Is the fleshcrafter out yet?

Not quite yet, it hasn't been that long.

The teenager notices her checking down the path (he's been trying to be subtle in how much he's looking at her, but... well, she did take A Hundred Ships) and indicates that he expects the fleshcrafter to be a couple more minutes, their house is a ways into their territory and it's not an emergency.

Well, it's kind of her own fault, isn't it. At least this world doesn't have to worry about unrealistic body standards.

She wonders at both of them what the typical makeup of the fleshcrafter's day is. Do they spend most of their time fleshcrafting or studying fleshcrafting, or is more like a part-time role, and most of the time they're doing the same things everyone else does?

It kind of depends on what's going on, mostly. Like most healers the fleshcrafter has a guest house for people who aren't in good enough shape to take care of themselves at home, and when someone's staying with them it's a fair amount of work to make sure they're comfortable. That isn't too often, though; Crafters prefer quite strongly to be in their own territories and the fleshcrafter tries pretty hard to find a way to make that possible. The rest of the time they have a pretty normal amount of chores and things to do - like, on the upper end of normal, with all the rabbits, but not a weird amount - and spend most of their time doing whatever they want. Which is sometimes fleshcrafting, but it mostly depends on what they're in the mood for that day or week or month.

That makes sense. She's still getting a feel for what average Crafter life is like. Are the rabbits pets, or is it related their fleshcrafting work somehow?

Some of them are more pets, most of them are for fleshcrafting experiments or meat - most Crafters keep some kind of small animal for meat and almost all of them keep chickens for eggs, and everybody has a food garden.

(The concept "fleshcrafting experiments" still makes Rebecca uneasy, but she'll get over it.)

What are the usual leisure activities? She'll make vaguely inquisitive small talk like this until the fleshcrafter arrives.

People have lots of different kinds of hobbies! He can easily ramble about the sorts of things the Crafters in this area do for fun for the few minutes it takes the fleshcrafter to show up. (Different kinds of hobby engineering are common, just as often for the sake of solving puzzles as accomplishing anything useful; so are a variety of kinds of art and information-collecting. Sports are less popular but still represented, as are group activities like choir singing and board games.)

And then the fleshcrafter shows up! He recognizes Daisy from peoples' descriptions, and of course he knows the teenager, but who's the newcomer? And do they want to come in or stay here?

(They themselves are stout and vaguely androgynous, with a flat chest but more feminine hips and hairline, and red hair just a touch brighter than is plausibly natural. They also have a remarkable set of whiskers - not a mustache or beard, but the kind of facial accessory you'd find on a cat - that extend out all the way to the edges of their shoulders and an extra thumb on their left hand.)

(Board games! They must have such interesting board games with crafting. She is abruptly more interested in board games than she's ever been in her life, but alas, business calls.)

She takes the body modifications in stride, giving them a once-over and moving right on.

She's Rebecca, from another world, like Daisy. She only got here yesterday. Like Daisy she only picked up crafting after coming here, but she learns quick and Daisy reckoned (glancing at Daisy for corroboration) she'd be up to speed as the average crafter within a week. Rebecca heard about fleshcrafting and was immediately fascinated and was told about the fleshcrafter and, well—it would be a bit forward to ask the fleshcrafter to teach her just like that, but it's what she was in fact thinking of coming here, so. Short of that she's just interested in learning more about fleshcrafting and the sort of things you do with it. Her home did a lot of study into biology and healing, and Rebecca is learned herself in some of it, but almost no one back home had the ability to directly interact with it like this.

They're perplexed at the name, until Daisy explains that it's similar to how Crafters put a few-word identifying description of themselves on books and that heavily-used encoded languages often end up with words that don't have meanings beyond being peoples' identifiers, which 'Rebecca' is an example of. With that sorted out, they say they'd be happy to talk about some of the things fleshcrafting can do and see what she might want to learn, though for anything really complicated the best they can do is help her puzzle out what the library's books have to say about it. What does she know so far?

She needs to start remembering the names thing.

She knows that fleshcrafting is the use of crafting to modify living bodies, and it's used to heal injuries, modify bodies, also for some culinary uses? She's also told it doesn't work on a genetic level. A lot of Crafters know enough of it to get along but past that it's a bit of a specialization. But she doesn't know what the actual practice of doing fleshcrafting is like, the skills and challenges to doing it well, and what the known limitations and bleeding edge of the field are.

Some of the things she's interested in—healing, first of all, and the general broad base of moving around standard biology, if that makes sense. But she's also interested in more esoteric applications blending into more physical crafts or engineering, like... extensible arms with telescoping bones, or microthorn skin for improved grip? Things involving internal crafting-programmed components? Ansible neurons to have multiple separately operated bodies? She doesn't know if any of those are possible.

Microthorn skin and internal programming are possible, though the latter is hard to do anything very complex with without risking interfering with a creature's organs, there's just not a lot of extra space in most animals. Things involving extra limbs are either very difficult or the realm of genecrafting or both - getting all the muscles and tendons and things set up properly is hard unless you can instantiate them from latent genes, they're still trying to get their extra thumb working the way they imagined it - and ansibles are... maybe technically possible to do something with, if you were very careful? But moving parts from one body to another isn't the kind of thing anyone does, to the best of their knowledge, and it sounds like it'd be the kind of thing that went really badly most of the time. Interesting idea, though!

