In the bottom bunk of a bunk bed, there sleeps a grey. (In the top bunk of same there also sleeps a grey but the bottom one is more immediately relevant.)
"That you're an alien prince from another dimension who teleported into my lap while aiming to be somewhere else to rescue your friend but I convinced you to stay for the time being."
"That's the idea. I might put in a picture of you if you don't mind."
"Like the scenery channel, those are pictures of scenery. I can take one of you." She switches to her everything's photo app, holds it up so it'd take a selfie of the two of them. "Like - a mirror but I can make it remember what it was reflecting at a specific moment."
"I don't know all the details. The first version had materials that reacted to light that you exposed to a scene for a short time, but this is digital, it's got a camera with a little lens... and then it stores the picture as encoded data about how to arrange millions of tiny blocks of single colors like a grid mosaic."
Her dad has a slightly more official channel to use. He pastes her email and picture into it, blinking at Fëanáro pensively over his morning coffee.
Fëanáro is going to keep right on holding on to not-Bella. And asking about coffee and coffee machines and what cops do exactly.
"Coffee has a chemical in it that helps people wake up in the morning. The machine heats up water and passes it through ground up coffee beans to brew it and it knows what he likes in his so when he uses it it adds those things. Police officers take complaints about people breaking the law, and then go stop them."
"I guess if you had six hundred million people and some were silly that would be a good thing to have."
"Yup. People who are just silly but not breaking the law get mental health nuisance instead, those are oranges."
"If someone is standing in the entrance to a store, blocking everybody's way and trying to tell them that raccoon-shaped aliens are eating everyone's shoes, this is not illegal but it is very annoying and disruptive. So somebody comes along and gets them out of the way and tries to figure out why they were doing that and if they have family they should be sent home to. If someone is instead breaking the store window and threatening the customers and stealing the stock, that is not just annoying but scary and damaging, and it is illegal. They're more likely to be dangerous so they need to be removed by people who know how to handle dangerous people, and they get in trouble, because people are less likely to do those things if they get in trouble, while someone who stands in a doorway talking about raccoon-shaped aliens is probably not going to stop doing it just to avoid getting in trouble because that's really weird and they aren't thinking straight."
"It was a good explanation and it was a Bella sort of good explanation." Cling.
Pelape's mother comes into the living area at this point. "- awwwwwwwwww -"