machine uses is marbles that roll down tracks and make different tones when they're struck, and the disc determines which marbles the machinery releases onto the tracks and then another piece of machinery on the ansible end strikes the marbles and listens to them and moves the ansible depending on what it hears.

That's amazing! The only other mechanical computers she's seen are gear-based. Although, come to think of it, she's not actually sure what they used for storage.

If they've got actual mechanical computers, rather than just a dumb storage system, she wonders if they have an internet analog.

"How many disk-machines are there? Different Crafters have their own disk machines that talk together by ansible?" she asks.

In the world, or as part of the library? The library has around fifteen, maybe closer to twenty sub-locations that all work together as parts of the one machine; this is the main one, but they don't have enough room here for everything, so some of the teams set up parts of it elsewhere in the world and connected them by ansible. In the world - Weeping Cherry would get a much better estimate from a traveler but she'd guess something like one in ten communities has someone with a computing machine? Those probably don't all use disc storage, not even all the library sub-locations do, but she knows some people do take inspiration from the library's setup for their own inventions.

"All machines with ansibles count as one machine?" she clarifies. That does make a certain amount of sense. "Crystal people make machines that can be put together and put apart again. Each machine works by itself, but if they are put together they talk."

She wonders what the network architecture of the library machine looks like. It was serving her requests in parallel, so it can't possibly have only a single part handling every request.

The different library locations work together as one big machine, yeah. She's not sure it makes sense to think of every machine that uses ansibles that way; it might, that's how it works for a lot of them, but she doesn't know everything that's out there. Crafter machines do use interchangeable parts within a given machine, where that makes sense - it'd be kind of silly not to, crating makes it so easy. She doesn't expect most machines to use parts that are interchangeable with each other, though; probably someone somewhere has copied an entire computing machine, but it's the kind of thing where just copying one without knowing how it works doesn't work very well, and if you need to know how it works the best way to do that is to build it yourself.

Huh! That's fascinating. She would have expected there to be standardized models that you could just copy sight-unseen, since you can copy things made of crafting material. Maybe crafting doesn't work like that, and the copies will be degraded unless you understand how they work.

Weeping Cherry has finished her breakfast -- does it look as though her interlocutor has as well?

She's still working on it, but it looks like she'll be done soon.

"After you're done with breakfast," she writes. "I like to see the book machines."

She was just going to absorb more library books and talk to the project staff, but the discussion of their computing technology has gotten her interested, and she really would like to get a closer look.

Sure, she'll just be another minute and then she can take her over to the maintenance crew's section.

This involves a walk through more tunnels inside the mountain; the formatting team's section continues a ways further, past turnoffs for the private territories of its members, and then the walls revert from brightly colored crafting material to smooth natural stone with darker grey handrails. This path meanders downwards, taking a couple of switchbacks and at one point using a bridge to cross a small natural cavern. A little ways past that they come to a pair of dull red territory markers with an unlabeled button and hematite rectangle next to them; her guide makes a stylus out of a bit of crafting material from the tip of the walking stick she made before setting out and writes 'the crystal-person alien wants a tour of the library machine' on the rectangle and then presses the button.

It'll probably be a few minutes before they answer, she thinks.

"Is the rectangle an ansible?" she asks. That seems like a very convenient intercom system.

Yep! If they keep an eye on it they'll be able to tell when someone's gotten their message, since they'll clear it off.

It does take a few minutes for the message to clear, but only another minute after that for another Crafter to appear in the hallway past the monoliths, this one in a blue outfit hung with teardrop-shaped bits of crafting material in a range of green tones.

Hi! Weeping Cherry must be the alien?

"Hello! I am the crystal-person. I want to see your machines. They seem interesting!" she replies.

They are! He can show her his section but she might prefer the kids' tour? It doesn't involve the actual library machinery, but it'll let her interact with the machines and see more directly how it all works.

