...Bella pats the back of her hand a little awkwardly.

After a bit:

"Should we go see if you can talk to Riley now?"

"I'm not sure what I'd say. Maybe first I should see if I can talk across the door - I don't want to, er, go in."

"Why not?"

"It seems like it might be a bad idea for a human to be in another human's mind."

"Oh- yes, that makes sense."

"So who in there should I talk to?"

"Well, if you can't just talk to Riley, I think Joy and Fear would definitely like to know about this and Anger and Disgust probably would too?"

"- at a guess Joy's the pleasantest conversationalist?"

"I guess she is. Recently, anyway."

"Recently?"

"She used to be kind of mean to me."

"...in... a... happy way?"

"Not really. She's happy about a lot of things but I think she used to really not like me."

"That sucks, I'm sorry."

"Thanks.

We've gotten on a lot better since we got lost together, 'though. She's been helping me with getting back stuff Riley lost in the move and we've started reading tragic romance books together."

"- where do you get tragic romance books? Do you just read them through Riley - how do you get Riley to read them -"

Sadness smiles

"We do read them through Riley. Joy put together the idea to try reading tragic romances in the first place, but now there's a personality island for it."

"How do you put together ideas for things like that? How many personality islands are there?"

"One of Riley's friends talked about how much she enjoyed a tragic romance novel. So on the next school day Joy called up that memory and something to do with the school library- maybe just the knowledge that it exists- and sent them to Friendship Island to be associated into an idea to look for that book in the library. Then come lunchtime Joy plugged that idea into the implementation socket.

Riley has nine personality islands now- Family, Friendship, Goofball, Honesty, Hockey, Tech, Tragic Romance, Fashion, and Boy Band."

"That's such a - peculiar collection of things - what's hockey - what do you mean by tech -"

"Hockey's a sport Riley plays. There's an ice rink with a goal at either end, you try to hit a rubber disk into your team's goal and keep it out of the other team's goal. Tech Island is about trying to know all about all the different phones and computers and so on people can buy and having opinions about which ones are best for which things."

"- phones and computers? Really?"

"Yes? Some phones have better cameras than others, some have the operating system code available to the public so people are more likely to be able to fix stuff that goes wrong with it, that sort of thing."

"The translation effect is making it sound like you have - science fantasy stuff."