His fall startled a burst of birds out of the tree, including a handful of crows; he was probably too distracted to notice the odd awareness of their alarm in the few seconds before they got far enough for it to fade away.

His immediate surroundings are unremarkably forested; if he'd been deposited a few feet farther along the cliff he might have had a softer landing in a blueberry bush, but on the other hand if he'd been a few feet in the other direction he might've landed on a tumble of boulders from where the face of the cliff collapsed at some point. Past that, the area is fairly heavily overgrown; there are probably game trails winding between the foliage, it's certainly the right sort of terrain for the type of animals that leave them, but none is immediately in evidence.

Huh. At least the berries are probably edible if he gets stuck here. He spends some time poking his ankle trying to figure out the best way to splint it - a medically trained defense mage could probably do something sensible but he isn't one.

Nothing very much happens for ten or fifteen minutes - the various nearby wildlife resumes going about its business, and he can see birds and squirrels and bugs and things in the nearby foliage; eventually, though, there's a rustling that approaches through the undergrowth.

"Hey, you wouldn't happen to be a force mage, would you?" he says in Hari.

The rustling stops, and after a second a crow flies from that direction to perch overhead.

It regards him, and it's oddly legible that it is regarding him, and then it continues to be oddly clear that it's both surprised that he's a person and concerned about his injuries and about the distress it thinks he's probably in from being lost in someone else's territory. After a second or so it starts being worried that he's not telling it anything, too.

That is a weird thing for him to be imagining but evidently he is imagining a bunch of thoughts and feelings for this random bird to supposedly have. Why is he doing that. He waves cheerfully at the bird that he is imagining thoughts for.

...He can... maybe make a splint that goes on the outside? That would be simpler than a lot of other options and require a lot less gross anatomy knowledge he never picked up.

The bird flits back off toward where the rustling was, and it continues its approach, soon revealing itself to be a young apparently-human man scything his way through the underbrush, followed by a dog harnessed to a small contraption that's probably meant to be a cart, but with six spiderlike legs instead of wheels and a small heap of brush piled on it and two crows perched on top; the man's tunic and scythe and the cart and harness are all a deep forest green, speckled with metallic blue and fading to solid blue at the bottom.

The man stops short when he catches sight of Valanda, and seems (in a mundane way) to be thinking through what he should do; after a moment his body language shifts from frozen-and-thinking to uncomfortable-but-interacting and there's a sense, similar to the sense of what the crow was thinking, that the man assumes Valanda was lost and is now hurt, and needs help, and that he's not very happy with this situation for reasons that he thinks are obvious but of course he'll help anyway. He'd like Valanda to tell him about his injuries, if he can, so he can figure out if it's safe to move him.

"Hi, I fell off a cliff, I don't have rings with me but I do have them..."

The man startles back half a step, confused and alarmed at the noise.

...Okay. He can also not say things. Instead he can turn his sock and also some air into a splint and... not get up because this person is easily startled and he doesn't want to do anything that might come across as aggressive...

If Val can't communicate that's going to make this riskier but that's fine, the newcomer will manage. Val should just wait there for a second... He steps back to the cart and suggests that the crows go see if they can find anything Val had on him that he might have dropped; while they're doing that, he pushes the brush off the cart, recolors and reshapes the platform into an orange seat about the same color as Val's clothes, and reshapes his scythe into a walking stick with several protruding handholds, green from the top to the point where he's holding it fading quickly to Val's orange for the rest of its length.

Getting the cart close to Val is a bit of a process in the narrow space available, but much less difficult than it would be with a wheeled vehicle; the cart goes where it's pushed or pulled, in any direction, stepping nimbly over tree roots and uneven terrain. When it's placed, the man comes around to hold the walking stick for Val and suggest that he try to get into the cart so he can bring him to the medic; there's a sense that he thinks she's quite a good one, though he's still too unsettled to be dwelling on that particularly.

He stares, baffled. There should be wind, for structure magic on that scale. Maybe there's another way to do it - well, obviously there's another way to do it - the cart is probably enchanted to do that on command -

He gets up, wincing, and limps into the cart. He could in fact hide it better but he's somewhere he isn't supposed to be and it's probably strategically better to look visibly hurt right now, and at any rate in a sense it's less dishonest than trying to look like he's fine.

The man relaxes slightly once Val is in the cart, and reshapes the side of it so he won't fall out if it lurches - there's a mild sense that this is out of an abundance of caution, that he's expecting the trip to actually be straightforward.

He pauses for a moment to consider whether to wait for the crows, but decides to head out and he'll get Val's things to him later; he reshapes the stick into a simpler one, colored green and blue again, and starts back down the trail he cut on the way in, with the dog and cart following behind. It's a fairly tight squeeze, but only for a few minutes until they come to a larger trail cobbled with midnight blue stones, which he turns onto without comment - he's looking back every few minutes to make sure Val is all right, but not otherwise trying to interact with him.

The walk to the edge of his territory takes another ten or fifteen minutes, and he points out the marker by the path when they get to it, though the cobbles giving way to plain dirt at the same place make it pretty obvious, too. He's much more relaxed once the cart is safely out, and expects that Val is too - he's never found himself in someone's territory by accident but he can imagine how bad that would be.

Anyway, now that Val is probably comfortable enough to talk - he doesn't recognize him; is he new in the area, or just exploring outside his usual range?

Actually he's less rather than more comfortable now. He assumes it's the crisis having sort of died down, giving him the leeway to really feel his injuries.

He might as well assume the apparent telepathy is real, in the absence of anything else to do, but... how would you do that? It's not illusion magic. It's got to be something else, and the crows have it - the crows are probably people, assuming the telepathy's real, it's people who have magic - but to just assume he can communicate that way - is he supposed to have a knowledge/telepathy dual-enchanted artifact? Also, on the back burner but much more importantly, where is he?

