He'll send his guide a message about it, then. Later, he's liking the snuggles too much to go get the phone right now.

"They are pretty nice," he agrees.

This is, due to some strategic scheduling, his day off. So he's not in any particular hurry over breakfast.

"You know, it feels surprisingly good to know how much you enjoy my company," he remarks after a moment. "Like, I know people enjoy my company, but with your crafting the knowledge is a lot more visceral. It feels nice."

He's glad that's the case; a fair portion of Crafters find it to be a bit too much for them. That's part of why he was hesitant to express it at first. He can definitely keep it going though if it's nice; it's nice to be able to express it, too.

He thinks for a moment.

"I suspect that some people here will find it overwhelming, but I bet most people will like it," he replies. "For the novelty, for the certainty, for the immediacy."

He doesn't snuggle closer (they established last night that while he might be able to get his touching-others-related instincts to back off a bit eventually it's at least not going to happen immediately) but he wants to; he wonders how Kharet feels about him sharing that with other people. He considers it fairly intimate, after all.

Well, if he wants to cuddle closer, then Kharet will put an arm around him and pull him in.

"I was sort of expecting it; I know some Helpers feel more secure when they know that they're the focus of their lovers' sole attention, but A) that's always seemed a bit daft to me, and B) your telepathy neatly bypasses any doubt about how you feel, so I think that most people wouldn't need that in a relationship with you anyway," he replies. "You're obviously desirable, and if I were in your position — lots of free time, no inclination to settle down, people-enjoying — I would probably want to have several partners. And it would be very rude of me to ask you not to use telepathy on them."

Kharet is a delight. And, yeah, that's more or less how he feels about it - he's a little intimidated by how many options the situation offers, it wouldn't've been hard for him to decide to take a more cautious approach, but that's definitely the less fun option. It's all hypothetical for now, though, and he has better things to pay attention to right here. For example: kiss?

Kissing!

Eventually he needs to get started on his house chores, and he does want to keep his momentum going with converting things to crafting material every day, but Kharet is welcome to stay while he does (he has books he can share, or he can get a puzzle kit or something out of storage), and he can take breaks as often as he likes. He can share what he's doing as he converts things, too - it's a very kinesthetic task, like a combination of playing with one of the Helpers' spinning cubes and guiding a marble through a maze by tilting it. Different materials have different degrees of those different aspects, he explains and later demonstrates; structurally simple things like metal or glass or crystal are more like the spinning cube while more complex things like stone or wood are more like solving a puzzle, which he prefers.

Well, Kharet is not in a rush, so he's happy to hang around for the morning. Experiencing a sense that he doesn't have is fascinating, and now he really wants to be able to use it to explore the inner structures of plants without damaging them.

Eventually — around noon — he does have to take the train back to his apartment and take care of some of his own chores. But before that, as they chat, he makes sure to let Traveler know his schedule and when he's free to meet up again (which he would like).

Aw. (He is disappointed that Kharet has to go, but jokingly, not seriously.) He writes down the schedule and sends Kharet home with an ansible so that they can make more concrete plans closer to the time.

He finally gets around to messaging Vesherti shortly afterward: A situation came up where he wanted to convert some public property to crafting material, and his companion mentioned that the Helpers might prefer that he leave it in a different form rather than putting it back the way it was when he was done with it; in that case he just put it back, but if there are specific things they might want him to make in cases like that in the future it'd be good for him to a) know about it and b) have miniatures of the things they want made - the example that came up was a crib and he doesn't know what Helper cribs are like yet.

Vesherti is happy to provide a list of things and have small models delivered: primarily things that are immediately useful, such as perpetual crank shafts, but also a number of baby items, under the much-hoped-for try-exposing-babies-to-crafting-material plan.

He is also curious whether Traveler would like to set up another day trip into the city sometime soon, or perhaps a trip up to see the flood-control structures like they had mentioned. The day after tomorrow is a celebration day, so a lot of places will be closed or doing something different from their normal daily routine, but other than that he can set things up whenever Traveler wants.

