She will think at the crows something vaguely between a goodbye and apology.

To Daisy: That makes sense. She just didn't want to be off doing her own study if their project urgently needed hands. She's perfectly happy to split time to help them with that research and see if fleshcrafting can offer any useful integrations.

To both Daisy and the teenager: she was originally planning to hang out and meet more people but that also sounds like a good idea. Does Daisy want to/can she come with, or do they want to split? She's probably not skilled enough at regular crafting to make it useful to apprentice with the fleshcrafter yet, if she's understanding the requisite skills correctly, but it would be good to meet and get to know them, maybe scope out the idea.

(If compensation can't shift the scales, she really needs to make a good impression, but she's finding herself not bothered to work too hard at optimizing their first meeting. If they don't get along naturally, it might be better for her to find someone else anyway.)

Four people might be kind of a lot all at once but he thinks it'll be okay if they're careful about not overwhelming them. Especially if it's just a short visit to meet them and ask if they might be interested in the future, which it does sound like it would be. How much crafting does Rebecca know?

She only started learning last night, literally. She can change the color and shape of crafting material to reasonable precision when paying attention, and she figured out how to change the specularity and a few other bits about surface texture. But her powers make her learn much faster in a few different ways, so in a month or two she expects she might be as good as the average Crafter?

If she focuses on fleshcrafting Daisy thinks she can probably be as good as the average Crafter at that within a week or so, the basics aren't hard.

They'll probably want her to pick that up before she starts going for lessons, but yeah, that's soon enough that it's worth a visit.

He's got his papers packed up now and just needs to shrink-copy his map and get the big one's crafting material into a more convenient shape, which is a matter of a few seconds' work, and now he's ready to go.

Great. So are Daisy and Nine coming?

Daisy would like to if they don't mind having her. Nine, on consultation, will opt to stay here; he's already met the fleshcrafter and doesn't think he'll have anything to contribute.

Off they can go, then.

The walk to the fleshcrafter's territory is a little longer, off in a slightly different direction from Daisy's place; they have to go around another territory to get there. When they do, there's a sign standing just outside the spot marked by the monolith, in black with swirled yellow-and-orange finials and yellow glyphs, which Daisy reads for Rebecca: it gives the fleshcrafter's schedule (shortly after sunrise to shortly before sunset) and has a slot for depositing letters with a perch underneath to make it accessible to delivery crows and a grey button to press in case of an emergency and another to press if their attention is wanted less urgently. Daisy presses the latter, and more glyphs appear on a previously-blank section of the board indicating that they'll be there in ten or fifteen minutes.

Her attention has been drawn again to how dismal her crafting capabilities are, so she practice-plays with a bit of crafting material in her pocket as they walk.

She wonders how the doorbell system works. Is it connected by ansible to an interface inside the fleshcrafter's house? She's also suddenly wondering at Daisy how delivery crows work and how easy it is to learn the Crafters' writing.

She expects that the doorbell works by ansible, possibly to something installed inside their home but more likely to something portable so they'll be in contact wherever they go; she has one like that too. (Daisy does have a similar signpost outside her group's territory, they just didn't stop to look at it on the way out.) The section of the sign where the glyphs appeared is also an ansible, she's pretty sure.

The crows will carry letters for anyone who asks them to, in exchange for a bit of food; they aren't very smart in general but they seem to have an excellent memory for people, so they're good at it, though she wouldn't be surprised if the fleshcrafter gets most of their crow-based mail delivered to them personally instead of to the collection point.

She didn't find the Crafters' writing difficult to pick up at all, but then she has Omniglot on top of specialized programming for learning languages. It's a little odd compared to human languages, being structured purely conceptually rather than based on a spoken language, but that doesn't make it any harder, she doesn't think. She can go over the basics of the grammar while they wait, if Rebecca would like.

...Huh, she's wondering if—Daisy said she can write learned skills to hardcopy—Rebecca doesn't seem to have the hardware to ingest those, but if Daisy compresses a skill into that format and tries to beam that to Rebecca over crafting communication, could that work? It's a bit of a long shot, but might be worth a try; and Rebecca might be able to return the favor if so. She might also just be able to pick up the hardware if she Dragon Fairy Elf Witches more droids. Maybe with fleshcrafting they can test if Dragon Fairy Elf Witch can selectively pick heritages from a being with multiple viable heritages.

- huh, it hadn't occurred to her to try combining the skill packaging with the crafted communication; she doesn't expect it to work in general, since unpacking the skill is also an action, but it might work for Rebecca. She's willing to give it a try; packing the skill will just take a minute.

She doesn't expect fleshcrafting to interact with Dragon Fairy Elf Witch very much, since it doesn't touch genetics at all; did Rebecca have a mechanism in mind there?

She didn't realize it doesn't touch genetics! That puts a damper on the idea. Maybe if there are interfertile species around she can look for a liger or something like that and try inheriting the components separately. And yes, she was thinking that either her existing mental enhancements could help her unpack it, or she might have unknowingly inherited something related from Nine.

The closest thing Daisy knows of to a hybrid animal in the area are crossbreed livestock, chickens and things; there are also a couple of dino-crows that Rebecca might be able to do something with, those are genecrafted. It might also be worth asking around, Daisy hasn't been here long enough to know all the trivia the area has to offer.

That sounds like it... should work? They can test it later.

Sure, there's plenty of time.

And here's the language bundle.

She cannot download it. She tells the same to Daisy. That's unfortunate, since it would have made their parallelization of fleshcrafting learning and interworld travel experiments much more productive.

Oh well. Hopefully she'll end up being able to copy from Daisy one way or another. Though Daisy will want to spend some time thinking about things first - she's met a lot of species of aliens, is the thing, and she hasn't DFEW'd them yet but if she does that before Rebecca DFEWs her it's presumably possible for some of the traits to carry over. The big limitation there is going to be that Daisy doesn't want to be biological or look any different unless she can tuck it away like Rebecca can with her cannons.

Rebecca thinks that the Spirit won't give Daisy biologicals or a different look unless Daisy wants it; the definition of drawbacks is—she got a clarification on this specifically, so let her pull up the exact text—

And would I be right in expecting that any changes which could be considered neutral, but which I wouldn't prefer—for example changing my mental architecture towards the origin species—would count relevantly as drawbacks and won't happen?

you're right that the definition of drawbacks (and the definition of drawbacks cool and dramatic enough to be allowed) depends on your preferences and aesthetics.

She'd gathered that, yeah; she's not sure she can pass a trait along without having it herself, though. Maybe she can? Some biological traits skip generations, right?

That makes sense. Maybe it'll work. Rebecca isn't really invested in looking different so it might not matter anyway; she doesn't badly want a stinger or claws or extra arms or funny ears or anything. She'd be going for any innate powers, flat mental improvements, flat physical improvements and so on.

There are definitely some of those on offer. She'll try to find time to figure out her options there sooner rather than later, then. Are there any physical changes Rebecca would particularly want? On reflection Daisy suspects that specifically trying to get a 'carrier of this trait' trait would work.

Anything which is specifically concealable, like her shoulder cannons, she would probably be interested in. She... has Perfect Hair and Emerald Orbs, so anything affecting those she might be able to just magic away, so she might also be interested in those? Higher confidence in that than for the concealables. But "carrier of this trait" sounds like it could work fine.

She'll keep those in mind.