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."

"Maybe our world is higher tech than yours? Cellphones and computers would have been sci-fi stuff a hundred years ago."

"We call it enchantment and mirrors and crystal balls."

"Do yours work by magic? Those sound like things out of a fantasy story."

"- yes, of course they're magic... since it's real life... not a science fantasy story..."

"Ours aren't magic, they run on electricity. I don't think we have magic outside of peoples' heads."

"- so you're actually from a science fantasy world? Or, uh, Riley is from one, and you're from the differently strange world of inside Riley's head -"

"Yeah. Well, we just think of it as the world but it sounds like compared to your world it's science fantasy."

"We can't have technology like that in my world."

"Can't?"

"Nah, doesn't work. If you try to invent, like, precision instruments based on experimentally derived facts about the world, you eventually probably die and your neighbors'll be lucky if that's all."

"Oh. That sucks. At least it sounds like your magic makes up for a lot of it?"

"Yeah, things would be a lot worse if we didn't have magic."

"What's it like, living in that world?"

"I'm not sure how to answer that."

"What sorts of things do each day? What sorts of problem do you have?"

"I'm in university, so I have classes, and homework, and I go to skirmish games, and avoid various campus hazards..."

"I don't really know what university's like in our world either. But I think that sounds pretty similar to what we do at school? What sorts of hazard do you have to avoid?"