She vaguely wonders if this is because she currently comes up to about his ankle, before responding "I want to see your section. If I see a machine, I can remember it and make it in my head in my crystal and touch it there."

(He knows that size doesn't have much to do with adulthood status, he's met crows. Though to be fair he wouldn't invite a crow into the guts of the library any more than he'd invite a little kid - it breaks if you mess with it!)

Sure, he sends. He doesn't have examples of all the different parts of the library machinery in his section, but he can show her most of it and ask someone else to show her the rest.

Is her companion going to join them?

She figures that's up to Weeping Cherry.

"Crystal-people like lots of people. I like you and you can join us. I also know you have a project, so if you want to leave that is also good. Or if green man doesn't want more people," she says.

She'll come, then.

He offers her a hand across the threshold, and then turns back and finds himself confused about what the equivalent should be for Weeping Cherry.

Weeping Cherry briefly considers hopping over the boundary such that she taps his foot at the same time as touching the floor, but decides to play it safe.

"Crystal-people don't need to be invited to be comfy. But also I don't want to make you uncomfy by coming in without you saying," she explains. "I can come in?"

Sure, that works. He assumes someone has explained to her how ownership claims work and that she shouldn't touch anything marked as belonging to someone, but just to be on the safe side he'd like to confirm that; it's important not to mess with the machinery while it's in use.

"Yes! I will not touch anything. I will look and listen," she confirms. She hops over the territory boundary and then follows in her normal sliding fashion.

After a moment, she wonders whether backscatter x-rays would be a problem.

"Can I shine a transparent light on the machines? Or would that hurt them?" she asks.

What kind of transparent light? Some of that kind of thing is dangerous to Crafters, even if it's fine for the machine. (He thinks it's probably fine for the machine, but he'd rather check on some spare parts, once he's sure it's safe for him.)

"I don't have the words. Too much is bad for crystal-people without crystals, but I can shine very carefully."

She makes a little laser pointer wander around the floor to demonstrate.

"I would shine a small amount. Each shine would be the amount of this kind of light you get by standing on a tall mountain for one minute," she explains. "But if you say no, I won't. I am curious about the machines, but I don't want to hurt anyone."

That will definitely be fine, then, plenty of the machinery is outside and it's hardened enough to be there indefinitely.

Does she have any other questions?

She does! She bets she has enough questions to last the walk until they get there.

"How similar do parts need to be in the machine?" she asks. She shows a foot-long ruler on the floor. "The marbles are one in 120 of this similar? One in 12,000? How do you know if parts are similar enough?"

The marbles are copies of each other, so they're entirely identical! There are different kinds that make different sounds, and they're marked to show that so the Crafters can figure out what's happening if there's a problem, but the different sorts were originally copied from the same example without any other modification, so all their other traits are the same. The rails are mostly identical too, but as long as the marbles will go through them reliably and at the right speed, it doesn't matter very much. The engineer usually adjusts the speed by adjusting the rails' friction, and includes a leveling-bubble tube so they can make sure they have the slopes right when they install them.

Oh, that makes sense. And obviates some of her other questions about the construction, if they can just vary the friction appropriately.

"How many kinds of marble are there? When one part of the machine gives several marbles to another part of the machine, does it give them one after the other, or on different rails?" she asks.

There are eight kinds of number marbles - there could have been any number, but there's some math he can recommend a book about if she wants about what tones sound nice together, and eight is an important number for that, and the Crafter who invented the library decided to do it based on that - and four special marbles that mark the beginning and end of a book request and separate the part of the request that specifies the book from the part of the request that specifies where it's going, in one direction, and separate the instructions for each glyph, in the other. Most of the special marbles were added later, when the library went from being just one person's thing to sending books everywhere via ansible. All the marbles for a given request go down the rails together, but there's a system to send different requests down different rails in parallel to let the machine work faster without getting jammed up.

Interesting! She supposes that without needing to base things on binary like a digital computer or trinary like some early mechanical computers, you're free to choose any base. She wonders how the ideal choice of base interacts with radix economy.

