She smiles at him.

"Any distance."

Bounce - pop bounce-pop. "Can you make these for everyone? They're so nice."

She giggles. "Can, yes."

"Thank you! People will have so much fun!"

She smiles, and waits for him to be done bouncing around.

It is a fairly long wait. Eventually he's too tired to keep it up.

She's patient.

"We go tell people about magic?"

"Not yet. I'm not supposed to be doing this and they'll get worried if you're not really supposed to be here."

"You're not supposed to be doing what?"

"Hiding in the palace and crying. Or learning magic with strangers, maybe, not sure if I'm supposed to be doing that."

"Not supposed to be learning magic," she nods, "but not doing learning magic. Why not supposed to be hiding?"

"This would count as learning magic even though I can't do it myself yet. You usually can't on the first day, I'm just really impatient. I'm not supposed to hide because Father worries."

She squints skeptically at the bit about the magic, and then harder at the bit about hiding. "Explain 'Father'?"

He sends the concept for that; too hard to explain verbally, if she doesn't get it already.

That is still pretty disconcerting but she has to admit it's handy.

"Choose a different Father?" she suggests, in a tone that sounds like this is an obvious and common solution to that sort of problem and she's not sure why he hasn't already done it.

The tone is precisely what makes it confusing. As a joke it would have been a good one. "Huh?"

She's confused at his confusion, and worried, too. She thinks about the words she has to explain this with.

"Hiding is good, if you're safe. Worrying is sometimes good, but worrying about hiding is bad; it," she demonstrates, biting down on her hand just hard enough to make the point, "hurts you. If Father hurts you, choose a different Father."

Now he gets it, but she's just confused. He feels a little hollow at the realization. "My father is the King."

Hm.

"Explain 'King'?"

He does osanwë for that too. "We have a hundred thousand people. He's the King of all our people."

She makes a face.

"Kobolds do groups, tribes, size ... eight-twelves, nine-twelves people. King doesn't be Father; many doing, not good, hurts people. Other people be Father."

"Yeah. It should be that way too, but Kings are fathers. And he has a lot to do but that's not the biggest problem."

"Enough problem. More problems more. Hurting you, big problem."

"Yeah, I think so too. I love him, though. I think he loves me. When I'm working hard."

She makes less of a face at that, anyway.