So far, this world appears to be made of plants, and dirt and fallen leaves and tall trees and other things which are found in forests.

Okay. Those are all reasonable things. She moves like a cautious deer, touching a tree, then going to touch a different tree, peering around in all directions.

She goes down.

She follows the stream. She's not thirsty right now.

Well, she doesn't have anything else to do. Up she goes.

That's pretty weird. But they waved back so she figures they probably are friendly. She puts her arm down and stays put.

"Hi," says the girl, shuffling her feet and putting her hands in her pockets, estimating the size of the gaps between the glass plane bird people.

"Emily Lark," she says, relaxing substantially when they are no longer surrounding her. "Are you all three an I?"

"Well, it was all very symmetrical," says Emily, "and you must have worked very hard on it, I bet."

“It's all for fun, though; if it weren't fun I'd stop and do something else. And are you working on something out here, or do you just like scenery?”

"I'm not working on anything special. It is very pretty scenery, isn't it?"

“I suppose. This is a bit uniform for my taste; all tree tops. I like things that look different in parts, or at least from a different angle.”

"I'm not used to forests so this is a nice change," smiles the girl. "Where do you usually prefer to be?"

“No, I mean, I like being here all right, but I don't like it for its looks from this spot in particular. Just on this island in particular, I'd rather be among the trees so that instead of just green you get different kinds of bark on the trees, and lots of other plants and stuff.”

"I did come through the trees before I climbed up here."

"Help doing what?"

“I don’t know. You're out here alone and there's nothing wrong with that but I can’t even ping you. You're wearing damaged cloth. Are you stranded?”

"...Ping me?" she asks, clenching her hands in her jeans.

“Well, yes, uninhabited islands are no place to be visiting without a radio. If you're hiding the rest of you somewhere on the other side of the island or something, then I guess that's fine and I'll leave you be. But it looks like you could be in a lot of trouble and I don't want to leave a person to starve or something.”

"The rest of me?" she asks.

“The rest of your kortarem.”

"...I have a pencil," she says, pulling a yellow nubbin out of her pocket. "Will that do?"

“—I don't see why not,” he says, a little dubiously. “The usual sort of tool would be a thing you use to move other stuff that already exists separately, like a fork or a hammer. But it's more important that you are familiar with using it.”

"I use pencils all the time," she nods.

“Okay, so what you need to do is use it, write with it. Then try to forget it exists. You're not writing with a pencil, you're writing on the paper. Because you are writing on the paper, you can feel the texture of the paper.”

"If... it's going to take a while, then yes, I'll sunburn out here," she blinks, watching the gloop do its thing.

"If younger children can do it then I probably can too." She looks dubiously at the chair setup, then sits in it.

She starts writing out simple algebra problems and solving them. Scratch, scratch.

Algebra. Some of a poem. Some of a book report. Scratch scratch.

“Yes, you’ve started to claim your pencil. You've probably got just the paint on the outside, but not any of the wood yet. You should be able to move it around a bit. Think of it like trying to move a finger you didn't have before.”

She smiles, like she thought of something funny. The pencil twitches. She turns her hand over and the pencil turns with it, only partially.

“Now try to feel something with it. Tap the side of the pencil against the desk, or your other hand. Your sense of touch and temperature should extend through the pencil.”

She prods the pencil with her other hand. Gingerly, lest she get stuck to it.

The pencil is not sticky at all, but it feels different than pencils usually do, like touching your other hand is different from touching someone else's hand.

Well, if it's not going to stick then she can investigate it more thoroughly. Poke pinch prod.

Pencils are much more tolerant of lots of pinching than fingers. She can feel the pressure, but it doesn't hurt.

How interesting. And if she presses a fingernail into it, the least bitten one...?

What if she pulls on it, how stuck is it?

She can feel it being pulled away. She can do something about that. It's exactly as stuck as she wants it to be.

Huh. She experiments with amounts of stuckness, then plucks it off her right hand and holds it in her left.

"Could you say more about what exactly it is I did?"