First order of business: demonstrating that he's not an animal, and incidentally demonstrating what he has instead of telepathy. His ponytail has gotten undone somehow at some point; he puts his hair up in a bun that stays put with no visible fastener. And then he mimes writing, in case that helps.

The man stares, briefly, at the bun, before catching himself and looking away - he wasn't aware fleshcrafting could do that! Probably Valanda is on a learning voyage and stopped here to talk to their fleshcrafter; how convenient that that's where he's taking him.

He can pass Val some crafting material to write on, sure. (Hopefully the crows won't have too much trouble finding the supply he was carrying when he fell; he'll look too if they do.) He'll even reshape it into a board and utensil first, and recolor it - grey this time, he does want it back - taking the material from the end of his walking stick.

...Okay, there... isn't actually much chance that people on another planet recognize his alphabet, but presumably they have writing and can recognize the concept, so he writes "do you speak Hari?" sort of on autopilot while thinking of what to draw - this looks like a collection of slightly different crosses and lattices, drawn out longhand like this. And then below that he draws a map of his continent, sketching in the biomes - conical trees up in the north, mountains near the southern coast, and so on, including stylized waves in the ocean around it. He marks Thelm Ret, the town his apartment is in.

...yeah he doesn't recognize that writing system; they use the world library's recommended one around here. Or the map - he assumes it's a map, anyway. Is Val more lost than just ending up in someone's territory? ...uh, in the writing system he knows, yes is like this, and the negation modifier goes around it like this for no.

Oh, convenient. Yes.

Huh, okay. Is he from this general area, or was he traveling and got lost? Or something else, he's not sure how it could be something else but that's best practice in a situation like this, to offer it as an option... the glyph for 'something else' is like this.

Something else.

Uh. Okay... he assumes the goal is to get Val home; will figuring out how he got here help with that, does he think? Or, actually, more importantly, is there an immediate danger involved here?

He has no idea and attempts to convey this with body language.

...more likely yes or more likely no? Or 'not sure' is this glyph, negated.

Not sure.

...He might end up needing to remember a lot of glyphs here. He writes "yes" and "no" and "something else" and "not sure" with short glosses and puts a little box around them to set them off from the content on the page, with room for a couple more in the box.

He's not very happy about that.

Anyway.

Does Val know anything about how they'd go about getting him home that he thinks he'll be able to communicate this way, or should they focus on getting communication working better? Or if he wants to give up and be a hermit about the situation that'd be the obvious third option.

No, yes.

No Val doesn't think he can communicate it like this, yes they should focus on better communication?

Yes.

Okay. (He takes a minute to think.) There's lots of ways they could try to do that but they kind of break down into 'get Val a territory of his own', 'other less resource-intensive things to help him get out of his freeze', and 'someone learns someone else's writing system'.

He gestures at the notes he's taken on their writing system that he is working on learning right now.

All right. The medic has a connection to the world library, he's pretty sure, and probably won't mind making him some educational materials, or one of them can ask around for someone else to. Most likely she'll do it, though.

He might need to stay with her for a couple of days if there's more wrong than is obvious; should someone check on Val's noncrafter household for him?

Nope.

(...Man, this help is really helpful, for some hypothetical person who is how they expect him to be. They will presumably want some really tremendous favors but since they don't seem to have defense magic that'll be fine.)

All right. It's not much farther, is there anything else he should try to think to ask about before they get there?

Not sure.

(He's kind of having a time. Maybe he would have better ideas if he weren't.)

He'll leave it for the medic to figure out then, she's got more experience with this kind of thing.

After another few minutes' walk, and they come to a territory marker similar to the one he pointed out to Val when they left his territory - a chest-height pillar of crafting material marked with the glyphs of the local writing system, this one a peachy matte orange mottled with yellow and red and purple. On the other side of the trail is a larger installation reminiscent of a noticeboard, but with notices aside from the main one tucked into slots on one side and machinery on the other and on the top.

It looks to Val's companion like Val is in good enough shape not to need him to activate the emergency bell, but to be sure - should he do that?

Nah.

The territory system here is interesting, he's going to have to consciously pay attention to avoid treating it as basically agerah with more art.

Okay. He'll fill out the form then... it's this one here... He takes another clump of material off of his walking stick to make a copy of the form and leans on the structure while he fills it out, after noting that Val should stop him if he gets anything wrong.

Val fell off a cliff, is the main problem. He doesn't have any obvious-to-someone-else broken bones but there's something wrong with his ankle and might be other injuries - are there any that are obvious to him? there's a diagram he can fill out if he wants - and he might have hit his head - did he, does he know? - since he's not able to communicate normally, though he's writing and following a conversation okay and generally seems alert. Val isn't sure how he got to the top of the cliff though and the whole situation is pretty weird so if she can do any forensics on top of the medical care that'd be good. Does that seem to Val like it sums the situation up?

He did not hit his head. Yes, that sums it up.

He puts that Val didn't hit his head, and runs the form through the machine on the side of the structure; after a few seconds a spot above the machine begins to glow, and a mechanism flips to show a small board with a couple of glyphs on it; he explains that this indicates that the medic got their message and should be here in about fifteen minutes or so.

It's closer to ten though when someone comes running up the path toward them - a human-sized figure in closer-fitting black clothing than the robe Val's companion is wearing, making no effort to look where he's going as he runs on shortened legs and knuckles covered by a pair of apparatuses strapped to his forearms, but instead using the long thin black tentacles that sprout from the backs of his shoulders as antennae to keep himself from running into things. His ears are inhumanly large and pointed, and he has a pair of deep blue feathery moth's antennae growing on the top of his head, and when he stops short and faces them, his eyes are a solid blue with no obvious affordance for being able to see with them.

