"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."

"Yeah I can see that."

"They're not all terrible, some of them are nice at least some of the time to victims or sympathetic perps, but they're handling it like - they go in and do things because that's what cops do - not because there's any underlying reason for why cops do those things."

He nods. "I never interacted much with them, when I was younger and my father worked in law enforcement but, yeah, that fits."

"It's probably different department to department and precinct to precinct, honestly, but finding one that would work for me would be really difficult and one doesn't typically get full control over assignments like that."

Nod. "And the underlying—thing that permits this sort of culture to exist and develop in the first place is a bit more widespread."

"Yeah. The year I was three school was horrible."

"People pick on you 'cause of the balance or something more—general? Or, well, both."

"The first year of school my mom was my class's primary teacher. I stuck close to her and got other kids in trouble pretty casually if they bothered me. My mom's school only has one-year-olds, so after that I went to an intercaste school, which only covered through age two. Then I couldn't get into any plausible specialty schools because they all have fitness tests or military service requirements, and I mainstreamed grey and - I mean, the balance thing was typical as a target, and I got tripped and knocked over more than I got anything else in particular, but I didn't get as much crap as the wheelchair sports teams. I think it was an intersection of not having anything visibly wrong with me as an excuse and the lack of culture fit. I marked time till I could drop out and then self-taught from there, my parents worried about my being caste-nonconforming and think it'll bite me later but I just couldn't stick it out another year ahead in all the academics and pathetic in all the gym."

"I'm sorry," he sighs. "I didn't really have anything people picked on me for, per se, but I used to try to stand up for the kids who were picked on and we often got slotted together. I used to fight back something fierce, though."

"I got that advice once. Tried it. I needed fifteen stitches afterwards."

"...yeowch."

"Yeah."