Really any reasonable time will work; sunrise is very early this time of year so the Crafters will be there by five or six. Daisy would also prefer to be back by noon to get Dusk her breakfast, but aside from that it's up to Rebecca.

She would like to be up by five and get there around six, then, if that works with Daisy. She doesn't have her phone; is there an alarm feature to the bed?

There isn't at the moment but Daisy can make one, it'll just take a minute: She expands out another bit of crafting material that she fashions into a disc with a nub sticking up out of it rotating slowly in a low bowl with an apparatus on top that the nub will bump into when it makes its way around to it, which will then chime; she can change the sound of the chime if Rebecca doesn't like it when she demonstrates it. She considers for a moment and adds markings to the disc to indicate twenty-minute intervals so that Rebecca can set it herself in the future; a real clock would of course be better but she doesn't have a design for one available off the top of her head, probably she can get Dusk to help with that tomorrow.

Neat. She is generating more crafting questions from that demonstration but will not bother Daisy about random things she'll find out in due time in her own studies.

Where should she look for Daisy tomorrow? Just in the main living area?

Yep; she'll make sure she isn't busy then. Is there anything else Rebecca would like for tonight?

That's all, thank you. And again, she appreciates them putting up with her.

It's no trouble at all. Daisy hopes she has a good night.

Rebecca bids her farewell and the same.

Once she's alone, she sits down on her bed, massaging creases into the material and ironing them out.

She's kept asking herself why the Spirit put her here. It's not to fix her; her read on Daisy is confident on that. It's not to find the key to beating Scion. She has all the time in the world and all the resources of the multiverse to figure out how kill one thing; she told Dusk she wasn't in a hurry, and she stands by it. There are powers to be gained here; crafting isn't exactly world-shattering, but it's astonishingly versatile and Daisy and Dusk clearly thought they could leverage it into multiverse travel—she needs to ask them about that. But that doesn't feel like the right answer.

She's beginning to wonder if the answer is... nothing.

Back home, Alexandria recommended that Protectorate heroes take a month of recharge leave every couple of years. Decompress, learn a hobby, allow the accumulated stresses of their work slack to unwind. The practice is empirically proven to reduce burnout and improve net productivity, the Chief Director would grudgingly admit.

Rebecca didn't follow her own advice. She cheated, as she did with her sleep. A contracted rogue duo to put her in an artificially accelerated dreaming trance, and she came out after a few hours refreshed like a new person, feeling as if a hundred years had passed. And like her cheap solution to sleep, the shortcut was never as good as the real thing.

Is it that simple?

She has Dressing Room to sort through and plans of approach to make for tomorrow's hangout. She ought to put together some strategy of how to get in Dusk's good books.

But—and she's not even mentally fatigued, since she had the lucky foresight to take an hour of sleep last night, so this is purely impulsive—she feels like taking a nap. And she has an hour to prepare after she wakes up. And if she botches it...

What are the stakes? Some people are annoyed at her. Worst case, she needs to move to a different continent.

She changes into pyjamas and lies down on the bed. It's warm. She tries fiddling with the thickness of the blanket and ends up breaking it accidentally and globbing the remains into a ball, but Dressing Room seems up to taking over the task, bundling her in an overlarge cape that rolls out out to a thin and breatheable cover.

She drifts off without meaning to. She doesn't remember to turn off the lights.

The light will still be on in the morning, then; there's no sign that it's drawing from any kind of energy source.

There's a smell of berries in the air when she steps outside, and it gets stronger when Daisy opens the door of the main house for her; she's been making jam, but she's all done now and ready to go. Nine will be joining them, too.

It has been so long since she'd had a proper night of sleep. She's in a good mood when she emerges.

That smells amazing, she tells Daisy, and approaches, idly curious, to inspect the apparatus. How is she making the jam? When she sees Nine, she'll be sure to greet him; they didn't get to have much of a proper conversation yesterday.

Nine rumbles a greeting in return, in what Daisy identifies as Basic when she translates for him.

The kitchen, like almost everything else here, is made of crafting material; she's crafted the cooking pot itself to heat up on the inside rather than needing a stove. The berries she used were fleshcrafted to be extra sweet, since she hasn't worked out how to get pure sugar yet, and the thickening agent is also fleshcrafted from a plant, and experimental, but she's happy with the results this time and Dusk has already confirmed for her that it's not poisonous to humans. For storage, she's using a crafted freezer, since she's not confident she's figured out proper canning procedure with the tools she has at hand yet; it's just a crafted box that's set to keep its inner walls and shelves at freezer temperatures, which keeps everything inside it cold, while keeping its outer walls at room temperature.

Crafting really does make everything easier.

She reassures Daisy that she has Immunity System and cannot be poisoned. Oh, and she promised milk, didn't she? She ducks around a wall and—apparently that's sufficient—comes out with a milk churn on her back. That was easier than she expected. If Daisy doesn't have a use for it now she can vanish it and make more easily. She thinks. She was sort of doing that just to see if she could.

In parallel she's asking Nine what he was working last night, if he doesn't mind her being nosy.

She wasn't going to do any more cooking just this moment but she can put the milk away for later, she also has a refrigerator set up. Dusk will be so pleased to have butter again.

Nine has been working on figuring out how to teach Basic to the Crafters, since he doesn't have a spare language slot to learn their written language in and doesn't want to give up Basic and being able to speak directly to Dusk. The Crafters have a little easier time hearing the different sounds when they're sung rather than spoken, so he's been looking through the library for music that has useful vocabulary in it, and practicing it - he's not as good with his voice as Daisy's kind of droid, so the practice is helpful.

That's an excellent project. If he wants, Rebecca can be a bouncing board for Basic pedagogy, though she might not have the same singing bias as Crafters. She was interested in learning anyway. At some point she may suddenly start learning 20x faster from him, though, because of Anything You Can Do, which would muddle the results a bit.

To all: what's their agenda for today?

They're going to take her to the Crafters' public hangout and probably to see the fleshcrafter this morning, and don't have any other specific plans; if they get back early Daisy wants to craft up a butter churn and Nine might go hunting. Dusk is predictably going to want a quiet day, but may or may not want them around; if she'd prefer them gone Daisy might see if the crows want to do anything - they usually do but it's hard to predict what - and if she'd rather have them around she's thinking she'll make a pie or some cookies with the fresh butter, and Nine intends to finish up the global warming research Dusk asked him for either way unless someone wants him for something. Of course if Rebecca has any other suggestions none of their plans are particularly urgent, besides being there for Dusk if she wants them.

All of that sounds excellent. They know the locals much better than she does. She is interested in meeting the crows and the other intelligent animals eventually, but not enough to change any schedules for it.

There's a pretty good chance they'll meet some crows or mammoths at the hangout or on the way to it; in any case Rebecca shouldn't have to wait too long to run into them. Did she want to get going now?

Absolutely.

Off they can go, then; it's about a ten minute walk to the hangout. There's a child maybe seven years old throwing shiny sticks into the air for a flock of crows to catch, and a trio of adults chatting, and a teenager with a big map laid out on the table in front of him and a few pages of notes that he's working on next to it. About a third of the crows come over to say hello to Daisy and ask her who her new friend is when they spot her, and she suggests that Rebecca can handle her own introduction.