The peach one sent him to see if he could figure anything out about their mystery, and - his antennae twitch gently - he probably has more mysteries for them than he's going to solve - why does the stranger smell so strange, both personally and all the other smells that are on her. how doesn't she smell like anything around here. how is she malnourished, that doesn't happen to people her age. Anyway, they should come in, he'll drop them off at the workhouse and go get Val something to eat.

The one in the green seems to have some trouble with this, starting to move a couple of times but stopping short of walking past the territory-marker, until the one in black offers him a hand (folding back his protective bracer to do so) and leads him across, which seems to solve the problem.

...Ugh, gender again, he didn't miss that. He'll... whatever, he'll deal with it later. After the... all of this.

He leads the way, spending a few minutes walking upright on his short legs before folding his bracer back down so he can use the more comfortable knucklewalking gait. The underbrush is sparser here, and Val can catch glimpses of structures through the trees, rounded and lumpy like gigantic boulders in fantastic colors, mostly peach-themed but with the occasional black-and-blue or mint-and-gold or pearlescent pink. After a few minutes they pass a cluster of large platforms carrying plants and chickens and topped with mesh cages to keep wildlife away from their contents sit on the other side of the path, their legs tucked in close, and their guide notes that they're almost to the workhouse.

They come to it around the next corner: a large one-story building, rounded like the others and with its peach color scheme splattered with a rainbow of pastel colors. It's flanked by half a dozen small cottages in the same style, with various colors of trim around the doors; an old woman dozes bundled up in a spider-legged chair on the porch of one of them.

Their guide stops them in the clearing between the buildings, and goes into the main one; the person who comes out again is presumably the medic. Her general build is more human, though she's at least as modified overall - instead of wearing clothing, she's covered with a thick and very pettable-looking peach-colored fur that fades into red on her back with a line of blackish-purple running down her spine to her tail, a long-haired waggy doglike thing. Where their guide had antennae, she has a pair of simple three-pointed backswept antlers, continuing the peach theme with red on the back third and purple tips and draped with golden garlands strung with charms and baubles. Her forearms and calves are protected by structures that look like turtle shells, and she also has a shoulder tentacles, but two pairs rather than one, and they're thicker, looking sturdy enough to hold things with, lined with leathery yellow patches, and bald at the tips. She asks if Val's companion would like her to move him to another seat, and when he replies that it's fine to leave him where he is, she comes over to address Val - may she have a look at him? She doesn't need to touch him if he's not comfortable with that but it'll make it easier for her to see what's going on with him internally.

Sure.

(So many new species here. Well, but they recognized him as a human, so it's fine. Probably.)

She sets her hand on his knee - the one on the side with the good ankle - and considers him for a few moments, seeming mildly worried as she does. Her conclusion is that he's bruised up and his hand is scraped up and ankle is in some trouble but there's no brain damage or anything. She's concerned about his diet; it isn't terribly urgent, but his lack of fat reserves is going to complicate treatment a little - ideally she'd grow him some extra bone marrow to top his blood supply back up, but there isn't enough mass for her to work with for that without cannibalizing something: his breasts are the obvious choice, and she can put them back once he's put on some weight for her to use for that, but that might take a few weeks or months even if there's not something going on that's making it hard for him to eat. Or she thinks he'll be okay without that, he'll just be weak for a few days or weeks while he recovers naturally, and he's welcome to stay in one of the cottages while he does - really ideally he'd stay for a bit anyway while they see if they can get his nutrition situation figured out, but she doesn't expect him to want to. Anyway, she can fix the ankle and the hand now, with his permission, and either 1) let her make him some bone marrow, and he can come back for the breast reconstruction at his leisure; 2) move into one of the cottages until he feels like leaving, however long that ends up taking; 3) both; or 4) neither, and he'll take care of himself or go to someone else.

He is fine with her cannibalizing his breasts. (Wow, for the first time he doesn't particularly resent their existence.) He... has no idea where he should live right now. Maybe here, on the basis that someone said it was okay and no one has said that about anywhere else?

Okay; this'll feel weird...

His various aches and pains subside quickly, and then there's an odd sensation along his ribs as his breasts shrink to nothing.

...how's that, does he want any adjustments?

Nah, he's fine.

Good. She'll need a few minutes to sanitize a cottage, but he can come in while she's setting it up and point out anything he'd like her to adjust.

His companion cuts in at this point to bring up the nature of the communication problem and Val's request for materials to learn the form of writing they use from; the medic agrees to get that started once the cottage is ready, and then goes to start on that.

While she's gone, the black-themed person returns with a plate of food - garlic and herb mashed potatoes-and-carrots, roasted mixed vegetables, and a small venison steak - on a tray with utensils and a glass of fruit juice, to offer to Val.

Oh. Well, he doesn't have a better way to find food, and he will eventually need to eat at least once before he's fluent in their language, so even if he's going to end up owing them even more for this what choice does he really have.

...The mashed whatever it is is really good, at least.

When he's done, the medic has finished with the inside of the cottage and recolored its trim to dull orange, and is adding planters to the railings of its porch using material taken from other decorative elements. When she notices that he's done, she indicates that he can come over and help her set it up, and bring the dishes with him.

