"It works okay for her. And my dad."

"My little brother is probably gonna go the same route as my father, and my little sister is too small to really have a track."

"She one or two?"

"Two, he's four."

"Three's pretty good."

"They're actually half-siblings, my mother died when I was less than two and my father remarried."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"Thank you. It's been a while, and I don't live with my father anymore. We've had our—differences." He shrugs. "But I still see my siblings every now and then."

"I don't make enough money to live alone anywhere that doesn't price in the assumption that all the grey residents know self-defense so it doesn't matter if the area's high crime."

"My father made us get self-defense training so that wouldn't have been a problem but I do actually manage to get enough money to not have to deal with that."

"Lucky you. I got special tutoring in how to fall safely that didn't include the rest of the martial art."

"Why specifically how to fall safely? The balance issues?"

"Yeah. If you ever see me go over and do a cool roll that's not me being randomly dramatic that's me tripping and recovering."

He covers his mouth with a hand to hide a smile. "I don't endorse wanting to witness that someday."

"Well, it happens a lot, so you may be in luck."

He purses his lips but is still smiling when he lowers his hand. "So, should we order? What would you recommend?"

"The onion beef ones are good but so are the cheese ones."

"Hmm I think I'm gonna go with cheese."

"I'm gonna try the spicy chicken, I haven't had those before."

They soon receive baskets of dumplings!

Dumplings!

"So why'd you decide to start the website?"

"Uh, I had a good math teacher, when I was two and went to an intercaste school, and at first I tried to get him to stop, er, relating everything to grey interests, but then I got worried about my career prospects and went back when I dropped out later, and he helped me figure out what had already been done and which sport would be good to cover and so on."

Nod. "Did you consider any other options than that?"

"Yeah. I got pushed into teaching swim lessons, which I tried - I could do it if the alternative was going on social services but the blog is better. For a while I went along with an attempt to push me into every obscure non-locomoting sport - I'm tolerable at archery - but I wasn't good enough to compete professionally at any of them. Could have tried to skip all the legwork usual towards a detective sort of position, possibly via nepotism, I followed my dad to work a few times - culture was miserable, I would have hated everyone there except him, I have that problem in a lot of possible grey fields. Could have made book traditionally but there's a lot of competition for that and it's not interesting or creative in the same way."

"What was the culture like?"

"Uh - it's not trivial to describe in a way that doesn't sound even more judgmental than I mean to be. You ever read about how oranges get 'compassion burnout' from having to put all their cases through bureaucracy and having lots of them every day? The cops didn't bother having anything to burn out in the first place."