"Very good, very good. I'd ask for several things with your binderly magic, but I'm sure everyone else would too- Perhaps I should take a tally of peoples' top desires? There's a lot of work to do. Many hands, but only three sets that are magic, hmm? And Hessia is still asleep. Not so many wizards want to risk their necks in the colors. Sensible, seeing as how half the wizards who came with us have died..."

"I'd love to speak with her as soon as she's available. As for the rest, all I can do is to take in the requests and triage them as best I can. I do have a few requests for you as well, if you have a moment to look into things."

"Please do elaborate."

"I arrived here with basically nothing but the clothes on my back and the magic I bear. I would greatly appreciate borrowing a spare bedroll for the night, if one is going unused. Also, my magical education was a bit spotty, so any textbooks or reference materials people have on any magical subject would be appreciated, just to fill gaps. I don't have high confidence in that last request being fulfillable, though."

"Well. We do have the late Donovan and Ms. Klimas's things. But I've packaged up Ms. Klimas's belongings and will also inter her ashes- For return to Covehold and eventually to Whitecrest, in accordance with her will. She did her best, standing at the cave entrance and contracting it so the dragon's lightning did not kill us all, so I am inclined to respect it unless there's something directly and urgently relevant to survival. And you would have to talk to Donovan's widow for the other. A bedroll, that I can probably do."

"I don't want to trouble a grieving widow. I'll make do with talking to Hessia when she wakes. The bedroll will be more than enough. Oh, also, I'd like to get a sense of who everyone is and what their skills are at some point. I'm going to try to be the social half of demesne leadership, because I enjoy talking to people far more than Nico does. Meeting people and getting a sense of them will make that easier. Also, we need to get on crops as soon as possible, so I'd like to hear from any farmers in the colony about where they're planning to plant and what I can do as a deadspeaking binder to help them along. Introductions would be appreciated toward that end. I expect they know what they need better than I do."

He writes shorthand for these things on the wall. 'census', 'crops/farmers'.

"We do have a list of everyone with listed professions, but I don't necessarily know anything less obvious than a farmer knowing how to farm. If he also knows how to make rope... I don't have that. I'll... Pause my supply tally and go gather the farmers next, that is quite a point. I think someone already went out hunting..."

"It's not urgent on a scale of hours. I just want to help them however I can. These things can happen tomorrow, if need be."

"I think I would have an easier time organizing things if one of our Binders declared me an authority- However temporarily."

She hums thoughtfully. "We will need an organizer, someone to help with talking to people and getting them moving, and someone to help with organizing resources and logistics. I don't want to make any permanent decisions without discussing the advantages and disadvantages with Nico, but getting organized fast has important advantages. Mmm. Temporary Organizer, pending an actual discussion about needed roles and who's best suited for them between me and Nico, and if anyone gives you trouble about getting things moving, I'll handle it. But this is with the understanding that if you overstep, you're on latrines duty. So if anyone throws a tantrum about one of your decisions, you'd best be able to convince me it was a good one, or at least the best you could reasonably make with the info you had. That fair?"

He makes a face. Then sighs. "Yes, I understand. You hardly know anyone here, least of all me. I'd hesitate to declare a lord straight off, too. Could you give me an example of a reasonable decision and an unreasonable one?"

"Let's use the one I just handled earlier today. Three colonists are having a fight about a destroyed boat, first about who owns the wreckage, then about whose fault the damage is. One, the pilot, claims ownership. The other two are trying to get the wood for construction. What do you do?"

"Tell them to cut it out and put the debris somewhere safe for now, the binder will make a decision on this later. Write that down. Come to you or Mr. Whisp about it later."

"Decent enough. Makes it my problem, doesn't do anything irrevocable. How I handled it was three-fold. I pointed out that fighting about apportioning blame contributed less than nothing to all of us surviving, then pointed out that the wreckage wasn't doing any good in its current state and could be repurposed, and finally pointed out all the things the pilot could be doing that would contribute to our survival, both short- and long-term, and told him to pick one. He went with cutting reeds to eventually make rope and nets. I'll grow us some lumber for another boat later, but we need that wood for other things now."

"Yes, people are fashioning poles and the like. Hrmm. ...It's late and we're all strained. Sleep will come soon and tomorrow is a new day."

"Just so. I'd also like to find someone to help maintain Nico's water distillery, free more of his time up, but that's a tomorrow task as well. For now, I'll be meditating on some magic things near the entrance if anyone want to talk, or if you track down a bedroll."

"I'll get on that now."

Walking towards the cave entrance she spots Nico, smoothing out the floor by rolling stalagmites into big stone spheres. Some older kids -eight to twelve or so- are playing on a few he lined up in a little depression at the edge of the cave.

Awww, cute. She finds a quiet spot where she's reachable but out of the way and pokes at the mentalism side of things. What are the primitive actions of this shiny new magical skill, and can she store data or procedures in the core?

The Core is... Weird. There's a bunch of ways she could interact with it but to her magic senses it's a bright-hot ball of energy, unclaimable, but a source of infinite imbuement.

The primitive actions of mentalism are remembering, math, and deciding. Also, telekinesis. She could, for example, make a rock that hovers after it's touched five times. Or a door that only opens if you tap the right pattern. Or a todo list in her head. Or a tray that floats if someone is touching it. She could also make an Excel spreadsheet if she's willing to recharge every cell manually and give up on advanced formulae like vlookup for now.

Oh wow. She basically has magical programming. Nico said as much but it's cool to just feel it. Does it provide any straightforward way to share data storage between her and Nico without needing a physical object to bind the data to? Does it come with loop primatives, or just if/elseif/else? 

Her magic instincts seem pretty sure that data storage requires a mentalism-binding (what Nico called an idea), and those need to be anchored to something physical. A loop is not a primitive but it's pretty obvious how to put it together with ifs and counting.

Yeah, building up the rest of the language from ifs and variables is doable. Does referencing a stored procedure in another idea seem doable? Or at least stored procedures in one large idea?

Yes, you can make ideas ... not arbitrarily complicated, but pretty complicated before running into issues. And combine that with telekinesis flipping switches and activating or deactivating things and you can get pretty creative.

Progress. What about power transfer, can she power it centrally and have power distributed to subsystems?

Oh, you need wire for that. Gold works best, but anything electrically conductive can carry imbuement.