"Are you glad you came to work today?"

"Yes."

"Oh good." Hug.

Hug.

"I love you, Lintalai. Good night."

"Good night."

He goes to bed.

"I was kind of hoping to save - politics - for when she was older."

"Woulda been nice."

"When I was one I thought Anitam was the best thing imaginable."

"Did your opinion of Anitam get worse or your imagination get better?"

"I don't think a state like the one I thought I lived in when I was one could possibly exist. Serving real people just is hard and ugly and zero-sum a lot of the time. But I wish she could - she's too little -"

Nod. Sigh.

The next day Lintalai tries cherries and thinks they are great and eats a whole lot of them. She wants to know if she has to not come to work to get Afen to let her type in her alphabet.

No, it won't take him long to set up at all!

Cool. Here is the alphabet and how one writes in it.

He gets that set up for her and then drops her off at Aitim's.

She has to practice in the new alphabet for a bit before she can take good notes. She does that, sitting in her sunpatch.

Aitim makes phone calls and has meetings and talks with his secretary! Most things are indirectly about Orvara but not all of them. Someone else demands an opinion on the reds thing and he repeats that being short of them would be inconvenient if there were a riot or something that needed putting down. 

Notes notes notes.

"Isel can meet us for dinner today," he tells her when he's done with his meetings.

"Oh good."

"Did you have fun?"

"Yeah. I can kinda type plant words now."

"Well done!" Scoop.

And she has accumulated a few questions over the course of the day.