“You claimed the outside of your pencil, and your right hand. The writing exercise let you focus on having the pencil move as you needed rather than moving the pencil using the grip of your hand.”

"But I still don't really know what you're talking about. I'm not used to this being something that happens."

Slow nod.

“If it's yours, then you can move it,” — the sun-shade wobbles a bit — “reshape it,” — a blob of glass rises up and turns into a pair of disks, one floating above the other — “and forcepattern it.” He presses down on the top disk, then lets go and it flies up into the air. When it comes back down, it stops in its original position relative to the first disk without any bounce or noise.

"What is forcepatterning? Besides 'that thing you just did'."

“It's when instead of just moving something around, you make it so that it will react in a particular way in the future. You did a little bit with the pencil already; I saw you adjusting how fixed to your hand it was.”

"Oh. How do I claim more stuff?"

She sticks the pencil to the back of her claimed hand so it will be out of the way and holds the glass and frowns at it.

It's not immediately squishy to her hands, but she can sort of loosen it up inside until it is. Or just have it flow into any particular shape she pictures.

She puts her pencil back on her hand and refashions the glass.

“Now you have two pieces of glass, which aren't attached to each other” — he waves his hand through the gap between his pair of disks — “except that they are. What happens if you try to push them together? With your hands, I mean.”

Push. They repel like magnets: bounce.

The girl looks at him with extreme dubiousness, but some combination of these instructions and invisibly fumbling with her glass later she manages to set them rigidly separated with respect to one another.

"Okay..." Now this, too, is done.

"What do you do with the energy, when you've collected it?"

“You use it to move things, including to create forcepatterns that start out pushing rather than holding things still. You haven't needed any because you've been pushing on the glass with your muscles, so you had that much to work with. But you need the stored energy to move things without touching them, or to do things that would be too much effort at once, like flying.”

"Where does glass keep energy?"

"Can you do things with it besides move the stuff it's stored in?"

Nod, nod.

“I think we've covered all the basics. What's left is practice and techniques. After you have some practice to make sure your control is good, you should claim the rest of your own body, so that you can reinforce and move it.”

"That sounds useful," she agrees.

“Is there anything in particular you would like to try to do, or make?”

"I'm not sure. Is it usual to make everything out of this stuff?"

“Some materials can't be reshaped, like wood. Some kinds of fine detail are easier to make with tools. And if you need a lot of something, it's faster to use machines to make it than to have someone claim all the materials first. But if there's no reason not to, then you do.”

"Can you make stuff smaller?"

"Do you own the air too?"

“No, it's just trapped. It's really hard to keep a claim on air because it moves around all the time.”

"Can't you make it attach to things?"

"I thought the difference was how cold it was."

“It's the same thing. Heat is what we call individual molecules moving around or vibrating.”

"So it wouldn't be safe to touch, either? If you held air still."

She looks at her pencil and glass. "You didn't tell me this was so dangerous."

“You just have to try to do it, like you did with the glass. It would be hard because bodies are complicated, but because it's your body that you can feel, that helps. You should practice with stuff that isn't so important first, though. It's not like you would likely seriously injure yourself if you make a mistake, because you can usually feel it and stop, but interesting kinds of bruises are a thing.”

"If it's just bruises that's not so bad. What happened to the blood that was in my hand when I got it at first?"

Frown. Nod.

"Okay. Can I do most things with glass or should I get other stuff?"

She watches the birds go. "What do you have besides glass and you and your little bit of metal?"

"You don't make your food bite-sized?"

“Sorry, I don't know what you mean. My food is in whatever size that kind of food comes in. I could split it into bite-size pieces, but there's no particular reason to and that might make some of it spoil faster.”

"I mean, if you have all your food claimed then you could cut it up without needing a knife. When you were about to cook it. Couldn't you?"

“Oh, yes, you can do that.”

"But it seems to take a long time to claim things so maybe you don't do it every time you eat."

“No, but usually I claim everything I carry with me on trips like this so I can keep it from getting damaged if I get adventurous, and find where it is if I were somehow to lose it, and so on.”

