"...Synchrony problems with that though..."

"This is what I mean about prototypes. Or at least parts drawings and process flow diagrams."

"...I imagine I get where you're going with that, just on the basis of words meaning things, but you should know that I did not understand it natively."

"Words, how do they even work."

Instead she pulls out her slate and chalk and starts sketching. "What if the wheel that spins the paper has... Contact points? That trigger the searer? But then we might as well just make a precise stamp..."

"No, it's..."

She's already at work on her tablet.

"You need to be spinning the searer.  Because then you can calibrate it reliably and just feed it rotation and on-off and all the other instructions."

"Hmm... I see what you mean. It's going to need a rune library. Or like. Twenty of the most common ones."

"Yeah.  I figure we see if we can do, like.  Hooking together commands, where each command pulls the next one in the chain into the calibration matrix.  And then we pack the common runes down into a single matrix themselves."

"So... Sear engine here, with runes in different rotations. It can accept three instructions. Rotate left, rotate right, and sear a rune. Hmm... If we have twenty different runes... Either we need to activate a particular one or also have a shield that blocks all of them except the one we want and rotate that too..."

Lo: A sketch

"See, this way we don't have to have eleventy bajillion different control channels for the different runes on the melter. We just have to make the device read off some sort of instruction and do... Three very simple things. Rotate one disk precisely. Rotate another disk precisely. And make heat. Makes it much easier to design, magically speaking."

"...I was not thinking of that.

"Though maybe if runes are composeable...

"...but there's still the problem of...

"...Fuck!  Drippage on the one hand, human error in encoding in the other...!

"...Inverted record needle?  Polar coordinates...

"So.  There's open problems whatever we do to start.

"Namely, that as far as I can figure, the tools we could use to eliminate imprecision are themselves imprecise in their construction unless I'm missing a trick, on the one hand, and 'if you melt wax it will drip downwards only semi-predictably' on the other."