The Echo is not a translator.

I should have realized that at the restaurant, since I could understand what people were saying but couldn't read the signs. It just didn't click until I tried an episode of Assassination Classroom and couldn't make out the undubbed version. Didn't matter if what I watched was live-action: I tried a random Spanish show trailer on YouTube and couldn't understand it either.

The wikis were a bit inconclusive about the Echo working for written text. One forum discussion noted the character couldn't read a coded message and had to take it to someone for translation. Nothing talked about information per se having aetherial content or presence.

But I remembered Mikoto getting into it in Kugane, and later in Bozja, so I hunted down a transcript of the cutscene in the Rabanastre plotline. What she had talked about was how aether made up the immaterial elements of a person: their soul and their memories. Because of this, if you could read the aether in a person, you could read what was in their mind.

This reminded me of something I'd figured out/understood/got the impression of years ago: that language doesn't contain information. People's heads do. Language is a set of symbols that someone generates because they correspond in his head to knowledge that he has, and that he hopes will correspond enough to the knowledge in someone else's head to convey meaning. From an aetherial/atomic standpoint, the language itself is just ink on paper, or grooves in stone, or patterns of movement in the air, or modulated fluxuations of lightning travelling over wire.

Which means what the Echo is doing when it "translates" is really a form of telepathy: it's grabbing the ideas in the head of the guy speaking that correspond to the language he's trying to say and placing it in our heads. If the guy doesn't happen to be available to be read, there's nothing for the Echo to grab. Which might mean we could know what a guy is writing when he's writing it, but not once he's done writing and walking away.

Same with audio or video recordings. Unless we're seeing or hearing something in realtime (and it doesn't take much distance or propagation delay or five-second safety buffering to make it not realtime), we're probably not going to understand shows or music. We might not even be able to understand stuff over phone or CCTV if the person on the other end is far enough away. I don't know if the Echo has a range limit.

So, new experiment set for the list: find someone who speaks a foreign language that we can trust or convince to try things out with. Maybe we can claim we're working on an automated translation system and we need a test subject. Tsu'na might be tickled to have someone else be one for a change.

It was a pleasantly unremarkable Saturday af the Pit, so we were rather rested and refreshed for a bauxite expedition the next day. Arkansas Geological Survey maps say there's bauxite not too far to the southeast of Little Rock, which meant there wouldn't be too much offroad travel, though if it had proved too far for biking we'd've needed to do it at night and take the goobbues.

Getting to Little Rock was actually trickier. Neither Tulsa nor Little Rock are that small, but Greyhound didn't want to give me a route from one to the other without going through Dallas. I wound up finding a bus southeast to Sallisaw, which was apparently a bus/train hub that I'd never heard of, and another bus east along I40 from there.

As Tsu'na and I waited for the bus to Tulsa, I told her, "While we're looking for bauxite, we should also keep an eye out for diamonds, so make sure you have Truth of Mountains active."

She peered at me. "Why do we want diamonds?"

"They sell for a lot of money here."

"Diamonds."

"Yes, my love."

"You could not sell diamonds in Eorzea. You listed them for five gil and they never sold."

"Yes, my love. Remember how I found that strange?"

"How much do they sell for here?"

"Good ones can go for thousands of dollars."

She froze. "Each?"

"Yes, my love."

"Why did you not bring diamonds from Eorzea???"

"They were with my retainer. The golden circle had just appeared in front of us...I didn't know if it would stick around long enough for me to go get stuff."

She grabbed my shoulders and bore into my eyes. "You will make a Wealth Kit! You will fill it with valuable things! You will always keep it in your inventory! We will not find ourselves on another world with no money!"

"Excellent idea, my love. I have a better one. We will make wealth kits."

"...Yes. That is a better idea."

The same maps that said bauxite was near Little Rock also said diamonds weren't, that they were well to the southwest near Murfreesboro and Crater of Diamonds National Park. But that didn't mean we couldn't look...we still don't know for sure why we find nodes where we do.

Bauxite is typically mined using "open-cut" techniques, which kind of means a quarry. There's a good-sized quarry south-southeast of Little Rock, south of the area 3M plant, off of 3M Road. It's practically right outside the city, so it would be easy enough to get to, but we decided to wait until nightfall because getting in over the fence would be so much easier if we flew.

Which left us with some time to kill in Little Rock. Not a lot, not enough for full walking tours or for really doing justice to museums. Tsu'na's been studying a kids' science site, so she was interested in something called the Museum of Discovery, until we saw on their website that the exhibits were made for kids 6 and under, and we didn't have a handy kid to borrow. There's something similar in Tulsa called Discovery Lab, though, so maybe we can offer to help chaperone a field trip or something.

