The pastries are done just a minute or so before the rest - they're something like a raspberry pinwheel, though less flaky for lack of butter when the dough was being made. Daisy serves them with butter for spreading, which Dusk is visibly enthusiastic about, though she doesn't neglect the eggs and sausage over it.

Did someone finally bring you a goat while I was asleep?

    Nope, Daisy replies, we're still waiting on that. Rebecca figured out how to use one of the Spirit powers I don't have to get milk.

Dusk makes a bit of a face, and Daisy clarifies that she believes it's cow's milk. Oh, that's good. It's been a while since I've had cow's milk, she directs at Rebecca, conversationally. We had goats, before, a cow would have been too much just for me. They're both good, of course.

Dressing Room is really fantastically useful; it's only a few seconds' work whenever they need another top up.

Did they have other animals? Daisy said they had a homestead, but Rebecca hadn't really internalized it as, you know, a homestead. Rebecca's through-and-through a city dweller for all her life so she doesn't know much about it.

We had chickens, too, and a garden, and a couple peripheral stands of things that didn't need as much attention, and I'd hunt every once in a while. We didn't grow all our own food - I say 'we' but Daisy gets most of the credit - but more than half and all the fresh stuff, we only got things from town once a month.

That sounds nice. Here, with fleshcrafting and genecrafting, it's easier to live off the land, is that right? Do they usually trade for anything with the locals? Maybe "trade" isn't the right word.

They don't do trading much but a few of them have been keeping us in meat while we get settled, we haven't decided whether we want to keep animals for that in the long term. Crafting makes it a lot easier, though, yeah. Much less logistical overhead.

She just went to the hangout with Daisy and Nine this morning to meet some of the locals; they're very friendly, aren't they.

They are, it's really charming.

There were a few of the Crafters with this problem with a dog...

(Depending on how interested or uninterested in the neighborly gossip Dusk looks as Rebecca recounts the morning, she will provide a less or more abridged summary of the Dog Quest and how she's ended up trying to learn their writing to write a chat room for prospective trainers or wild release locations. She's clearly enthusiastic about getting to play with the local computing technology.)

Huh! She's not sure she can help with Dog Quest but she's also definitely interested in the computing tech; she's never been much for programming but it seems like the local machines are at just about the level of abstraction she's sometimes worked with as an engineer, so that'd definitely be cool to get a look at, she thinks. Also it might be interesting to get a different window into Crafter culture; she's gotten the impression that the ones they see at the hangout are significantly more social than average and that might not be true of the ones with computer access.

Rebecca is definitely looking forward to poking at it. Crafting does seem to make everything a lot more—tactile, sort of? Abstracted but also materialized. She thinks they might not actually get to look at the complex parts yet, though, since it sounds like they're only getting sent the front-end interface and the actual computer lives with the system administrator, or whatever they're called. It'll be a good introduction anyway.

She hadn't thought about the selection effect for the hangout, but that definitely makes sense; it would be definitely true for humans, and Crafters seem even less socially minded. She's interested in whether they've developed online subcultures the way Earth humans tend to. Or maybe they'll see in action some sort of—cultural globalization—since probably there are regional differences in Crafter culture?

Even the front-end interface will be interesting to look at; I took apart a copy of the library printer when they first got it and that was pretty cool. I'm not sure they have a generalized global internet, though? The way the library works feels like the wrong scale for that to be a thing yet.

Yeah, but she'd expect a chat room to quickly grow the kind of internal equilibrium that an Internet forum might; it feels almost the ideal breeding ground among all the types of proto–information network you could think of. So in this case it would be subculture singular, she supposes. And at least on Earth, the Internet started out as a communication intranet that metastasized into something bigger. If they stay here long enough, they might see the Crafters standing up a proper Internet within a human lifetime! Or proper by Rebecca's standards, at least; maybe their world has something grander.

—though with Internet the actual breakthrough they needed was networking protocol, which it's not clear this system is solving—

She's getting carried away, sorry about that.

It'd be pretty hypocritical of me to object to nerdery.

Rebecca stifles a laugh.

Her Earth's Internet was created during Rebecca's lifetime, is the thing. It wasn't even a concept when she was a teenager, and in a short few decades it turned into the biggest technological revolution in the world. It changed the world more than parahumans did, if she's being honest. So this is one of the many, many interests she's studied and collected in her brain forever. Engineering broadly as well, for different reasons. So this is pulling at her on a lot of different threads.

Oh, wow. Ours is much older, yeah. Not that every world has full access to it - the planet I grew up on was pretty rural, I only had access to the planetary 'net growing up - but it was still out there.

She really hopes they'll be able to make some sense of the tinkertech, with their higher tech base. Rebecca can reproduce Hero's lectures trying to explain his work, and she's started her fair share of workshop fires attempting hands-on learning, so she knows her way around the esoteric nuts and bolts if Dusk wants a hand.

I'll have a look after breakfast. I can already tell it's not going to be as simple as matching it all up to known tech, though, there's something in there that looks a bit like a sideways gravity tangle that I've never seen before.

Well, they're in no hurry, really.

Yup. Nice, isn't it.

She's still not used to the change of pace, but it is!

It does take a while to get used to, when we first moved to the homestead it took months for me to stop feeling like there was something I was forgetting to do. But it's - well, for me it was important to have the space to stop worrying about that and think about what I wanted for myself in the long run, I don't know whether that matches your situation.

...It is, she thinks.

She's had to catch herself from aggresively optimizing all her time away, and she's still—not sure—

Not sure what she's doing. Not sure what she is, without all the responsibilities and ticking timers binding her into the shapes the world needs. She's noticed herself latching onto tasks, goals, and maybe that's a coping mechanism, to bring structure and direction back into her life, but...

Does Dusk have any advice, or is it just... time.

A lot of it is time. I found it helpful to have reminders, too, and scheduled things that I was supposed to be doing that were about what I wanted to work toward. And the kind of work that gives you a chance to think while you do it - I made a lot of art that way, once we had the house built.

(—Oh, that makes sense, if art was something Dusk got into as a retirement project of sorts.)

Maybe Rebecca should try getting into art. She never invested time in it because it was the sort of thing which took a lot of time to produce results and which she couldn't cheat at with perfect memory and cognitive acceleration—or delegation—but maybe that's exactly why it would be good for her now. And certainly these new worlds offer a lot in novel inspiration.

Yeah. The crafting is good for it, too, though I'm not sure I like how much of a shortcut it is.