Inside, the cottage has also been recolored to dull orange, with neutral grey as a secondary color. It uses a mostly-open floor plan, with a workbench, small kitchen, and communication machinery along the left wall and a seating area and enclosed bed-bay on the right, with a restroom in the back; she goes around the room, showing Val all the amenities - this patch of wall can be touched to turn the overhead lights on and off, or this one operates the workbench's dedicated light, and here's a writing pad and various colors of utensils he can use, and there's a supply of crafting material in the cabinet here that he's welcome to; the kitchen has a cold box without any particular controls and a small oven and a stovetop element that are operated like so, and she'll get it stocked with food next; the communication station won't be very useful until they share a writing system but the emergency button is here and the not-an-emergency-but-please-come-by button is here; the bed enclosure has a built in light and fan and heater and cooler and water dispenser and moonroof and variable-softness sleeping surface that are operated via this panel of buttons, plus the sliding doors latch closed like so, or there are also curtains if he prefers to use those, and there are a couple of types of blankets and pillows in drawers underneath; the seating area has its own lamp, and the chairs can be warmed or cooled or softened or firmed with this other panel of buttons, plus there's storage built into the base of the seats for blankets; if any of this doesn't suit him she can adjust it however he likes.

It's very nice. He tries to smile about that.

He is going to have to do so much for these people. It might even be legal to force him to, here, he doesn't know, but even if it's not, if he doesn't pay them back they'll tell everyone.

There's no sense from her that she thinks she's doing him a big favor; if anything, the undertone to her communication is that she expects this to not quite meet his needs. She doesn't comment on it directly, though, just asks if there's any foods he likes that he wants to draw for her so she can see if she has them available.

Well, he's eaten... fruits... which are... round... and nuts, he might as well try to draw a pecan if only because pecans are pretty distinct and known to be edible for humans... and, uh... fish? He can draw fish pretty recognizably.

She doesn't recognize that fruit but she can ask around about it, she does know where she can get a pecan tree cutting but she'll have to find out if the owner of the tree is willing, and she doesn't have a good fishing spot in her territory but she'll see what she can do for fish - he's not in bad enough shape that she thinks she needs to call in favors about it unless he turns out to have trouble with eggs or something, but it's pretty likely that someone has extra or will take the excuse to set out extra traps just for being asked.

Does he want to tag along while she gets some staples from her gardens?

Sure, he might as well go see.

So she leads the way back up the path to the mesh-enclosed platforms; the chickens in one of them bunch up against the edge of their cage to watch her as she goes by. She offers them a greeting, but otherwise ignores them in favor of going into one of the planted enclosures, pausing to make sure he follows her through the doorway without trouble.

The plants inside aren't bearing any obvious fruit or vegetables to start with, but she takes a basket from by the door and makes her way between the plants anyway, pausing here and there to touch a plant and make it grow a melon or squash or ear of corn or sprig of grapes for her to harvest.

Huh. It looks like green magic but that's awfully dramatic for green magic.

He doesn't have any trouble following. He doesn't touch the plants.

Once she's made a circuit of the first platform, she goes to the second one, where she fills the basket out with chestnuts and butternuts grown from miniature trees.

On the way back, it occurs to her to ask him if he knows how to cook.

Shrug.

He doesn't really have a good way to provide her with a useful answer to that question.

Well, the majority of what she has here can be eaten raw, and the rest should be basically fine roasted, she'll sort it out for him and make sure he's okay using the oven. And they'll be bringing him meals in addition, of course.

(She's really curious what his whole deal is; it is of course none of her business and she's definitely not going to push for information while he's in a vulnerable position here, but for the record, if he does want to tell her once he's able, she'd like to know.)

Back at the house, she sorts the food out as promised, and steps out for a minute to get another cold box from one of the other cottages to separate the piles into; with that taken care of she'd like to make sure he's okay with cooking - she'll walk him through preparing that squash, if that sounds good, and she'll give it to the chickens if he isn't hungry again so soon.

...Well, he wouldn't say that he's hungry again, but he can't really usefully say anything, and also he could use the tutorial, so.

So first he needs to craft a knife, something with pretty good heft to it; the crafting material is in the cabinet there.

...He examines the crafting material. What is crafting material.

The substance in the cabinet she directed him to looks like clay and is just as moldable, though it's a bit smoother to the touch and doesn't stick to his hands at all.

Well. He can smoosh some clay-or-whatever into a blade shape and enchant it to stay that way. If it'll stay enchanted, anyway.

It stays enchanted just fine.

His host keeps watching, though, seeming somewhat confused.

Well, he was probably supposed to do something different, but instead he's done the thing he's done. ...Is he supposed to turn it orange? He hasn't missed that that's how they signal that he's using something but he can't do that without paint.

So he'll just... do nothing and wait and see what she complains about.

She doesn't complain, but when it's clear that he's done she walks him through cutting the squash in half, reshaping the knife into a scoop to deal with the stringy bits inside and then back to a knife to score it, then making a tray to put it into the oven on and setting the oven to bake it.

When it's in he oven, she indicates somewhat hesitantly that it seems like he might not have learned to craft properly - though he's obviously got some aspects of it down - and that's not strictly speaking her business but she's worried about his ability to live on his own if he can't craft... is something going on with that that he's going to want or need help with?

Conveniently he has already been taught a glyph for "something else" and can therefore at least sort of try to answer that question.

...help but not the obvious kind, or...?

Something else!

...This conversation might turn out to be extremely frustrating but who knows.

She's not actually sure what else it could be; probably she should just get a dictionary printing and that'll help Val explain himself.

Yes! Yes, she should.

...Assuming the dictionary is readable without already knowing the writing system.

Okay. That'll be maybe an hour, and she'll go handle some other urgent chores while it's printing and then she can read some of it to him, since he won't be able to read it on his own at first - it'll be organized by topic, though, so they'll hopefully be able to get somewhere on communicating things tonight even if he can't put sentences together or anything.

Does he need anything before she goes to do that? If not she'll be back in an hour or so.

Nope.

In that case she'll be back in an hour!