But we did get dinner, bowing to the insistence of the tourism sites that Little Rock barbecue and cheese dip (not necessarily together) are to die for. It did broaden our view of barbecue a bit. The cheese dip too, though it's more thematically compatible with our pretzels.

The quarry was a not-terribly-long bike ride. Google satellite view showed it was nearly a quarter-mile across, with a belt of trees around it, enough to make it not too obvious from the road, other than the signs and the trucks and the chain-link fence and the BLASTING ZONE warnings. But still scenically compatible.

Arkansas Geological Survey listed the bauxite mine as "abandoned", but there still seemed to be activity, with the occasional truck rumbling out. Maybe they ran out of bauxite, but I guess a big stone hole in the ground is still good for making bigger by taking stone away. And if we can get corn from a harvested cornfield, it was worth trying to get bauxite from a harvested bauxite mine.

We shifted to Miner, complete with Gatherer's Sneak, and prowled the perimeter until we found a place with trees on both sides of the fence. It was dark enough by then to chance a quick goobbue-hop over the fence. There was no activity in our section of the quarry, either because it was late enough in the day or because there's plenty enough quarry to keep busy in. So we utilized Lay of the Land, found some mineral nodes, and got to work.

No diamonds in the bauxite quarry, but there were "hidden" items coming up from time to time like garnets and quartz. Even in quantity, they aren't the sort of thing we can get rich with, though we can maybe make a little money selling raw stuff to lapidary shops or finished stuff to jewelry shops. Though that gets back to ID. Diamonds would be worth enough to interest a fence, but not one-off accessories. Maybe I can somehow work out crafting leves with Sam.

Google says the ratio of bauxite to aluminum is 5 to 1. More specifically, it says it takes five tons of bauxite to make one ton of aluminum. Since the entire ultralight is supposed to weigh less than three hundred pounds, we might not need a literal ton of aluminum, but we're capable of thinking big. So we were prepared for a night of mining.

At least, we thought we were. We didn't sleep that much on the bus, and we'd sort of kept moving after hitting Little Rock, and physical effort and all, so after putting in some good work we decided to get some decent rest and have a fresh start at mining after.

Problem was, enough sleep would take us into daytime hours, when our orange popup tent would be visible from the quarry. We could goobbue-hop over the fence and pitch the tent outside, but then we wouldn't be able to hop back in in broad daylight.

"Why did you buy an orange tent, Husband?"

"It was cheap. I wasn't thinking about stealth at the time."

"It will not be Sam finding us this time and offering breakfast. Perhaps we could glamour it?"

"Glamour a tent?"

"Yes, like what the Resistance did to the flag at Castellum Velodyna."

"Oh, the snake lady tower. Right, but that was glamouring a flag to another flag. What would we glamour the tent to?"

"...A tent of a different color?"

"Why not just use a tent of a different color?"

Her mouth opened, and, after a moment, closed again.

"Actually, I think you might be on to something, but we can experiment at home. Let's just do it the Earth way tonight."

"What is the Earth way?"

The Earth way was cutting foliage and using it to cover the tent. There was enough underbrush that it didn't take long, and it made us just that much more ready to sleep when we were done.

We woke to the sound of a rather not-healthy-sounding dump truck rumbling nearby. We breakfasted on venison pie, dressed for gathering, activated Sneak and decamped.

The truck, it seemed, was a random passerby, presumably with business elsewhere in the quarry. We got to our own business, further amassing bauxite and finding a couple other random things like hematite and pyrolucite. The latter was sort of cool-looking, with feathery/thready crystals. Googling it shows crystal nuts enthusiasts think it's good for a "transformative" effect on relationships; other sites say it's a different sort of transformative, in that it's a carcinogen and a mutagen.

So, with bauxite and cool rocks and cheese dip to show for our trip (I may have gotten three carryout tubs), we Returned to Wyatt, washed up, did household stuff, and headed to the workshop to learn how to smelt aluminum. I stopped in the Pit to say hello to Sam.

"Hey there. Don'cha got diner work tonight?"

"In a couple hours, yeah. Just got back from Arkansas."

"Find yer bauxite?"

"Yeah, we did. Know what else we found?"

"Cheese dip?"

I stared at him. He shrugged. "They're right next door."

"Yeah, but, seriously, cheese dip? I mean, what a thing to be known for. Who cares about cheese dip?"

Sam grinned. "Arkansas. Bring back any?"

What the hell. I took out a tub and set it on the bar. He kept grinning until he touched it. "It's warm?"

"Nuked it for dinner. Go ahead, I've got more."

When I got to the workshop, Tsu'na was sitting at the workbench on a stool with her head resting on her arms. "I do not think I want to smelt, Husband."

So I got out the camping gear once again, and we took a nap on the mats and sleeping bags. And we didn't eat any cheese dip.