"How big is the whole machine?" she asks. "How long of rails, doing how many things at the same time?"

They don't keep very close track of the total length of the rails, but it's somewhere in the tens of thousands of kilometers; they currently have between 17,300 and 17,400 user ansibles connected to the machine and can read requests in from about 5,000 and send books out to nearly 2,000 of those at once.

Wow! That's incredible. Her world never produced such large mechanical computers, albeit because they switched to digital.

"How do you send a request to the right part?" she asks. She's beginning to think she should have consulted some of their local computer science books before asking for a tour, but she's still excited to see it first-hand.

There's a lot of steps to that! It starts when the user sends in the code they want; that's read off the ansible and translated by the machinery into a series of marbles. Those then go into a machine with a section of track that can tilt down, and marbles denoting zero are added to the top until it's full; every time they get to the point where the longest book code is another digit longer they have to change that bit to make room for the new digit. Then the special marbles denoting the beginning and end of that section are added, and the marbles that encode where the ansible is, so the machine can find it again when it has the book. The marbles then go off to a reader, which checks the first marble to make sure it's makes the 'beginning' tone, and then it checks the second marble to see what tone it makes and adjusts the track depending on what it hears. Once it's checked the second marble, it removes it, so when the request gets to the next reader the old third marble is the new second marble, and that gets checked and removed. Once it gets to the last marble in the code, it's made its way to the book that was requested, and from there the track is made in a way that lets the encoded book follow along behind the marbles in the second part of the code, which lead it to the reader with the ansible in it in the same way the marbles were led to the book in the first place. Then once they get to the reader, the encoded book goes into that and the reader decodes it into a series of marbles that are then translated into ansible nudges to send back to the person who requested the book. Of course that's a simplification; there are extra bits of machinery that do things like sending the entire request to a holding lane if there aren't any readers free or the book it's looking for is already being read by someone else, or that handle things like the library having a few copies of a very popular book available or something going wrong with how the request is put together. It gets really complicated!

She starts idly tracing out what the schematic of that would look like in her notes.

"I see. Why read the disk into marbles, and then the marbles into the ansible? Why not the disk into the ansible?" she asks.

Well, the machinery sections that read the book and manipulate the ansible are fairly bulky, so they'd need some kind of machinery to move data between them, and marbles are as good as anything else they could use for it. In general there's never just one way to do any particular part of a given machine, but if you do things too many different ways it makes the whole thing harder to understand and work with. The library's machinery is already too big for any one person to really understand, they don't want to make it any more fragile that way than they have to.

Yeah, with so many concurrent things happening, robustness is probably very important in the design. She expects that does terrible things to their transfer rate, though. If the disks were read off directly by the ansible, they could read vibrations off much faster than it's practical to release marbles.

"What part of the machine do you work on?" she asks, because probably she can ask more questions about the complexity/speed tradeoff once she's seen the actual machine parts they're working with.

His territory is mostly routing, but he's got the main holding area for when they have too many requests and need to make some of them wait, and some book storage, including some popular ones with duplicates in storage if she wants to see how that's handled; he doesn't have any of the machines for actually reading a book out into an ansible but he has a good view of one over on the north side if seeing it from a little distance will do, otherwise she'll have to wait for someone with one to to agree to let her in for a tour, which might be a few days. And then the ansible and marble storage is mostly upslope, he can't help her with that today.

Routing sounds like a pretty challenging part of the whole thing, yeah. She wants to see at least one disk, because she wants to try decoding the book directly off of it. If she can, maybe she can get herself installed in the machinery in such a way as to be able to read books directly.

"That sounds good! A far look is good," she reassures him. "Why do you work on machine parts and not on writing disks or designing machine parts?"

Well, in some ways his job is the easiest one in the whole place, right; he does need to know how everything works, but he doesn't need to figure anything out about how it should be, that's up to the engineers and programmers. And he doesn't have to meet with people when he doesn't want to; he'd go nuts living as close with other Crafters as the formatting team does, or spending as much time talking to them in person as the programmers do.