She has a dozen eggs, which she puts in the cold box with the other food that needs to be cooked, and two set of slim books in orange and peach, and explains that it seemed like it'd be easier to work with the dictionary in several parts like this - this edition also has some more specialized books available that she didn't print, if he needs vocabulary about advanced genecrafting or something, but this will hopefully get them at least to the point where he can ask for what he needs. The most obvious place to start would be this one that covers basic things like modifiers and relational words, but if he wants to skip to one of the others that's fine by her - the set includes vocabulary about general crafting, crafters and interpersonal things between them, tools and other common objects, plants and animals (including talking animals, she notes, with the subtext that that categorization choice doesn't go without saying), and other natural phenomena like terrain and weather.

He can start wherever she thinks it makes sense to start. Shouldn't be that much harder than learning Ereli, right?

It's pretty easy, for a language - without a spoken version of the language to encode phonemes of, the glyphs are all little drawings, and there's usually a pretty clear logic to how a drawing relates to the concept it's referencing; even the ones that refer to things that can't be drawn representationally have a fairly consistent 'grammar' to how they're laid out.

The book of general-use words is the shortest of the set, and she gets through it fairly quickly. She can probably get about a third to half of one of the others done tonight; she's inclined to start on the crafting book, but perhaps one of the others would be more useful to him.

...Maybe the one with words that have to do with interpersonal relationships.

Sure, no problem.

The vocabulary in this book covers general relationship categories like friends, neighbors, parents, children, and romantic partners; they also have terms for households and heads-of-households, the people who claim the territories that households are in and are ultimately responsible for keeping them running, and household-member, which can refer to both crafters and animals - the chickens and pop-runner, the black-and-blue themed crafter he met earlier, are both members of her household, but the local crows and wildlife aren't, even though they come through regularly, because they're doing their own thing. There's also a concept of guests; being in a household's territory as a guest is like a much less intense version of being a member of that household, where the household is responsible for your well-being while you're there, mostly in the form of helping with freezing-instinct problems but also including things like offering food and other amenities during longer visits.

With inter-crafter relationships covered, the book switches to giving vocabulary related to the freezing instinct; from the explanations he can gather that crafters have a real problem with interacting with things they perceive as owned by another person without that person's direct permission, including not being able to enter each other's territories or move around within them without an escort. The color-coding is related to this; it makes it clear who owns something, or who the owner intended to use it. There's a concept of public-use objects, and she notes that a grey like she used on parts of his cottage is the usual sign of that around here, though she hears that other places do it differently.

As she goes to start on the next glyph, pop-runner shows up with a tray of food and asks to be let in to drop it off.

...Okay, definitely not just agerah, not that he really thought they were.

...Is this one species? He can sort of see how that would work.

He looks to her to figure out if he's supposed to let them in.

She goes to get the door herself and brings the tray in - dinner is scrambled eggs, roasted corn, purple asparagus, and a slice of chestnut-flour cake topped with dried cherries - and then goes to eat her own dinner, pausing first to clarify that she probably won't be back tonight but he can use the call bell if he needs anything.

He won't need her tonight anyway, probably.

He probably shouldn't just eat their food, if these people are all one species that he doesn't belong to and just think he's one of them. On the other hand, humans can eat a superset of things all other people he's ever met before can eat, and the foods from before were fine. Also where else is he going to get anything to eat. Also it's really good! Would poison taste this good? 

It doesn't cause him any obvious problems, at least!

He's left alone for the rest of the night; the bed nook turns out to be quite comfortable, if he turns on the fan or leaves the sliding door that closes it off open a bit for ventilation. Pop-runner returns in the morning, with breakfast: two hard boiled eggs peeled and sliced into wedges, an apple tart with maple syrup and chestnut crumble, and a small bowl of mixed melon chunks with finely chopped mint on the side; he wasn't sure if Val would like the mint, some people don't. He'll take last night's dishes while he's there, if Val would like, and he passes along the message that his head-of-household expects to be by in a couple of hours and asks if Val needs anything in the meantime.

He does not need anything before that and will try to make himself presentable. He's still missing anything to hold a ponytail with and it still doesn't really matter much; since he has the luxury of so much time to prepare this morning he bathes and puts his hair up in a French twist.

The mint is fine. The melon is edible. The whatever that is with syrup is cloying and he doesn't finish it. He recognizes eggs! Eggs are nice and definitely not poison.

His host is a little late, and apologizes when she gets there - she got called away from her chores to handle someone's accidental burn. Was his evening all right? Is there anything to address before they get back to the dictionary?

His evening was fine and there isn't anything to address.

They can get back into it, then. (She knows it's probably getting annoying that she keeps asking him that kind of question, but since he can't just tell her, it's that or possibly let something go unaddressed, which is obviously worse.)

They were near the end of the section about public-use objects; there are also ways to refer to group-owned ones and abandoned ones (the example sentence describes a suspected-abandoned territory marker as metonymy for a suspected-abandoned territory), then pivots to talking about things-people-do - they don't actually seem to have the concept of careers, and there's no mention of anything related to formal paid work or for that matter money, but productive things like hunting, building robots, breeding animals, and maintaining public utilities like pebbleclinkers (complicated machines that do things with information; she doesn't understand them well enough to give a better description than that, though she does mention that she got this dictionary from the library's pebbleclinker) are mentioned, along with various hobbies, including producing various kinds of art and participation in recreational groups for things like writing or playing games, and going on journeys to do things like picking up skills, answering questions, or collecting things. Farming isn't mentioned, though breeding and crafting plants and animals specifically to change their traits and breeding animals for food are; building construction is only mentioned in the context of making robotic walking ones; government, law enforcement, and retail shops aren't mentioned at all.

It's really annoying that he still hasn't run into a generic word for "magic" or anything useful for describing where he came from.

Fortunately, he can now attempt to ask. He kind of painstakingly consults his notes and attempts to construct the question, "What kind of thing is crafting?"

