She stretches, dusts herself off, and rolls up the bedroll. Time to go find Nico and get some work done. She cheerfully greets anyone she passes on the way. "Good morning!"

The mood is much brighter this morning and several people accost her wanting workplaces! This one is a carpenter. This one is a cooper. This one is a smith! This one wants to know where they should be laying out all the cut reeds to rett. This one is a butcher- It's not really very fun or sanitary to butcher beasts outside, you know? And the hunters who went out yesterday totally caught one. That's what breakfast is made of!

Nico is not visible, but there's a new exit to the main cave chamber.

She solicits and notes down what people need in their workspaces. How big should the area be, do you need ventilation, do you have important material constraints, what are the dimensions of a retting tank? And all of this goes into her mental notepad on her way to find Nico, who is likely in that new room.

New hallway, actually, gradually sloping down. He's at the end, excavating more.

"Ah, there you are. So, I had an idea. How about I actually use horotracting today? I can turn closets into dining halls... So long as I remember to keep them imbued. Or someone has wire. I don't want to make too many temporary solutions but it'd be better than 'cave floor for everyone'."

She smiles when she finds Nico. "Ooh. That would mesh well with a request people had. We have a bunch of requests for workspaces: carpenter, cooper, smith, butcher, et cetera. Could dig out some closets and then stretch them into workrooms. Oh. and speaking of secondary skills, I've got a bound to-do list now. Also, I would do an awful lot of favors for a mirror eventually, but it's not urgent."

"So, question is- What the place is gonna look like in a year, right? We'll want to get out ahead of it. Neat streets. Convenient amenities. No loud industries next to where people sleep. And I want to build as much as I can out of stone, fused all the way down the the bedrock. Smooth limestone's pretty. We'll have a white town, if we can find copper ore- Green roofs, like a Mediterranean holiday resort. We're only like ten, fifteen miles up from this bay- They wanted to keep going and not be near other people founding demesnes. The geography does not correspond, by the way. This place isn't earth with magic. I lost track of where I was going with that. I can make big rooms today. They'd be explicitly temporary. What I really want to do is get this hall long enough, make a nice sheer pit, and try figuring out how monsters work- The fifth component of the core. I think they might be made of iridescence? Or - something like that. They devour imbuement and bindings if they touch them, and get stronger, just like the colors do."

"Ooh, smooth limestone is pretty, especially with copper. Do you want to plan things mostly underground or aboveground? And can you make another one of those temporarily goopy slates to draw some village planning on? Stone construction fused all the way down should be really stable, as long as we're not in am earthquake zone."

She drums her fingers on her thigh. "Oh, I authorized Cooper as a 'temporary organizer' until you and I talk about actual roles and people to fill them, with an explicit note that if he does something sufficiently annoying with it I'm busting him down to latrine duty. We need an official cabinet or chain of command or something, people who are officially in charge of different things so we can tap all their expertise and also not have to make every immediate nuts-and-bolts decision. Have some ideas for possible roles depending on what vague shape you want the colony to take: monarchy with cabinet, militaristic, republic-ish, or something else."

"My ideal life... Is one where I wander from town to town, honestly, and it's not like I can never leave here, but- Ugh. I do not want to settle arguments about who owes who what. The usual arrangement and the one people will expect is- Appointing a few 'lords and ladies', like we're all jousting and holding feasts. They get to know the binder, carry out instructions on their behalf, assemble reports, the whole lot. The lords are understood to be operating on behalf of the dungeon binder in a pretty flexible way. I say, 'lord Farkas, what do we need most today?' and he'd say 'I asked people about that earlier, we could really use better ventilation in the dining hall, oh and there's a problem with the seeling and furshing, a kid fell in and now some of the parents are saying to keep kids away from the river'. That make sense? We'd want to both approve probationary lords..."

"So lord of this and lady of that, especially if they're talented at managing something or other? Great. Do noble titles typically come with an area of responsibility, like lord of agriculture or something like that?"

"No idea. Not like I rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous back home. It doesn't sound wrong? Oh, and 'lord' isn't hereditary. It's a hired and fired post. Lords can be and are replaced."

"Well, that's gonna be my instinct unless I hear a reason it's a bad idea. To my understanding it makes things work better. Sort of like ministers in a monarch's cabinet. And I definitely like that they can be fired. I can and will fire a bitch if they fuck things up for our populace."

"This is making me remember my mom and dad talking about the violence inherent in the system... Okay, whatever, enough of that. You know, Zeris was reasonable but she'll probably be too busy smithing to be a Lady. Anyway, what's on the to-do list today and can I do any of it?"

