"Pretty much! And then I figured out what some of the colours tended to do and used that to guess which other recipes might be useful to try. And so on."

There are so many recipes. Most of them for some kind of raw material, but there's intermediate products like cloth and knife blades in there, too, and a few entire tools.

"Weird," Cam remarks. "It's like - I have to assume this system either has the recipes installed or that the system itself is intelligent, how else is it supposed to get a concept like 'weaving' out of atomic concepts -"

"I'm not sure what you mean by 'installed', or 'intelligent' for that matter?"

"Like, all the fancy software that my computer has to design houses and mountains and stuff, that's installed, it was written by people out of teeny parts to allow computers to do those things, computers can't innately do that. There's not enough teeny parts in these recipes for me to buy that they add up to 'weaving' or 'garden implements' on their own, so I am imagining that one of two things is going on - someone wanted a cloth spell and came up with the recipe and 'taught' the system that this recipe means 'cloth', or, the system itself is personlike enough that the recipe conveys to it just the gist and it can fill in the blanks."

"Huh. I have no idea which of those it is," he says. "Maybe there's theory books."

"I am pretty sure that if this planet is genuinely empty and you tried things without knowing what they did it and they worked, it can't be using caster knowledge," Cam adds. "Must be baked into the magic itself somehow."

"I guess! But I do, like, know what cloth is, so it could've been drawing on me a little..."

"Possible. Did you get anything you really didn't know what it was?"

"Yeah, but mostly in the category of 'what kind of rock is that'... the bacon plants seem like they would've needed complex ideas like that, but they also kind of look like someone took a 'pig' recipe and a 'plant' recipe and mashed them together, so it still seems possible that the whole thing runs automatically on basic concepts and the weird part is which basic concepts it's able to draw on."

"If you naively mashed 'pig' and 'plant' you could just as well get a pig made of wood or a pig-shaped topiary or a shrub that grew unappetizing pig parts, the bacon plant continues to be suspicious!"

"For all I know they got all those things before they figured out a bacon plant that grew edible bacon! I do actually know you can fuck up a recipe and get something weird - like, if I draw a random extra line on a diagram, what usually happens is the result is shaped wrong or appears in the wrong place, but if it's a diagram for something complicated like cloth, it does weirder things. I managed to get cloth that was missing all the threads in one direction so it was just a big pile of loose threads, once."

"Ooh, huh. Okay, maybe it is naively mashing concepts and it's just doing it in a particularly refined way."

"I think that seems plausible! Are there theory books? There's got to be theory books, right?"

"Probably! Unfortunately I have this library organized in no particularly useful way so it might take a while to find them." Hunt hunt.

"Does that mean 'organized in a useless way' or 'not organized at all'?"

"Oh, I had to make it organized some way, but some way is in this case pure chronological order."

"Could be worse, I guess, but yeah, not that great for finding theory books about alchemy."

"Yeah. If we are lucky there is a book titled 'theory of magic' or something like that."

They are unfortunately not quite that lucky.

"I'm excited about theory books, if we ever find them!"

"Me too!"

Tiro beams at him.

Wag.

Tiro grins and looks for a second like he might be about to cry again and then recovers and settles for saying, "You're really great and I'm so glad you're here."

"I am glad I could help. And glad the summoning circle didn't count as having bindings in it, that would have made me much worse company."

"Bindings?"