It's... a thing you do? To creatures with minds, that's what the communication is, or to living things, that's how she healed him and grew the food, or to crafting material, to make things that aren't alive, or to other objects, to make crafting material. It's not really more specific than that; like how uh... fishing, you could say fishing was a type of gathering or trapping, but walking is just walking, it's a kind of movement but that doesn't tell you much, crafting is like walking and not like fishing.

It's confusing that he asked that, and really everything about him and crafting has been confusing so far - if he doesn't want to take the time to read the dictionary of crafting-related words, maybe it'd help for her to write out what she's been confused about and read it to him, and then he'll have those words specifically?

Yeah, that seems like a good idea.

All right, so...

• At first she thought he wasn't communicating normally because of his freeze instinct. That's been looking less likely as she's seen him do more things, but some people do have really specific problems like that, so she wasn't going to rule it out, but at this point she's thinking it's not that.

• The obvious other way for it to happen is brain damage, but he doesn't have brain damage, she already checked that.

• All the less-obvious communication-related issues she's heard of would leave him unable to communicate by writing, too.

• She's confused about his physical differences, too, and it's just barely possible that it could be related to that. She's not sure how or why someone would end up with a dozen mostly minor and obscure aspects of their physiology working differently from the rest of the species in ways that are mostly completely functional, but it could be a side effect of someone doing highly unethical genecrafting to a fetus, and that could maybe in theory have not being able to communicate as a side effect, except, like... that's not how genecrafting works, she's pretty sure. (She can write about the physical differences she noticed if he wants, but there wasn't anything alarming.)

• His non-communication crafting is also weird, - it looked like he wasn't able to craft the knife into the shape he wanted and had to do it by hand, and she doesn't know that he can't change the color of crating material but it's weird that he didn't. On the other hand he did obviously change the crafting material's stiffness or he wouldn't've been able to use it as a knife at all. She doesn't know what to make of that; it'd be less weird if he hadn't been able to craft a knife at all, that kind of freeze-instinct problem is very common.

• His being malnourished is very strange and could be crafting-related, if he's not able to craft himself food; that's actually the most obvious explanation of it.

• He also hasn't crafted his clothing clean, which may just be personal preference but she's including it here in case it's related.

• It's also weird that he didn't have any crafting material besides his clothes with him when he came in; she's been assuming he had a walking stick or something that he dropped in the fall, but she'll mention it for completeness' sake.

...If his magic is a strict subset of crafting he absolutely needs to keep them from finding that out, but it didn't seem like it was, before, it seemed like doing his hair startled one of these people... but his hair is up now and she's not startled. Maybe she assumes he tucked some pins in invisibly.

He'd like to do something casual-seeming, here, so that it's not obvious he thought he was communicating anything important if he turns out to be wrong about what crafting can and can't do, but he can't think what would work for that.

He picks up the writing slate and then sets it back down two inches up in the air.

.....what. That's not... a thing that can happen? What?

She peers concernedly at him and pokes it with a tentacle, then sweeps underneath it to check for invisible bits holding it up.

It cannot be swept underneath. There is definitely some kind of invisible bit holding it up.

Okay that's less utterly baffling, you can craft something to be partly invisible, it's just that changing the shape and the color so perfectly and so quickly without disturbing the rest of the object in any visible way isn't really a thing people can do.

Which is probably the point, either he's demonstrating something about how he can craft or something weirder is going on. Is she on the right track?

Okay, now it seems safe to go ahead and write that he can't craft.

Okay so that's definitely 'something weirder is going on'. Well, first things first, is he okay in the short term, is there anything he needs?

He's fine and just hoping get started as quickly as possible on figuring out what people here will want from him so he can do that and pay people back for helping him.

She puzzles over this message for a minute, until it occurs to her that trade is potentially a solution to not being able to craft, if his neighbors are amenable enough. It'd take some unusually sociable neighbors to source all his meals that way, as he seems to have maybe found out, but it's a clever approach.

Trying to draw inferences - she thinks he's either not from around here or kept to himself up to now, and he's at the age of wanting his own territory and trying to figure out how to make it work; he's had the clever idea about it but not knowing the common writing system is a problem with that, you need to be able to communicate with people somehow to trade with them. Plus, as he says, he'll need to figure out what to trade and who to trade it with. She's not sure how that leads to falling down bluebriar's cliff, but that's kind of beside the point, most likely. Is she on the right track? (She crafts a second writing board to write this out for him.)

She is on the right track!

He also isn't sure how that leads to falling down bluebriar's cliff. It seems like maybe someone somehow caused him to be in a different place very quickly? In the place he came from, they use a different writing system - here's a sample - and there are twelve kinds of thing-that-crafting-and-his-thing-are-types-of so people trade a lot.

...there being a place with twelve kinds of superset(crafting) is also not how things work, she's pretty sure? Or, not a place on the planet. With weird superset(crafting) in play she supposes the options for where he's from aren't limited to that.

He, uh, may be stuck here; they haven't made it off the planet yet, at least not that's public knowledge. She'll spread the word that if anyone's been thinking of picking it up as a project there's a need for it now, but she doesn't expect that to turn up a spaceship very quickly.

In the short term... if he shows her more of what he can do she can share that around and take messages about who'd want to trade with him, but she's not sure it's going to work very well to try to get all his meals that way - nobody's going to want to go trade in a snowstorm, for example, even if he can get enough trading partners that them taking breaks from the projects they want his not-crafting for isn't a problem.

She passes him the board while she takes another minute to think.

While she thinks he writes.

I don't need to get food the day I eat it. It can be the same a year later.

...oh! He should be fine, then. Crafters don't usually bother trading in staple foods - things like meat and fish, yes, not everyone likes hunting or fishing or keeping meat animals, and rare foods that only a few people have sources of, but common plants and eggs are too easy to get to bother with - but if he wants those, people won't want much more for them than they'd want for the crafting material it takes to make them, it's just if he needed someone to visit every couple days with them that would be tough to talk someone into.

