"I intend to reserve Ariel a chamber of her own, and give her any tools and resources she needs for her research." Meesei continued. It was the same offer that she had made for Marcaille, so it was not likely a surprise to others on the council. "We may have to relocate one or more people, but I have no doubt there will be volunteers, and we can make up for the inconvenience. Otherwise, there is not much else to say. There were no complications to note during our journey, and Ariel should be able to get to work immediately."

Marcaille gave a quick motion towards Ariel as she started to speak. "I can educate her on our rules and procedures after we're done here, if her sister hasn't already. There really aren't many." She said, looking more directly towards Ariel. There were hardly any rules among the clan that would not be expected of any civilized place. Most of what Ariel would need to adapt to would be how the clan handled the rationing of resources, as well as the cultural differences that were common among lycans compared to the lifestyle she was accustomed to. When they had traveled together previously, Meesei's pack had, for the most part, respected the norms that Ariel was familiar with. Now, Ariel would have to be the one to adapt. 

Meesei nodded. "Very good. Now, I understand there have also been some developments in a few of our long-term projects while we were away. I have seen the Dwemer machines patrolling our home, so I presume that you and your peers have discovered how to command them, Brenann?"

The Breton scholar was sitting in his plain brown robe, wearing an abundance of satchels and bags containing papers and other resources related to his research. He always tended to be over-prepared for most everything he did, meetings in particular. He had one of the Dwemer spiders standing at the side of his chair, presumably for demonstration purposes. "Uh, well...sort of." He answered. "Over the past few months of study, we have learned more about the aninonculory. We are still nowhere close to understanding completely how it functions; I doubt we will ever get to that point, but we do know enough to be able to manipulate the process in some ways. We know that it is the soul gems that provide...life, for the lack of a better word, to the machines. They do not provide power, they provide the ability for the machines to act autonomously. We were able to use a unique feature of lycans in order to mark you as allies that they are meant to serve. In this case, lycan blood. Fortunately, the automatons do seem to possess the cognitive ability to understand context, so they will not attack something that their masters treat as an ally, such as non-lycans like myself. But, that alone did not make them listen to us. They did not attack us, and they would perform some default autonomous functions, but they wouldn't obey commands. Control rods could be linked to them and be used to give them fine, detailed commands, but we, uh, don't know how to make those yet. We were just able to take the control rods we found here and link them to the machines we produced."

Pausing a moment, Brenann looked down at the spider beside him and tapped his hand on the edge of the table. "Up, sparks."

As commanded, the Dwemer spider jumped up from the floor onto the table and stood still, waiting patiently for another command. As Meesei was observing it, Brenann continued his explanation. "Our greatest breakthrough came somewhat recently. Using a person's blood, we can bound an automaton to that person at its creations. But, [i]only[/i] that person. It will listen to any verbal commands that the person gives, but even though they can understand context, that authority cannot be transferred to anyone else. It will only ever listen to that one person. If that person dies, it will just perform its default functions and never listen to anyone else again, except for a control rod. We are currently trying to work out a solution to that problem, but until then, we have been making automatons and assigning them to people based on the requests of the council. The spheres are mostly assigned to our soldiers and scouts. The spiders can perform maintenance and construction work, and I personally find them to be good assistants. They have surprisingly fine motor control with their pincers."