"Workspaces for important labors like carpentry, smithing, cooper, butchery, and retting reeds for making ropes or nets. I've got social crap to manage, including getting to know people well enough to determine whether they deserve noble titles and ministry posts, and finding you a distiller technician. Also, I'm going to try to make mentalism store visual data instead of text so I can start sketching out a town layout. I'm quite confident I can make a computer once I have wire, by the way. Probably we want to find ores as soon as we can, but that'll be more your jam than mine. I'll try to learn more about trees so I can make some soon. Mirror for me and hot baths for the general public if you get bored and want to cheer people up. Anything you want me working on especially, today?"

"I could probably find ore by feeling out how the wisps are laid out? I... Do not know how to make a mirror.  You need glass and silver, I think? Or- Refraction- Hmm. I'll think about it. You should ask Zeris if she can smelt glass as well as metals. I feel like I should get over myself and also be social, and draft and talk to people about example town layouts. I could mold stone for it- Speaking of which," Here's another softened-stone tablet. "Big thing I want from you? We're going to want boats. For crossing the river, for furshing, for going to the bay and making salt to preserve food with, for reassuring people. I know deadspeakers can make boats by fusing wood together, that you need a nice heavy keel, and that's about all I know."

"I will prioritize finding someone to talk boat shapes at me — I can picture some tolerable shapes in my head, but I'd rather do better than that — and figuring enough about trees to mass-produce wood. Sounds like a plan. Oh! Another thing. If you can manage to make sticks of slightly powdery calcite, that'll be chalk, and any comparatively smooth dark surface can be drawn on with it. But these tablets are great. So thank you."

"Whisperers can't really make new kinds of things, just move around what exists. I can replace coal for a forge but have no idea how to actually get metal out of rocks, for example. But yeah, enough talking. Time to work."

She nods, waves, and heads off. First person to find, Mr. Cooper, to check in on all the things she left for him to work on last night.

Mr. Cooper has acquired:

A list of skilled professions, a charcoal-shorthand sketched list of workshop and tool requirements for two smiths and apprentice, four carpenters, a mushroom farmer, a beekeeper, a charcoaller, a butcher, a soap and candle maker, a roper, half a dozen weavers, and a mason.

Also, retting tank requirements, and two other people waiting to talk to her- A broad-shouldered man who looks kind of absent, and a teen girl with brightly ginger hair (and... Fox ears? Wait, that's a headband.)

Mr. Cooper has done well and acquired very helpful things and people. She is pleased, and thanks him. Also, she makes a new text file — Possible Nobles — and marks him down under the headings "Lord Quartermaster" and "Lord Bookkeeper", as possibilities. 

Those various workshop, tool, and tank requirements, how much of them are stonework and how much of them are woodwork? Or really whispering versus deadspeaking?

And would these two people like to introduce themselves and give a two-sentence explanation each so she can figure out whether one of them pressingly needs to be talked to first?

Tables, chairs, and workspace dimensions are the important things. The mushroom farmers will need compost. They mostly have their own tools, but have already listed nice to haves like power saws or a proper forge.

"Name's Beenu and I'm a vigas farmer, ma'am. I want to know where's we're allowed to get planting. It'll be a be a few weeks before you'n the fox girl can speed 'em all up, so I want to get to plowing today."

"Oi! I have a name. Hessia Winters. I'm a Deadspeaker, Lady Binder."

The "ma'am"-ing and "Lady Binder"-ing continues. And these are both important conversations.

"Ms. Winters, I'm going to very much enjoy talking to you, I expect, and it will probably be a long conversation and not quite as urgent, so I'm going to talk with Beenu here first, if you don't mind. Best get the farming started quickly, y'know. Thank you for your patience."

Then she turns to Beenu. "Mr. Beenu, what are the ideal conditions for farming vigas?"

"Silty soil's best. Got to be pretty dry to start with, good drainage, we'll need watering but it gets too wet real easily, Vigas. Gentle slope is fine, but too steep's not. Needs all the sun it can get. Most importantly we'll need some kind of low fence or wall to keep chokers out. Either that or constant guard day and night plus lots of traps for the little pests. So a big block of field we can all farm together would be nice..."

He glances doubtfully over to a different part of the cave.

"You seem sensible, so let's just say lots of folk have got it in their heads that they're gonna own land and get rich off farming or renting it. Self-sustaining like. That is a hazy dream that will vanish under noonday sun. A lot of these people, all they'll get is fat chokers and badly built huts. Then they'll come beggin' for help when winter comes, having cost valuable seed crop to boot. It would be bad on multiple levels."