Yeah, he's fine.

He asks what she wants.

Honestly she'll probably set him up with a couple months' worth of food just for the peace of mind of knowing he has it - if he needs a lot of help figuring out what kind of housewares he's going to need or something she might want to see if there's anything he can do to make up for that, but for the most part he doesn't need to worry about needing her help getting set up. She's not up for building him a house, though, she doesn't have the free time for that kind of big project, but there's enough people around here who'd be willing to help just for the chance to meet him that he won't have any trouble, at least if he wants something straightforward.

I don't understand.

Uh, what part?

Food is easy to make, she writes; she won't mind making a bunch for him and would mind not knowing that he had at least a small stockpile. Housewares are important too, but it's going to be harder - or at least she expects it to be - to figure out everything he'll need to be comfortable, so she might want to stop after just figuring out enough that he'll be okay but maybe not have everything he might possibly want. And he'll need a house for sure, but those are big, it takes a few days of focused work to make one - they're usually personalized, someone might have a template around that would speed it up but she doesn't know about it if so, and he probably doesn't want that anyway, it's his house - and she has chores that have to be done... that doesn't, she supposes, mean that she couldn't make him a house, if he really wanted her to do it for some reason, but she doesn't want to, and enough of her neighbors would be glad to help a new neighbor in need that it makes much more sense to ask them.

(Does it not work like that where he's from?)

I want you to be happy that you helped me.

I do want to know who would like building me a house.

He could say something about his horrible apartment but he doesn't want anyone getting the idea that he's used to poverty and has low standards.

She likes helping people; she wouldn't've become the kind of fleshcrafter she is if she didn't. Anyway, she'll send the crows to ask around about a house-building party; it'll probably take a few days to arrange that, but he can start thinking about designs now if he'd like - she can make him some models of her household's buildings, if he'd like to see how people around here are used to making them. Or they could get back to the dictionary, or something else.

...That doesn't really explain anything but okay. Since he's just taking notes and doesn't even need to remember words in real time he has a pretty much unlimited capacity to keep absorbing new things from dictionaries.

Back to the dictionaries it is, then; the one about crafting is next.

The dictionary gives words for three subtypes of crafting, in addition to the general sort - communication, fleshcrafting, and genecrafting - and then goes on to give a bunch of vocabulary about traits that crafting can apply to matter. Crafting can apply any physical trait that exists naturally, even temporarily, to crafting material, and there's a couple of traits listed that might seem like they shouldn't exist naturally at all - it's possible to make things emit dangerous but invisible light, for example, or to synchronize two objects so that any change to one appears in the other as well. The next section, nominally about fleshcrafting, is mostly anatomical vocabulary; it quickly becomes obvious that fleshcrafting allows for nearly arbitrary additions to a living thing's physical form, and a good variety of non-addition changes as well. There's also a few terms for general types of modifications: decorative, functional, medical, and so on. The genecrafting section is short and not very cohesive, with sections on mental conditions, heredity-related vocabulary, and a few specialized terms like the one for a creature that's been modified to express ancestral traits hidden in their genes; his host explains that this is mostly because there's so much overlap between the abilities of genecrafting and fleshcrating, and fleshcrafting is much more common, so the genecrafting section only has vocabulary for the additional things it can do, plus it's leaving out most of the jargon that only specialists know.

...How much does it usually cost to hire a fleshcrafter to, say, add some things?

Different fleshcrafters have different policies but she in particular works on a gift/donation basis and doesn't mind if people don't offer anything in exchange at all, in most cases.

...Why doesn't she mind that?

Well, she likes the work, and if she makes it harder for people to ask her for it she doesn't get to do as much of it - not all fleshcrafters like working with people, if he'd found someone who mostly liked working with dogs or chickens or something he'd probably have to figure out a trade.

...That makes sense. Would she maybe like to do some more things for him?

Sure, once he has a little more mass for her to work with. She can bring over the boxes of models if he wants to start thinking about details - did he have something specific in mind? (It seems like she has a guess.)

He has some thoughts but he'd like to see the models.

She goes to do that; it takes only a few minutes for her to return with a walking cabinet stocked with boxes of tiny miniatures of all different sorts of add-ons. The first couple of boxes are for things that can go anywhere on the body - swatches of fur and feathers and scales and plates and shells in all different textures and patterns, patches of chromatophores and whiskers and tasting nodules and light-sensitive eyespots and magnetic-field sensors and stridulating barblets, tentacles with flattened grasping surfaces or heavy muscles for climbing with or just plain, reinforced loops integrated into the skin for hanging crafted objects from, glands that can produce anything from milk to musk to a numbing liquid, and more. Further boxes are organized by body part: there are no less than two dozen options just for types of feet he could have without adjusting how his knees and hips work, and half a dozen options for how he could rearrange his stance, each with their own collection of completions. Five boxes just of genitalia, crafter-typical and more-exotic male and female plus one for things that defy that classification. Hand-specific modifications: four different models trading off grip strength and dexterity in different ways without sacrificing the crafter-typical aesthetic, two dozen approaches to adding extra fingers or wrist tentacles for fine detail work or pinchers for extra carrying capacity or other functional greebles, a dozen full-replacement options intended for people who want an entire set of extra arms with different functionality. And on and on - it's a bit overwhelming, though it's organized enough to keep track of if he tries. The crowns of her collection are a pair of wings that, with enough other mods, will allow a crafter to glide short distances - creatures their size and build are really just not made for flying, and nobody's cracked it yet - and a complex sequence of mods for replacing someone's legs with the entire body of a smallish bear.

