"-oh," she says, quietly, and then "whatever you'd like?"

So Kesa explains Pareto improvements and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency and suchlike.

DZ is an attentive pupil; she often needs things phrased simply, but she picks them up easily when they are, and she's good at coming up with examples of things.

The examples are sometimes of slightly different concepts which Kesa also explains!

Gosh. This is actually kind of fun.

Economics is great!

It is!

They don't actually have to stop; Deskyl can work on her paper just fine on her own. (She checks in on them once or twice anyway.)

Well, Kesa will need dinner, but the friendly purple brings her some.

DZ takes a break while she's eating to go and sit with Deskyl.

Enjoying yourself?

    Yeah. You were right about me having preferences.

Yeah, I know. Learn anything interesting?

She has! Lots! Here's what they need to find out from the reds about the district move idea, and here's what they'd do with the information, and it should go so much more smoothly this way.

Kesa is a slow eater.

Deskyl finishes and goes to meditate and practice forms; DZ works on some translations while she waits for Kesa.

Eventually Kesa has finished the last biscuit. "What else do you want to know?"

"Well, we've been assuming that our red contact was right that municipalizing would be bad for them, but I'm not sure..."

She eventually points out that she doesn't need to sleep and Kesa does.

"Are you going to want me back again?"

She nods. "Maybe not weekly, I can take care of some of this myself, but yes."

"Well, let me know." And she goes out.

And Deskyl gets back to work. This week's project is an improved air recycling system that takes advantage of some of the new materials they've developed.

One of the greens asks if hyperdrive ships have unusual air circulation needs compared to the moon shuttles they already have.

Scouting ships do; even with hyperdrives, scouting takes a while, so they need to be more self-sufficient. It has to do with how ships in hyperspace have to avoid mass shadows: she puts out a paper on that and how to find safe routes to make routine space travel faster.

This settles any concerns that she is being deliberately sluggish about the good stuff.

She's not; the main bottleneck on hyperdrives is that she's going to need to work with a team on them, and her Tapap isn't good enough yet. It's coming along at a good clip, though; if she pushed herself any harder with it it'd slow everything down, and this stuff is in fact necessary. The other bottleneck on scouts is going to be sensors, which need physics experiments; once they have scouts she'll want to try for repulsortech, but if that doesn't seem viable right away they should be able to put together some kind of colony ship anyway, it'll just be more complicated. And then the reds get their planet, and then they switch over to working on robotics.

Yaaaaaaay.

Yup! So: life support.

After another month and a half, she declares her Tapap good enough to be getting on with; there's still some rough spots vocabulary-wise, but immersion will smooth them out quickly enough.

First, though, she'd like to spend a few days outside this building.

What color would she like to dye her hair?

Green'll do.