"Yup. Help yourselves, they're free."

"We're probably going to get two once Kalatha stops being a baby. Because Shasali is very possessive of them and I want to hold one too."

Snort. "She has two hands."

"Yes but morally speaking I do not think her claim to a second baby is stronger than my claim to a first baby."

"Do you not get turns with Kalatha?"

"I do. She's stopped looking worried I will throw her across the room, even! But we'll both be happier with two. Springtime is rough under the best of circumstances and these really are not those."

"...why would you throw a baby across the room, and also it's autumn."

"We do not seem to have seasoned properly in this place and so our hormonal systems beg to differ and are probably just going to continue to be wrong about that forever. I might have thrown the baby because Shasali had touched her and Shasali's red.'

"...uh."

" - sorry, I don't mean 'it would be defensible', I mean 'it would be unsurprising'."

"To whom?"

"Amentans! Who would be baffled that I let her touch the baby in the first place. Our planet is deeply fucked up about this, in a way that is really hard to fix, and knowing it's not real doesn't really undo it at all."

"But even though you let her touch the baby she was worried you'd throw her?"

"What it feels like, thinking about touching something a red touched or realizing they touched something, is - like realizing that the hair you just brushed out of your eye was actually spiders and also your shirt is made of spiders and everything is made of spiders. Even if I was evidently trying to - be friendly - I might've still had the visceral reaction."

"Uh. Congratulations on not flinging Spiderbaby."

...giggle. "People who interact with reds enough get acclimated."

"Is it really just the hair that does it? She could pour henna on her head till it came out some other color."

"It's not the hair, the hair's just an indicator."

"What is it then?"

"Uh, the belief is that the world has an attribute called - pollution. Sewage is polluted; so are dead bodies; so is garbage; the origin of the belief is obviously in those things making you sick, but it is widely believed that pollution is bad separately from that, which is true in a sense because knowing they're polluted makes people miserable and people will go to extraordinary lengths to feel clean again and so on. And reds have worked with pollution so much that they are polluted, inherently."

"That's... pretty wacky, gotta tell you."

"It, uh, makes more sense when you can feel it, I'm sure."

"One of my co-prentices got a tarantula and petted it. I let it walk on my arm."

"Then maybe my analogy was poorly chosen."

"It did help that it was a pet and she'd told it not to bite me."