"Oh, I thought you turned it into glass with the magic thing."

“The — magic — thing?”

"The thing you're teaching me to do?"

"The glass you're making will take a while to cool off, though, won't it?"

“Yes, but you don't need to touch it with your hand, just touch it with the glass you already have, and once you are able to reshape it, you can cool it down quickly.”

"Oh. Okay."

She mushes her glass into a long stick and then pokes the melty spot.

“Now that you have all of that glass, split the stick before where it gets hot and take back your original glass. You'll use that for an anchor point, so hang onto it or wrap it around you or stand on it.”

She does as he suggests and turns it into a bracelet.

The hot glass wobbles up, snakelike, flattens out, arcs over.

“Looks good.”

Nod, nod.

"Solid thickness?"

“I mean, if you wanted to make a lens or something where you need there to actually be glass in the middle, or if it needed to be heavy. You can make reinforced hollow objects instead if you only need the shape.”

"Oh. I don't think I need heavy things very often." Experimentally, she tries dragging her lump of glass spaghetti from its anchor on her bracelet to see how much of an impediment it is.

"This seems like it will be hard to carry around everywhere I go."

“It was just like this to cool off. Now you can reshape it into something sensibly compact and carry it however you like. And I don't mean to suggest that you should carry around exactly this much glass and more stuff on top of that; this is just for practice for now and you can decide what you want to do when you leave.”

"Okay." She munches it all together in a ball. Maybe she can forcepattern it so if she kicks it, it'll roll in the relevant direction. ...Balls already mostly do that, but she wants it to roll in a straight line. Kick.

"And those had to be all loaded up with pushing so they could flap?"

“Yes, but I didn't do all the pushing myself. I used machines, like this solar engine.”

"How does that work?"

Frown. "And you can use that energy the same as pushing energy for forcepatterning?"

“It's turning the heat into pushing.”

"By the moving parts?"

“Yes.”

"How much energy can stuff store?"

“I could fly all the way around the world and back here, if I didn't have to stop for other supplies anyway.”

"What would I need to do to make a machine like that?"

“It's all shaped and forcepatterned for the moving parts, so you need to learn the shapes. You need metal to make the hot and cold ends, and something black, and a few other materials to make it more efficient but it could work with just metal and glass.”

"I'm not sure if there's any metal on this island besides yours," she says consideringly.

“Probably not. You usually buy it.”

"I don't have any money with me."

“There aren't any stores to sell it right here, anyway. I can give you some energy for now, or make you another engine you can hook up to, and you can get metal for yourself later. There are other ways to collect energy, too, like from waterfalls or waves or wind.”

"I might not stay here long enough to go to a store and buy metal. Does using wind and waterfalls and waves let you do without?"

"So I just have to let things move my stuff and then it'll charge up the stuff."

She takes it, frowning at it.

"Is it slowing itself down?"

“No, it's connected to the rest of me. If I made it stronger and you pushed hard then you could use it to push me around.”

"Can things slow themselves down? Could I pick a thing up and then drop it and let it fall very slow to charge it up? Or not fall?"

“No, you have to have something else to connect it to. If you live in one place a lot you can claim the ground and use that, though.”

"Should I not claim ground if I'm not going to live a place?"

"Right. Makes sense."

She looks at the birdpeople, but attends to the supplied exercise. Away with you, top glass chunk.

“So if you've got it right, you should be able to push it around but it won't move by itself, like the one I gave you.”

Push...

Huh. Okay. Push push push.

As exercise machines go, this one isn't very ergonomic.

"What would happen if I balanced something heavy on this?"

“If you made sure to push back enough so it went down gently rather than bouncing, then you'd have all of the energy that was used to lift the heavy thing up. That's the simplest way to use a waterfall, actually — fill a big bucket at the top and then lower it down.”

"Oh."

She slowly draws her own glass over her in a thin gappy layer, then stretches her arms up, takes a few steps.

He does the same kinds of things and adds more for her to follow along with if she wants to. Assorted silly walks. Arms all directions. Stretches. What might be a yoga routine if he ever held a pose still.

