Finneas glanced up in surprise, brushing his hair out of his eyes with his shoulder. “Hello, Z,” he greeted, looking a little curious. “How is it going out there?”
"It's good," he said, looking back. "We fixed the sprinklers and June suggested to talk to you about any more system ideas you had."
He would see his face light up, but he still looked reserved, as if he didn’t want to get his hopes up. “Really?”
He sat up, nodding. “That’s perfect. Okay. Let me, uh...” He paused, looking down at the table for a moment, frowning. “I should finish this first, but let me get my notebook and you can look through it. One second.”
He stood and hurried off. It took him only a few seconds to return with a dense, heavily used notebook, its cover bound meticulously with dried leaves and bark. He offered it to Zerras before continuing to clean the table. Inside were rough sketches of inventions. Zerras would see ideas for automatic collections of crops, animal feeders, gates that shepherded the cattle back into their stalls. There were pictures of solar panels that prepared meals, and machines that made beds. Finneas had ideas for almost every chore on the farm, with detailed ideas about how he could accomplish it.
Zerras tilted his head curiously, looking through all the ideas for inventions. "This is really impressive."
He brightened, looking a little embarrassed. "Thank you," he said sheepishly. "But they're just ideas. Juniper tries to think of ways to get them to work - she's nice like that - but most of the time, we don't have the stuff I'd need."
He was finishing the end of the table, scrubbing at some particularly stubborn porridge. "Honestly, I mostly need stuff to practice with," he admitted with a small laugh. "But in terms of some of the stuff out on the farm, I think we could try some stuff out." He stood, gathering his cleaning supplies. "Here. Come with me to the kitchen while I put this stuff away. I have an idea. With your Earth magic, can you control stuff that's in the ground but isn't naturally occurring? Like... if I put a scarecrow in the ground, could you move it somewhere else in the field?"
He seemed to consider this, biting his lip as he went into the kitchen. "Interesting... how much will it disturb?"
He squinted for a moment before putting his hands on his hips. "Interesting... you saw those corn millers out there? June probably was pushing them?"
"What if I rebuilt them," he proposed, taking the notebook back and beginning to sketch them. "Instead of having wheels for legs, they basically walked on needles. Distribution of weight would make these tiny concentrated areas that could be moved through the ground...." He glanced up at Zerras. "Could you teach June how to do it?"
He rubbed his chin slowly. "I could," he said, "she's pretty good at nature magic, but earth magic is something that should be worked on."