That makes sense to her. Maintenance does sound like a good job for someone who wants to be alone with machines.

"I see! It seems like good work for you. Why do you work on book project at all?" she asks. "Not working on it would be easier."

He in particular grew up here, his father is one of the other maintenance techs! He moved away for his first territory, but he missed it, so he came back when they had a territory available. Most of the other maintenance people just really like computers but aren't interested in designing their own for whatever reason.

"How long have people been working on the book project?" she asks. The fact that he's a second-generation maintenance librarian is neat, but it also makes her wonder about the timeline of invention. The periods between inventing new computer architectures came pretty quickly in her world; maybe the slower invention is a function of their lower population?

Around fifty years, probably a few more than that? The original inventor is retired now, but he's still around. It hasn't been open to the whole world quite that long, of course, it started out as a personal project and then spent a while as a local utility.

It's at about this point that they come to the beginning of his territory; unlike the formatting team's section, the tunnels that they've been walking through have been left to look like polished natural stone, similar to the unfinished tunnels they took to get here, though unlike those these are lined with crafting material, to close inspection. The doorway he leads them through is similar to the others they've passed, with the doorframe and door itself made in his design (the teardrops are three dimensional but not fully separate from the door, in this case), and leads to a corridor running under and through a nest of marble rails, itself under a translucent roof. Everywhere one might look there are marbles running at least occasionally, though some tracks are much more popular than others; it's fairly noisy but not too loud.

There are soundproof headphones by the door if the formatter wants some, he conveys, and he has an idea for something that might do the job for Weeping Cherry if the noise bothers her - it is kind of a lot but he's used to it, the sound helps him tell that everything's working as it should be.

"I like noises!" she reassures him. And, in fact, her forb is tracking sonic returns from everything to get a more detailed view of the surroundings. The different marbles make subtly different noises, and she's pretty sure that she could write some analysis software to read off what traffic is going overhead.

It wouldn't be especially hard to; the rails themselves are somewhat sound-dampening (unlike the headphones, which decline to transmit sound waves at all) but the marbles themselves are tuned to a straightforward major scale with a few sharp or flat notes for the special markers.

Their guide shows them around; a lot of the space is just for transit, but they can see a marble reader - this one's fully soundproof once the marbles are inside, but he'll take a copy and make it translucent and remove the soundproofing so she can see the mechanisms in action - and the bit after each reader that holds extra requests when there's a backup in a particular section, and the much bigger holding area for when the whole machine is backed up, and some encoded books headed back out to the book readers, and then he'll lead them to the edge of his domain to where it overlooks another section, done in buttery yellow and light coral, where they can watch a book get read out into an ansible. He's happy to answer any questions she has along the way, or make copies of any other things she'd like to see.

She has various questions about the sensitivity of the mechanisms inside the marble readers, how they allocate codes to books, how they elevate marbles when required, etc.

She takes lots of visible-light pictures, and turns out not to need any x-rays to see things because of his helpful transparent copies. When they get an overview of the book reader, she does use a focused burst to get a more detailed scan of it.

She starts working up designs for a book reader that she could sit in to scan books faster, but probably they won't be willing to attach her mechanisms to the library for a while, and her language proficiency is already doing pretty well.

When the tour is over, she expresses her appreciation and asks if she can sit in the formatting team's room and read more books.

They're going to want it back before too much longer, not everyone on the team is up for sharing space with strangers. but she'll be fine there for the afternoon and she can hang out in one of the empty formatting team territories for a few weeks if she wants, or there's a more public shared area a little ways down the mountain that nobody will mind her hanging around at. And of course she can get a book printer of her own if she wants one.

"The afternoon is okay, or anywhere I can have a transparent book printer. I can be outside if you like that," she says.

