"Yes. Meditation," she says, and stops, trying to figure out how to explain meditation in gestures using only the objects available in a campus garden.

"Mm?"

"Um..." She sits down on a bench, closes her eyes, and breathes in and out in long, even breaths. Then she opens them and gestures to her head. "Meditation. We meditate to reduce the mind thing."

"Meditation?"

"Yes! Meditation. Meditation."

"Meditation," he echoes. "Never been my style, but hey, if it helps."

"If you can do the same thing without meditation it might not," she admits.

"Practically since I can remember, I've had a pretty solid understanding of which thoughts are and are not safe to think, and I've navigated that pretty damn well given my starting conditions."

"Why would something not be safe to think?"

"If I'd ever once let myself get caught up in the attitude that of course I can solve all the world's problems if I just try hard and believe in myself, I'd have been dead in under a year. And it's by far the most natural attitude for my mind to assume. I have to fight it down pretty much any time I encounter a problem outside the range of what I can actually plausibly solve."

"Oh. Yes. Some problems can't be solved. I'd go crazy if I thought about them all the time."

"But now I am in a universe that rewards you for trying to become more powerful, so I'm going to become a god and solve every problem in sight."

"Same. But some problems can't be solved." She shakes her head. "Sorry, I get maudlin when I think like this."

"Did I hear a 'some problems can't be solved'? Have you tried becoming a god?" he inquires, half-jokingly.

She sighs. "I am twenty years old." She gets a stick and sketches a reasonable approximation of the four seasons, taps it, and says, "year."

"And I'm seventeen."

She nods. She sketches a picture of three people, each visually distinct, two stylized female and one male. She draws lines from the male one and one of the female ones to the other female one. She taps the one the lines are drawn to, and says, "Me. Odette." She taps her chest. Then she taps the other female image, says "Mother," taps the male image, and says, "Father."

"Your parents?"

She nods. Then she draws another figure of her mother, and two parent-figures up from that.

"Grandparents?"

She nods. Then she taps the image of her mother, says, "Fifteen years old," and then firmly crosses out the pictures of her grandparents.

Milan gets a look on his face, at that.

She hesitates, but goes forward. "Fifteen," she says again, tapping the picture with the crossed-out grandparents, and, "Fifty-three," she says, tapping the picture connected to the picture of Odette. "Thirty-eight years. Even if one or both of us became strong enough to resurrect the dead today, they would still have missed thirty-eight years of their daughter's life. That's the kind of problem you can't fix."

"...I think we may have different ideas of what it means to solve a problem," says Milan.

"Er, then what did you mean by having problems outside the range of what you can plausibly solve?"