"A couple of hours."

Solemn nod.

Pre-emptive sympathy cuddles.

Yay! Cuddles: so good.

"So we can probably find a little of the Ancients' writing online, and Mama works at a university that has an archaeology department."

"Awesome. The records aren't restricted access or anything?"

"If you wanted to take the things with writing on them out of the building or anything that would require a lot of permissions and I can't promise you'll get to see everything right away but no one should mind if a genetics professor wants to show her daughter's 'it's complicated' some stuff."

"...her daughter's what?"

"...It's complicated? I mean, it is."

"It is, it just didn't seem like a natural noun."

"I'm guessing you don't have Facebook in your world."

"No? What's that?"

"It's an online...do you have the internet in your world."

"No, what's that?"

"Where do I start? Do you have computers in your world?"

"Yeah? They're pretty new though."

"Okay, well, when they get a lot better people figure out how to network them and you can communicate between computers and then there are these things called websites where people construct things to be accessed by any computer and Facebook is a one of those for social networking and you make a profile for yourself and you can connect it to other peoples' profiles and specify relationships and one of the options is 'it's complicated' so 'they're my it's complicated on Facebook' became a way of saying 'our relationship is complicated' and what I said is sort of a shortening of that."

"...Okay, I think I followed that."

"Hooray, I'm getting better at explaining things."

"It sounds cool, too."

"It is so useful you have no idea."

"What else does it do?"

The internet: Does all of the things! Checking out library books and registering for things and applying for jobs and reading things and grocery shopping and Edie will be going on like this for some time most likely.

Edie's lovely.

Edie is aware that Annie thinks so, but is she meaningfully informative, is the question.