"Oh good," says Ike.

"You're cute, do people inform you of that often enough?"

"With reasonable frequency! But mostly they are members of my immediate family and that is not at all the same."

"I wouldn't expect it to be, no. But here I am, not related to you, thinking you're cute."

"I have noticed that," says Ike. "I am very pleased!"

"Good, I hate it when my flattering opinions are unhappily received."

Cam looks up.

"Oh, I was looking for my sister," Ike explains. "She is likely to show up and interrogate you if she notices that we are talking. But she does not seem to have done that yet."

"Why is she likely to do that?"

"She is very protective."

"What, exactly, is she likely to expect me to maybe do to harm you?"

"...Lots of things, none of which I think you are actually going to do, but there is a really long list, because I have had very bad luck with boys," says Ike.

"Aw, that sucks."

"So now she makes sure to intimidate anyone she catches maybe sort of slightly flirting with me, but I don't think she is going to try to intimidate you in particular because you are probably not very afraid of being punched even if it's by Val, but I think she will probably still glare at you a little just in case."

"I am fully warded up, yeah. Is she unusually good at punching?"

"I'm not sure if 'good' is the word. Maybe 'enthusiastic'. Also Sessiaki have iron bones."

"Sessiawhonow? Are you one of the innumerable forms of Sunshine demon?"

"Yes! Well, partially. Full Sessiaki also have scales and tails," he says. "I'm slightly more than half human. I have shiny fingernails, an iron skeleton, some human-toxic dietary requirements, and I never need a compass or a ruler."

"That is an interesting array of features. Can I have a look at the fingernails?"

"Okay," says Ike. He holds out his hand. His fingernails are, indeed, shiny - and a little smoother than human ones, and faintly opalescent.

Cam takes his hand and peers at them. "Very cool. I'd think it was a deliberate aesthetic if you hadn't told me. How does the geometry thing work?"

"I have a perfect sense of distance and direction, by eye and by physical orientation," he says. "The Sessiaki writing system tends to boggle humans because they don't see angle and distance automatically. But for example I can tell you that you're slightly taller than five-ten, about a sixteenth of an inch to be exact - heights are really interesting around here actually, with all the templates, your alts are mostly about five-four but very few of them are exactly the same as each other, and some of the other templates I've seen really are exactly the same across the board." He takes a breath. "And if I close my eyes and spin around several times I still know which way is north. Or, well, any direction. And if I were to walk around blindfolded I could tell you exactly how far I'd gone and draw the route on a map. Moving between worlds is always weird that way because it doesn't feel like going anywhere, but I am still demonstrably somewhere else."

"Huh. Is your sense of direction freaking out about being in space?"

"Not particularly. Most things are in space if you step back far enough," he says. "I don't have trouble with the moon orbiting the Earth or the Earth orbiting the sun, either. Actually when I was little it took me a while to get used to moving around in vehicles - I used to get horribly carsick, and I have thrown up on at least five separate trains - but it did not stay a problem for very long."