And he turns away from her and starts writing.

Odette fetches her journal out of her bag and puts in some time on her long-term project of writing down everything she can call to mind about home so she doesn't forget if she's here for a very, very long time.

After an hour he stops. "Okay. How much chemistry do you know? Chemistry is the study of physics on the scale of molecules, loosely speaking."

"Um, I could probably draw up a mostly complete periodic table, I can basically explain exothermic and endothermic reactions, ionic and covalent compounds...I haven't memorized my old textbooks or anything, but I've taken chemistry classes and I think I've retained most of it. Not sure how to explain all the material covered without a syllabus."

"If I give you diagrams of molecules that I think have the right properties, and explain what the substance made up of such molecules should look and feel like, would that be enough for Sympathy to work off? This molecule isn't one I could create, I'm sure there are processes that would create it but they're far beyond our current manufacturing tolerances."

"As long as I know what elements all the atoms are, sure, that ought to work."

"Write out your table so I can identify which elements are known to you?"

She goes to a blank page in her journal and purses her lips. Okay, there are this many columns, and this many rows...that goes in that box, that goes in that other one...she writes in the atomic numbers for each box, the names as she recalls them, and then lists elements off to the side for which she can remember their names but not exactly where they go in the table.

"Right, this'll be easy. Large organic molecules are all carbon. Okay, here are ten models. I don't know enough to predict which will come out best but they should all be transparent with very high plasticity and they'd all be manufactured, if I had the equipment, from compressed fossilized algaes or something like that, oil from organic carbon..."

She nods along. Then she convinces her leaf to give up a quantity of plant oil, and from there constructs smallish samples of each of the ten kinds of plastic.

He scowls at them. "None of those will do. Ordinarily I couldn't solve something like protein-design by trial-and-error, though, your abilities are astonishing." And he starts writing. "Let me make better ones."

"Okay. I can teach you the basics at some point, if you want."

"Maedhros did, in his letter. I like my head and think I'll wait on doing things that alter it until my father's back, at least if I can access the abilities I'd have from other people. Celegorm's learning it."

"Fair enough." She goes back to scribbling while he works on his next prototypes.

An hour later he has thirty more of them.

She constructs samples.

One of those is almost satisfactory. "Can you make more of it, so I can test more?"

Making more of something (relatively) simple that she already has some of is pretty easy!

He scratches it, bends it, digs grooves in it, applies pressure at various angles - "One more iteration."

And back to the notes.

Odette starts toying with various samples to evaluate their applicability for purposes other than spider dome.

"You can let me know other specifications for other projects and I'll try later," he says, "this is a productive way to go from speculation to prototype."

"Oh, at this point I'm mostly looking for inspiration," she says. "I'm sure at some point or other another project will come up and I'll have something specific in mind then."

He nods. "Waterproof paper is a problem that comes to mind that something in this genre might fix." And then back to his work.

"Oh, yes, that would be useful--you'd need to figure out a more waterproof ink, I think, if you just used normal ink then the pages might be impervious to water but the writing could still wash off..."

"Some kind of oil-based inks?"