Hug!

Such hug.

"Okay," says Tiro, "I think I'm done having feelings for now. How's the 'translate the magic books' project coming along?"

Cam checks. "Not bad, although we will have to help it as we come up with guesses about what mistakes it may have made, it was short on helpful illustrations for some of the content."

"I have guesses about some of the words - can you find one of the ink-colour indexes from the back of one of the recipe books?"

"Maybe -" Cam sorts through the library. "No, not trivially without a title or something, the electronic corpus is a lot of books and 'one of the recipe books' is not searchable."

"Well, maybe it's already figured out as much as I know - the list should have '3. Light' and then I don't know what four is and then '5. Air, 6. Water, 7. Earth, 8. Fire', and I guess if it already knows all those then I can't help it much."

Cam calls up the vocabulary for the numbers and those words - "These?"

He peers at the symbols. "That looks right. I only know the numerals, though, not the words for the numbers, it could've gotten those wrong and I wouldn't be able to tell."

Cam searches for the string "3. Light".

"Yeah, that's an ink colour index," says Tiro of the first search result. "Does it already know all the words I guessed?"

It does. Also it describes itself as a List of Known Essences. The first one is "0. Void", then "1. Chaos", "2. Order", "3. Light", "4. Matter", and Tiro's four other guesses, all of which the computer agrees with.

"Congratulations, how'd you figure the words out?"

"They're the ones with the most straightforward and popular recipes! Earth makes dirt and stone, fire makes hot things, water makes water, light makes glowing things - air was harder to figure out but it makes things that have a lot of air in them or are light, that sort of thing."

"Nicely done. What-all recipes do you have besides 'bacon plant'?"

"Well - a bunch of kinds of dirt and stone, water, glowing rocks, cloth, a bunch of kinds of plants..."

"Glowing rocks. What is their glowing mechanism?"

"Pretty sure it's magic."

"Delightful! So there's the whole recipe thing and then there's whatever the products run on. Wait, lemme check -" Cam attempts to make one of the glowing rocks of the sort Tiro has made.

No rock appears, glowing or otherwise.

"Does that mean I was right?" says Tiro, observing this rocklessness.

"Yep. If the rock glowed because it was smart or because the alchemizing process did some nonbypassable encryption which somehow produced glowing, I couldn't make a glowing rock, but I would have gotten a nonglowing rock."

"...How would you encrypt a glow?"

"I don't know, but I could probably invent a magic system where that was how it worked if I wanted to write a book with a pointlessly complicated magic system."

He giggles.

Cam flips through the recipe book to see what else is in here now that it's translated. "Did you just try stuff at random, see what it got you?"