Okay then, weird slow dancing it is.

She can!

It doesn't last long, anyway; she finds a comfortable way to stand and stops. "Now what?"

“Now that you have practiced the motions of your body, it is safe for you to claim it.”

"Without getting any weird bruises?"

“You could still give yourself weird bruises if you tried. The difference now is that you aren't going to do it by accident because you know what is a normal kind of motion now.”

Nod.

She watches raptly, trying to figure out how the tricks he's shown her add up to all that, slowly claiming her body.

"How did you land like that without hurting yourself? Is that all reinforcement?"

“Yep! You can't go completely rigid like I did for that all the time or you wouldn't be able to move, or breathe, but you can do a gentler reinforcement that you keep up all the time.”

"What about like how you did the fancy chair with the links, where they could move a little but not very much, can you do that and then really strongly reinforce yourself?"

“Sort of. Your body doesn't have a specific shape, and it doesn't have any rigid parts except for bones. If you want to say things stop after some motion, you have to say they stop relative to something else in particular, and the only way to do that that doesn't lead to hurting yourself or being unable to move is "this part of your body can only move so much relative to the part right next to it" — when I say part I mean like this patch of skin and the patch of skin next to it — and the result you get when you do that all over and smoothly is what I called a gentle reinforcement. It still makes you really tough, but if you did just that and tried to hit the sand like I did, you'd bend and flop instead of smashing the sand. You'd still be safe.”

"And instead you just held all of you totally still, so you drilled through the sand."

“I also had spikes on my feet so that they pushed the sand aside. If I hadn't done that I would have gotten just a bit of a crater instead, and not gone into the sand very much. But that difference is more about how sand in particular works.”

"Okay." Pause. "When I have all my body can I change how it's shaped?"

"But it'd be made of glass or whatever?"

“Or whatever, yes, but you can still feel things through it. You can even make eyes and ears in different places, but you have to learn to use them.”

"Whoa. Can those be glass or do they have to be different things?"

“For an eye, you use glass for the lens, but you also need some kind of material that reacts to light quickly, like the retina in your regular eyes does. There's a few kinds that are available. For an ear, you want something that is naturally flexible and not brittle to make the parts that vibrate, so you use a little bit of plastic or metal.”

"I want to make eyes and ears."

“Okay, which should we start with?”

"Eyes first."

She claims the black stuff. She inspects the shape. She copies it.

She follows along pretty capably.

She sets it up as directed. "How do you make a faster one, then?"

"Why can't I just get water and... stuff... and make an eye out of that like a real eye?"

“Real eyes are very, very complicated. Nobody knows how to make an eye from scratch, and if you did you would have to keep it alive with blood.”

"I have enough blood for two eyes, maybe I would have enough for four."

“There's still the problem of making the eye.”

"Yeah. Won't I feel my own eyes and how they work when I get that far?"

“You can't feel individual proteins, and you can't make them fit together right either. Animals are really, really, really, really complex.”

"What if I got eyes from an animal, then? A dead one I guess. Like a fish."

“Yes.”

"Can you not move them around like you can move other stuff? You said the fish wouldn't look where I wanted..."

"Griffins aren't supposed to have human eyes," sighs the girl, but she sits back and waits.

He tries to adjust things. His mock-bodies come over to give him a look at his mock hindquarters. (The same skill that let make up an almost acceptable griffin on the spot is evident in their perfectly human appearance.)

Eventually, he has it right! "Good. That looks like it's supposed to."

She takes to it like a natural.

"Yeah!"

"I'm not scared of heights."

"Mostly."

She copies this design.

He shapes his so that it fits onto hers, and starts spinning the inside parts. This apparently useless activity turns out to be rapidly increasing the stored energy in her spinny thing — hundreds of times more energy in just a few seconds than she was storing using her muscles in the practice sessions.

"Wow."

"Weird... how much is it? How could I hold more?"