Well, whatever Weeping Cherry prefers works, really, she can have her printer anywhere she'd like - they can put it on a walking cart for her if she wants that, a little one won't take much crafting material. Or they can maybe rig up some kind of airship that doesn't need crafting to use? She'll think about it.

"I want to read enough books to have good talking, and then I want to help Crafters until I am fixed myself. After I am fixed, I can travel and find a territory. I can help by sharing crystal-person machines, or by remembering, or by seeing small things, or by getting in small places, or other things," she explains. "If no Crafters want me to help, I will not be hurt by being outside. I like the outside."

- it's ultimately Weeping Cherry's choice, is what she's getting at. It'd hurt a Crafter pretty badly to have someone try to make a choice like that for them, and she doesn't expect anyone to be willing to make it for her just because she's an alien; she's certainly not willing to.

... huh. She keeps finding little things that remind her that these are aliens.

"Oh! I regret confusing you," she says. "What I choose is a choice for you also? If I choose to be in the Formatting team room, that is also a choice for the Formatting team. So when crystal-people are choosing, they think it is good that all the people a choice is for say what choices are good. If we both think one choice is good, I do that. If we think different choices are good, we can compare our choices."

"If that isn't how Crafters do it, I will stay outside with a book machine. I think that choice is the fewest people are not liking it," she concludes.

Yeah, if Weeping Cherry wanted to camp out in the formatting team room indefinitely that'd be a problem, which is why she's been disinvited from doing that. The other two options she mentioned are fine, they're not going to affect anyone very much one way or the other, so it's nobody's business but Weeping Cherry's which of those she picks, or if she goes with some other option.

She supposes that makes sense. She's also getting the idea that governments are going to be way less popular here than they are at home. At home, most people live somewhere with more than the minimum laws, and here it's probably going to be the reverse.

She doesn't really have anything else to say on the matter, so she just replies "I understand," and continues following neon-bubbles in the direction of the formatting room with the intention of making off with one of the transparent book machines.

The lounge is much as she left it; teal argyle has left and the one in green and coral that she saw last night is back, eating a salad and tinkering with a miniature airship.

"Will you help bring a book machine outside?" she asks neon bubbles. "And make a roof for it if it wants a roof?"

Sure - does Weeping Cherry intend to give it back within the next few days, or should someone make one for her?

She thinks for a moment.

"I like one for longer, but I could use this one for a day and then bring it back if nobody wants to make one right now," she concludes.

Give her a minute to check her crafting material stockpile, how about.

(She goes to do that.)

Given how fast checking probably is, she's not sure whether she has time to strike up another conversation or not. She settles for orienting to face green and coral in case a conversation happens, and spending the time reading more of her stored books.

They seem pretty engrossed in their tinkering; it looks like they're designing a new leveling system to keep the ship steady in the air.

Oh, that does look neat! Their machines are so wonderfully understandable -- built on a human scale, with no complex microscopic components. She thinks that if she had been born a Crafter she would have had so much fun learning about and designing mechanisms.

She reads a few more pages, occasionally scanning through her stored corpus to find example sentences with similar grammatical structure to the ones she's trying to pick apart.

Neon bubbles is back before too long, and goes ahead and makes another reader and roll of paper; Weeping Cherry can keep the set she's using, since it has the ansible in it, and she'll head down to the depot and get another one while she's out. She has material for a shade, too; rain won't bother the reader but the paper will react to bright sunlight the same way it reacts to light from the reader until it's deactivated, so she'll need someplace sheltered for that unless she's sure she isn't going to want any hardcopies of anything.

"I don't need paper," she explains. "The middle is clear because I can see the lights and remember them and look at the book in my head. Because I can't craft the paper empty, this is easier."

She figured it was something like that but she didn't want to assume anything - she could change the paper so it can be cleared by heating or cooling it or something? But it does sound like Weeping Cherry is fine with what she's doing now.

"Can you bring it? I am still too small to bring it well," she requests.

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.