He's planning on staying home today and tomorrow, or maybe exploring the part of the city nearest his house, which he's comfortable trying alone; he'll be interested in another longer visit after the holiday though.

Great!

The þereminians drop off some more items for him in the field outside his house — the miniatures he asked for, as well as more feedstock for crafting material — but are otherwise content to let him be.

Part way through the day, his phone makes the soft sound of papers rustling and it tells him that there is now the option to display the phone interface in Crafter glyphs, and would he like to enable that?

He doesn't notice the sound when it happens - he's not keeping the phone with him when he's at home - but when he checks on it a few hours later, yes, he would. He'll take a little time to cautiously look through the newly readable parts, too.

Many of the newly readable parts are just helpful labels that were previously opaque to him, like "Messages" and "Search Places Nearby". The biggest change is probably that the preferences screen and its associated help text has now been translated, which gives him the opportunity to read through and configure a lot of details of the phone's operation, such as which sounds it will make at what times, how it trades off battery life against providing timely updates on messages, and when it will update itself as new features become available (currently set to the default of "after asking permission").

The phone also includes a section on how to repair it if it breaks in various ways. To crudely summarize, the local data is stored on a little square piece that looks like this, and all the other components can be disconnected and swapped out with the right tools.

He takes a copy of the phone before he changes anything, just in case (he can't copy the battery, they discovered after he immediately broke the first phone that converting it to crafting material doesn't work, but everything else can be copied just fine and he can take the battery out and move it to the copy if he wants to switch to it) and spends some time fiddling with the settings, ultimately not making any major changes. When he's done he sends a message to Vesherti asking them to pass on his appreciation for the update and also whether there's a better way for him to get that sort of message to the relevant people.

Vesherti writes back that he's passed the message on, and he's glad Traveler found the update helpful. If he wants to talk to the team that has been working on letting phones handle Crafter glyphs, he can reach their group inbox here. In general, if he wants to message someone who he hasn't before, he can look them up in the public directory. Although that only shows people who have chosen to be publicly listed, so he might not always be able to find whoever he's looking for. The directory does have the authors of most of the different bits and pieces that make up a phone in it, though.

That's very cool. (How would he go about figuring out which people to look up? It's not an urgent question though.)

People frequently want to be recognized for their contribution to the phones; the standard is that if there's a section providing help on a feature, the author(s) of the feature are listed at the bottom. So for example if you open up your settings and go down to the bottom of the help pane, you'll see a list of author names. Sometimes those will be messaging links already, but if they aren't, you can go look those names up in the directory, he explains.

Alternatively, some people will also list stuff they've worked on in their directory entry, and you can search on that. You'll probably need to use the LCTL name for the project, though, since the directory hasn't been fully translated yet.

That's fine, he's going to want to get better with the local language situation anyway if he's going to be staying.

Vesherti thinks that's entirely sensible. If he wants any recommendations for language-learning materials, or to find a dedicated teacher, do let him know.

He suspects he's going to need a teacher but he'll try the solo learning materials first if that's more convenient somehow; he's not sure what principles they're following when they're deciding what to translate.

The solo learning materials are more convenient in the sense that he can study them whenever he likes and doesn't need to go meet up with a teacher. He can find the ones Vesherti recommends here. But if he has time this afternoon Vesherti can arrange for a teacher to come by and get started.

As for deciding what to translate — there are two parts: the ones that are being done by the people officially in charge of inter-world contact (Vesherti and his team), and the ones that people are just doing on their own because they're excited about alien languages. In the absence of specific requests, his team is trying to prioritize things that Traveler is likely to find useful, or that will be needed for talking with other Crafters in the future, such as the phone interface and various other pieces of basic information. People who are just excited about language are translating whatever's interesting to them. So if he runs across something that seems like an odd choice to have prioritized translation of, that's probably what's going on.

For example, a bunch of people have been working on an in-progress translation of the story that inspired that music performance he went to see because they like the story and the challenge of translating language-art to another language.