“About thirty gigajoules. You hold more by claiming more stuff so you can put energy in it. That's one of the reasons why I keep more of me around.” The ex-birds wave a little. “But unless you're planning to do something really big, you don't need more than a fraction of that. I just gave you a full charge because I have a full charge and I have it because I'm overly fond of being prepared for anything.”

"Well, thank you very much," she says politely. She starts experimenting with flapping her wings, and finding a comfortable gait with the griffin feet.

Onto it she steps. She practices with her beak: clack clack.

"What's a relay?"

"What kind of messages? Is it like mail or like the internet?"

“The internet?”

"...It's like what you said but it might be different some ways you didn't mention."

"Okay."

She listens carefully to all these instructions. When he stops talking: "Can I fly now?"

She takes a flying leap off the platform into the wind, wings spread wide.

She tries turning. She flaps. She tries diving and swooping up. She does a lot of whooping while she does all this.

She keeps her altitude as long as she can, until she's pretty sure she can flap well enough to get airborne again from a ground start - then land on the beach, fairly neatly for a first try.

She peels her griffin open and sits up, sticking her head out of it. "Um, I'd rather you just showed me this one other thing, I can figure out the other stuff I want to do myself from there probably."

"I walked. Can you teach me the mermaid thing or not?"

“I am birds all the time. I don't know that much about swimming creatures. I'm sure there are much better books on the subject.”

"That'd be slower."

“If you're in a hurry, why not just try doing it? Then you'll know what you need to learn.”

"And then you'll help me with that?"

“If I know how to help, I will.”

She frowns at him, sighs, and then starts making herself a mermaid tail out of griffin parts that she thinks will be relatively easy to reconstruct later. When she has something that is appropriately shiny and scaly and fits over her legs well she makes a big globe of glass full of air and then attempts to compress it down.

"How do I make not-regular air, then?" she asks, making a pressure regulator as instructed.

“You need special materials and a particular machine to filter the air. And you also need to watch how fast you go down or up. It's complicated and I'm really not qualified to teach you how to do it safely.”

"I guess I just won't go deeper than swimming pools, then."

“It would be pretty silly to make a swimming pool that was too deep, wouldn't it.”

He dry-suit-snorkels along at the surface to keep an eye on her. Not that there are any too-deep places anywhere this close to the beach, but just on the general principle of who knows what she will want to do next.

She mermaids about quite happily and doesn't drown. She seems to find having human joints under the tail inconvenient, and at one point flops out of the water long enough to grab more material from the griffin shell and add it on so her tail is longer and she can get more propulsion without unsightly knee-bending.

Eventually she flops back onto shore, reconstructs the griffin to make sure she can put it back together right, and then seems to be between activities (although she has collected some seashells and is idly claiming them).

"I don't know what I'd do with one, but I guess, if you want."

"How far is it?"

“About thirty miles. Maybe fifty minutes there and back if I go by myself or carry you, more than that if you want to fly yourself.”

"That seems like a long time to wait just for a radio."

“‘Just a radio’ can be the difference between life and death.”

"How?"

“If you're somewhere with nobody around, like this island, and you get sick, or hurt despite your reinforcements, or you run out of energy in a place where you can't walk away, then you can ask for help. And if you want them to then, people can find where you are.”

"Only if you're someplace where another radio can hear your radio."

“That's why there are relays, to make sure that those places are very rare.”

"Well, I don't think it'd be that useful for me."

“Why not?”

"I'm not always places where there's relays."

“Well, if you're going into a cave or something, you can also bring local repeaters. Or, you know, make sure other people are around. I'm not saying bringing a radio can help all the time, just often.”

"I don't think it'll help me."

“Why's that?”

"I already said, but you weren't paying much attention, I guess." She climbs into her reconstructed griffin and seals it up behind her. Stretches, catlike.

“You said you weren't always places where there were relays, not that you were never places where there were relays.”

"Well, I'm a place with relays right now, I guess, but I might never be again."

“How do you do that? I can't think of any places like that except for ones that also don't have food and stuff.”

"I haven't just never eaten for my whole life, don't be silly."

Gently: “Then where do you eat?”