Rebecca's not advanced enough to the point where she's developed personal opinions on that, but she had wondered whether crafting might be obstructive to Crafters developing automated industry because it takes such a long lead time for machines to catch up to what Crafters can do by just thinking at things.

Could be. But what I meant was - when you're working with real materials you have to figure out how best to use them within their limitations - if I have a pile of machine parts no two alike and I turn them into a pair of symmetrical flourishes with a couple hours of contemplating them all that's different from having a pile of stuff that I can shape however I want and make it look like machine parts afterward. I guess the stuff could be complicated too, if I wanted to figure out how to simulate the machine parts in detail, but it's still... you're grappling with the world as it is, in the first case. She shrugs. I don't know if it'll matter to you.

She sees what Dusk means. It's—not cheating, maybe, but a different kind of exercise, and losing a bit of the complexity which made it an interesting puzzle. What Rebecca meant is she's not sure if it's something which matters to her, but she might have a more definite opinion once she's over the learning curve.

Yeah. And figuring out which parts matter to you sounds like it'll be a lot of the point of it, anyway. You'll be fine.

Anything else from your world you've been meaning to get around to?

At some point she needs to Dragon Fairy Elf Witch all the things from her world, though she needs to sync with Daisy on how they want to execute their heritage exchanges in case they can get information with the right order of operations—

Oh, wait, did Dusk mean anything else from Rebecca's world she didn't have the time to do before, but now has the slack to try? She might end up trying out some board games here, since from the teenager at the hangout it sounds like the Crafters have a lot of innovations in the area thanks to crafting.

Yeah, that's what I meant. It's been a while since I've played any board games, I don't think I can recreate any of the ones I played as a kid, but I won't mind giving some of the local ones a try.

I'd vaguely expect that any information you can get with DFEW I can get with the Force; what did you have in mind?

Earlier they were wondering if they could get heritages from each of our worlds transitively off each other, and whether the traits transitively transferred would be constrained by the ones the first person got with DFEW, and if trying to get "recessive carrier of this trait" would work to let someone copy an expressed version of it off you. And if they could copy each other more than once to pull any new heritages expressed since the last use of DFEW, and importantly if it's possible to selectively pull specific heritages without pulling others... that type of information.

(She was thinking publicly, but she's explicitly pinging Daisy in on the conversation now.)

Ideally Rebecca can pull only the droid heritage from Daisy without anything else—she's trying to get the thing where droids can package up knowledge and skills and send them to each other—while retaining the option to pull extra heritages from their universe at a later date, and while not actually requiring Daisy to express those heritages in herself. And the reverse, if Daisy wants to grab anything from Rebecca's universe.

Of course, it might not work the same both ways because the powers bend to how the owner expects them to work.

DFEW is retroactive, right? she looks to Daisy, who nods. So the order of operations shouldn't matter, really. You might not be able to realize you have Hutt traits or whatever until she decides to take the heritage, but if she metaphysically had the heritage all along then she had it when you DFEW'd her.

Rebecca hadn't been conceptualizing DFEW as retroactive in that way. She can see now how they might infer that from the description... but she's not sure it would definitely work? It might retroactively become "Daisy always had Hutt traits, but the set of traits Rebecca copied from DFEWing Daisy happened to not include any of the Hutt traits", rendering her unable to copy the Hutt traits.

It definitely can't be the case that after DFEWing another chosen of the Spirit, the other chosen could arbitrarily graft new heritages onto her without her knowledge when DFEWing new things, because that would be terrible. So there would have to be a mental action to sync new heritages over, which just brings them back to the question of whether that button exists, how it works, and how tunable it is.

The way it worked for her was that when she took a careful mental inventory of her abilities she was able to find ones that she hadn't noticed before because she hadn't thought to look for them in the right way, with the impression that they'd always been there and she'd just never noticed. It might work that way for her because it's not unusual for her to have trouble noticing things about herself like that, and because she's very firm about not wanting to change shape or composition at all, but she doesn't see why it couldn't work that way for someone else, even if it was less likely to.

Huh. Rebecca's feels very different internally; she would be significantly disturbed to experience what Daisy described, and a lot of the abilities she wants to get might be visible or extremely internally noticeable. The way it worked with Nine was that she pulled a distinct mental lever of "use Dragon Fairy Elf Witch on Nine" and immediately experienced new sensory input streams corresponding to her inherited shoulder cannons, which she wasn't particularly expecting or looking for in advance. The difference in their experience certainly indicates it's very flexible, so probably she can copy new things if she tries to?

Maybe the low-hanging fruit for her here is to meditate on it and try to get a more high-resolution interface on the power, since it's plausible that the lack of a metaphorical options menu before was because it hadn't particularly occurred to her that there were options to think about.

That does sound plausible, yeah.

She'll take a few minutes after the meal to give it a try, and if that doesn't work she'll put another half hour into it tonight. For now, though, there's breakfast to finish.