So fleshcrafting is easier to use with upstream building blocks like genetic expression, cell differentiation, natural tissue formation and so on? And manually forming and putting all the tissues where you want them is possible, but a much harder and more fragile project? That's not a typical limitation of people who can manipulate living bodies where she comes from; a lot of the time they can just do whatever they want and get things wired up as they imagine; she's not sure if maybe they're not doing all the informational or design work. It definitely changes the way she thinks about it now, in a much more interesting way.

Are fleshcrafting and genecrafting completely different disciplines and skillsets? People seem very clear on the distinction. She suppose she can see why, given the different scales and mechanisms. But is it a continuum, or more like manipulating physical structure versus chemical makeup?

Fleshcrafting and genecrafting are as distinct as either is from normal crafting, yes, though it's useful to know a few genecrafting tricks as a fleshcrafter and vice versa, and adding normal crafting to the mix adds versatility too. And both of them are like normal crafting in that you have to get the details of what you're doing from somewhere, though, yes, in fleshcrafting you can copy from existing tissues you have access to - if they had a patient who'd lost their thumb in an accident they'd be able to fix that by mirroring their other one over or (less elegantly) by copying from their own and adjusting the proportions to suit the patient; the problem with their extra thumb is that hands aren't symmetrical and it's not possible to just mirror their existing thumb without interfering with the structures their fingers depend on on that side. And they don't usually think of it in terms of cell differentiation, it doesn't involve quite that much detail work for most practical purposes, but it's not an inaccurate way of looking at it - just like with regular crafting, you can't make something from nothing with fleshcrafting, but you can change one kind of tissue to another as freely as you'd like.

So if you wanted to, say, give yourself spider spinnerets in your fingers, you'd first want to model that off a spider, but secondly... would you need genecrafting to make your body able to replenish the silk, because you don't code for the right proteins in your existing genes?

Not quite like that. They haven't worked with spinnerets before and the further you go from the target's species in copying a whole organ (as opposed to something more simply structural, like a change in skin texture) the more likely it is that you'll need to tweak it to work with their biology, and genecrafting is a potential approach to that but figuring out which genes to copy over isn't necessarily any easier than figuring out how to make the changes directly with fleshcrafting, and it's much more likely to have unexpected side effects. And either way, once the organ is in and properly supported, it'll do its job just fine, including producing any things it usually produces; it doesn't have to be genetically plausible at all, nevermind having the specific genetics around to let the modified creature actually grow it. That's the advantage of fleshcrafting over genecrafting, once you have the detail work done it's much easier to just do things without having to worry about the biochemistry.

So one she doesn't quite understand is... her impression with crafting material is it's sort of its own substance, right, changeable in shape and properties, but not made of atoms and minerals like the normal stone and dirt lying around.  And they can transmute it out of normal matter, but after that it's its own thing, just... in the shape and properties of what it originally was?

How does that work with fleshcrafting? Is fleshcrafted flesh "crafting flesh", or... that doesn't sound like it'd work naively?

It's less that crafted flesh is its own substance like crafting material is, and more that all flesh has some of the same kind of mutability when it comes to being crafted. You can't do absolutely anything with it and still have a functional creature, but you can do plenty of the same sorts of things if you're careful.

...

uh

Sorry, this might be a dumb question, but has Daisy or anyone used fleshcrafting on Dusk? Are we sure that it's "all flesh" and not "the flesh of living things from this world"?

Nobody has tried it on Dusk, no.

Do they know that living things in this world don't have magic flesh, and using fleshcrafting on someone from a different world wouldn't enmagic them or part of them, potentially in dangerous ways? They don't have evidence that it would, just...

Daisy doesn't know that for sure, no, and doesn't see how the locals could have figured it out. It's the kind of thing Dusk makes a good guinea pig for, though, the Force is particularly good at physical defense in several ways that should cover this; she'll talk to her about it.

To Daisy only: Rebecca might be a good guinea pig herself, with her perks, but yes, they should discuss the details later.

Anyway, that was a weird sidetrack. Even if it turns out to be less applicable for Rebecca herself, it's still a terribly interesting field. They've been talking about limits, but what's the most interesting thing the fleshcrafter has ever heard of someone doing? What's the most interesting thing that hasn't been achieved, but which someone thinks is possible and is working on? Or, actually, what's the fleshcrafter working on right now? Apart from their thumb.

It's pretty widely agreed on that wings and the body modifications necessary to make them work are the bleeding edge of the craft; nobody has ones that do real flight yet but a couple people think they're close and gliding is basically solved. (They in particular are nowhere near skilled enough to do anything with the fleshcrafting side of that but they've been messing around with kite design to see if they can contribute any insights that way.) Apart from that - tentacles are cool and people do all sorts of things with those, you can even put taste and smell receptors on them if you grow them close enough to the spine that you don't have to run the nerves too far, tails are popular and people do a lot of different things with those (and they're an example of combining genecrafting and fleshcrafting, you use the genecrafting to grow a monkey tail and then make modifications from there with fleshcrafting), some people want gait and stance adjustments, that kind of thing - of course most people want simpler and more utilitarian things, cosmetic changes like fur or bioluminescence or reproductive stuff added if they don't have the sorts of capabilities they want there or medical issues fixed, that kind of thing, and they could go on about the latest advancements in external oxygenation setups or clever ways to hook up a womb if someone doesn't like the traditional arrangement for one but it doesn't sound like she's as interested in that. They don't really have any research projects going right now but there's a new book on reproductive stuff they've been reading through.