Giggly hug!

"You have actually held up surprisingly well for as long as it sounds like you were in solitary."

"I guess I bounce back fast."

"That's good, I'm not sure what I would have done if you were a gibbering wreck. Med school was very light on the psychiatrics."

He giggles. "Lucky you! I can still talk and stuff!"

"And express preferences and speculate on bacon plants, it's great."

"I have preferences! Bacon plants are weird and deserve speculation!"

"Also you have not voiced the opinion that I'm a hallucination, that's always cheering."

"I think if I hallucinated I would hallucinate different things."

"Oh?"

"Like... I don't think I'd hallucinate the existence of computers? Because where would I be getting that idea to hallucinate it?"

"Fair enough."

"I'm satisfied with my logic!"

"Good. Although if you did independently invent computers I'd be impressed!"

He laughs. "I don't think I could independently invent computers. Although now I wish I had."

"They were in fact invented! There's a progression! With enough alchemy and time you might have done it eventually."

"I think I prefer the scenario where I get to meet you first."

"Yeah, you'd have had to be alone for a really long time first and then you'd be all gibbery and I'd have a hard time communicating my impressedness over the inventions."

Snort.

"So what do you normally like to do with your time when you're not designing houses and deciphering alchemy texts?"

"Uh, mostly I decipher alchemy texts. And test alchemy diagrams. And fuck around with magic ink. I reinvented the process for refining magic ink with only moderate help from the pictures in the books, you can be impressed with me for that if you want."

"Consider me duly impressed. But I meant like when you can do more things than that. What did you use to do?"

"Get into kinds of trouble that aren't available when there's only two people on a planet. Read a lot. Bother the royal family. I've vaguely wanted to go find an athra and try to get favours out of them for a while, but it's hard to just do that and my parents made me promise not to go on a year-long expedition for it until I reach majority because year-long expeditions in search of favourable athrai sometimes end in disappearing for two hundred years or getting turned into a talking songbird instead of having any useful favours granted and they didn't want their teenage son impulsively going off to get turned into a talking songbird."

"...it's better than being a non-talking songbird."

"That happens too."