"...Why are you looking at me like that?"

"...I think we might have different ideas about what 'perfect' means and whether or not it's a good thing."

"If it fails to be a good thing then it fails to be perfect pretty straightforwardly on that basis, I think."

"I think I'd rather live in an imperfect world than one where there are gods deciding what perfect means and changing the world to fit."

"Well. And you do."

"Yeah. I just - I don't trust 'perfect'," he says. "I'm not sure there's really such a thing. Not the way some people mean it. To me, 'nothing's perfect' is kind of... comforting. It means there's room. I don't know, maybe that doesn't make sense."

"Not a whole lot, no."

"I could try to explain, but it would probably be depressing."

"Maybe. I won't know unless you do explain it."

"...I don't think I could live in a perfect world," he says. "I don't just mean I wouldn't like it there, I mean - I'm not Aelare. I don't have a mythological exception to all the rules. And I don't think anyone else's perfect world would have a place in it for someone like me. In my father's perfect world, I wouldn't exist at all. He'd have a son who was just like him."

"I've been using 'perfect' to mean 'actually not having anything wrong with it', not 'suiting one particular person and anybody sufficiently similar to them really well'. I'm not sure whether, if the world had been made perfect by that definition a hundred years ago, you'd have been born - it's entirely possible that your father wouldn't have been and that would sew you up too; I probably wouldn't have been because my parents met the way they did; etcetera - but if someone tried to make the world perfect today, and that squeezed you out of it altogether, they'd be doing it wrong."

"Well, that's comforting. But I'm still not sure a world with nothing wrong with it is possible. Who decides what's wrong? People tend to disagree on that."

"My first instinct is that those people don't have to live near each other," shrugs Aya. "But if I were, in fact, a goddess - and didn't get a much improved set of instincts to go with it, anyway - then I wouldn't be going with my first instinct, I'd think about it more."

"Then I guess I wouldn't mind if you were a goddess."

"I'm glad this purely hypothetical tension has been resolved."

He laughs.

Oh, look! Piper has appeared in the doorway at last!

"Hello, Piper," says Aya, getting up to see if the instrument has a reply.

H E L L O

"I'm Aya, by the way. Ayabel. I don't think I said."

"I cleared a space that should work for letting us see your keys without bumping into you constantly. Just how badly do you see?"

V E R Y B A D L Y (pause) B U T I C A N H E A R Y O U J U S T F I N E (pause) I S I T N E A R Y O U

"Okay. I'll sit down, you'll want to go just to my right."