He has no interest in being an entire smallish bear but it's really technically impressive that she could do that.

He would like one of these dicks. Maybe it should have chromatophores. No, it'll just be covered in hair, when's he going to have a chance to speak ereli intelligibly with it and who would he speak it to... yeah, no chromatophores. Possibly the wings. How big are the functional wings and how much gliding do they do?

The fur is really nice. He's not sure if he actually wants fur but it's really nice.

...Do hands get strictly better when designed intelligently from the ground up or is it just tradeoffs?

Most of this thought process doesn't make it into his writing, since he's effortfully translating each sentence a word or two at a time, but it might show on his face anyway. He writes his questions and pets the furs.

It's probably possible to make replacement hands that are strictly better, but the thing with handlikes is that there's a fairly long learning curve for anything that complicated, and nobody wants to go without dexterous hands for possibly up to a year or two (though most people do have the second set working well enough to get by with within a couple seasons), and if you're going to be adding extra arms for the new set anyway there's not much incentive to do the design work for something that's strictly better rather than just differently useful. This mass of tentacles comes closest; it's a bit prone to dropping things in moments of inattention but has better grip strength and dexterity and the ability to do some tasks one-handed that usually require two hands and/or a specialized tool. The greebles on the other hand are mostly strict improvements; she personally likes the wrist tentacles best (hers are hard to spot against her fur when they're wrapped around her wrists) and the extra thumbs are also popular.

The wings are quite large batlike affairs, but jointed in a way that lets them fold down small enough to fit through most doorways without much fuss; chairs are more of a problem with them, and he'd most likely want to add a few of those reinforced loops to help keep clothing on around the side flaps. They allow for gliding about twice as far as the height you're starting from, and triple or quadruple the height it's safe to jump from depending on skill; jumping out of a flying machine or something is still inadvisable without a parachute, and most people prefer to stick to hang gliders if they're going to need equipment anyway.

If he wants a dick there's a couple related choices he should make - the easy one is just whether he wants to be fertile that way or not, which is an entirely stand-alone choice. (This won't make him interfertile with crafters if he's not already, which she has no idea about.) The other one is what he wants to do for hormones - those affect things like hair growth and fat distribution and what people smell like, all those subtle differences between the default sexes. Crafters mostly do fine on mixed hormone systems but most other species tend to have problems in the long run that way, so it'd be risky for him to try it, and if he switches over to a male hormonal system he won't be able to bear children, just sire them. It's also possible to make it male-typical amounts of obvious that he's capable of bearing children even if he wants to keep the ability to, though that means he'll require crafter assistance to give birth - any adult crafter can do that much fleshcrafting, so it's not a huge limitation, but it is pretty risky if he's not sure he'll be able to get to someone in time.

She can totally make him a bigger swatch of one or two of those furs just to have, by the way.

He'll just stick with the hands he has for now. He'll... consider the wings and not make a snap decision about that.

He has never previously thought he might want to bear children but he takes this moment to look deep inside himself for any such yearnings and nope he still doesn't think he wants that. It's conceivable he could want to father children. He knows basically nothing about hormones but probably male hormones are fine?

...He might want furs like this one or this one for his bed once he has a house, but for his body, hmm, fur distribution is sexually dimorphic for humans and he should probably expect to start having some regardless, right? This texture here is nicer than the kind of coarse hair humans get in places other than the tops of their heads, and for that matter it's nicer than what humans mostly have on their heads and relevantly it's nicer than what he has on his head but maybe he shouldn't get ahead of himself here, maybe just the body hair. And while he's at it what if it were mostly black but with little glowing red speckles. He can draw the kind of pattern he's thinking of. ...Maybe his head hair should match the color, at least... It could be redder than it is, it's very orange right now.

Male hormones will give him body hair unless he has something done about that, yes, and if he decides he doesn't like them it's easy enough to set him  back to female ones. And that color pattern should work fine, though he might want to consider how it'll follow the contours of his face a bit more; she can't make hair glow directly but bioluminescence under reflective hair looks very cool in her opinion: she makes up a sample of that, with the red glittering up and breaking into subtle rainbows in the shiny black hair shafts. Reflective red or black would match it well on his head - bioluminescence won't work as well there if he wants to keep his hair as long as he has it now, unfortunately, though he may want some anyway to unify the look - and she makes up long samples of those as well, plus one that fades from red to black through a dappled roan of the two colors.

It's fine if the ends don't glow.

...Maybe he should fade from red to black like that? He doesn't like that exact design, though, it looks too patchy. Or maybe his beard should match the top of his head, because they'll end up continuous - actually, that's kind of annoying, he really only wants a goatee and he's probably just going to end up shaving the rest off...

She can set him up with just a goatee; it's not hard to make it keep a particular length, even. Has he thought about whether he wants sideburns?

She makes a new swatch with the roan fade without the dapples, and... actually, she really should make a proper model, here. She does that, taking a few minutes to put together a life-sized and moderately masculinized bust of Valanda with a shiny black goatee and long shiny black hair both lit by tiny glowing red dots on the surface underneath. (It's not a perfect rendition, but quite close; the masculinization helps save it from falling entirely into the uncanny valley.)

Oh, hey, that's useful.

If she's into batting around design ideas, now that they have a model, he'll do that for kind of a while.

A younger and more human-shaped woman in a green and gold argyle dress brings them lunch, eventually - fish and potato wedges and green beans for him, a hearty salad for her, gently spiced and sweetened mashed squash for both of them - but doesn't stay to chat; his host will follow his lead on whether to keep working while they eat.

...Well, he would kind of have preferred to follow her lead, but, uh... probably it's better not to waste her time?

She's perfectly content to work over lunch, yep. And eventually they'll have a bust he likes, or at least a list of decisions he wants to think about.