"Failed it miserably! All it could say was, 'I'm a muffin'! It did not react when I warned it I was going to bite it. It did not complain when I did so."

"That's good," says Ike. "I would hate to think about all food being smart enough to complain when you try to eat it."

"Most food is not. I mean, nothing in actual food form is smart, but I talked to a goat and she was capable of telling me that she didn't want to be eaten, so I don't eat anything that used to be potentially brighter than a chicken. Chickens are really stupid, though."

"I am glad my visions of screaming cupcakes are not supported by reality."

"At one time I thought I had met a very clever rock but it turned out to be a disguised evil deity."

"...I think I just had another 'floating in space holding hands' moment," giggles Ike.

"Yeah. The disguised evil deity introduced itself to me as Iggy," Cam adds, winking.

"Pfffffffffff," says Ike.

"And then it tried to convince me not to do so much Belling because I was cramping its style and I didn't bite and then it tried to kill me and Jellybean and Tilly saved my life, so that was exciting."

"It sounds it!" says Ike. "I am glad the evil rock did not kill you."

"Yeah, me too. It does continue to exist, I'm not sure yet what to do about it, although the list of possibilities recently expanded to 'hire the assassin from Materia who terrifies both her local Bell and Glass'."

"...I don't think I would like to hire an assassin that terrified multiple Bells!" says Ike. "But I guess an evil deity would be a good reason to do it."

"Yeah, ordinarily I wouldn't wanna interact with her, I have had enough unfortunate experiences with Materia, but Iggy's kind of a problem. Syntropy's not hooked up to Downside, there's something in the way, and I bet Iggy's involved."

"I cannot even imagine trying to solve this problem," Ike says after a moment. "At home you don't solve evil gods, you avoid them as much as possible. Or at least I don't. I guess somebody probably does, or we'd have evil gods popping up like mushrooms."

"Juliet solved an evil god," says Cam. "I think it was in her job description even apart from being a Bell."

Ike nods.

"Things," he says, with great authority, and then grins. "Actually not very many things. I tried to build a robot puppy once but I did not succeed. That's what trying again is for, though! The latest thing I'm working on is stairs. Because we have a Roomba, and they're really only good for relatively unobstructed flat surfaces, and stairs get dirty too, so I'm trying to build a robot that can climb up and down stairs, and then I'll figure out how to make it also vacuum them."

"A stair-climbing Roomba. That's adorable. It's probably cheating on the robot puppy thing if you just make something that bends in all the right places and someone gets it to come when called by magic, isn't it."

"That would be very cheating!" he says. "Magic usually is. Which is all right for some things, but I want to build a robot puppy, not just get one from somewhere else."

"Yeah, that's fair, it'd be like wishing a crossword puzzle filled in. There is already something which does the job of being a puppy without having to be built and it is called a puppy."

"Yes. They are very cute," he says. "That is why I want to build a robot one. I would be much better at taking care of it than I would be with an actual dog, and it would still be cute and fluffy and reasonably huggable."

"I've never had a pet. Most of us don't. Glass has a cat, but on her world cats are people and also magically useful."

"I have not had any pets either. But someday I will have a cute fluffy robot friend."

"I wish you the best of luck. The fur exterior won't present insoluble problems with cooling the processors or anything?"