She scans the crowd for a few seconds, then immediately recognizes Klimati when she sees her. She smiles brightly and waves.

"Hi!" calls Klimati, waving her arm energetically back. "Welcome to Anitam!"

"Thank you! Glad to be here!" she calls back, rushing over to them. "I just have to go get my luggage, and then you can show me the glorious sights of your homeland, including its adorable babies."

She's gonna see things and cuddle babies and spend almost no time thinking about the fundamental injustices of the world. It's gonna be great.

"We would have brought Kaloa but Kantil was home from work," says Klimati, standing up to head for baggage claim. "This is Lima -"

"Hi," says Lima. "Do you go by Ves or Zada in person?"

"Hi, Lima! Zada is good, my aunt just has this thing about staying anonymous online."

"That's smart," says Lima.

"I've never had anyone be too weird about it," says Klimati. "Even if I'd made up a name Isama's pretty distinctive by description."

"Yeah. I wouldn't worry about it too much, really, but Kairda's really nervous about people connecting her fic to her real identity, and now that she has any sales I figure I should try not to do anything that would make it easier for her to pick up a bunch of weird stalker fans. She would probably keel over dead or something if she got anything like that weird rpf fandom that shows up to bug you sometimes."

"Oh man, that stuff," laughs Klimati. "It's so weird! I haven't even read any and it's just so weird. I have dinner with those people and..." She shakes her head.

Zada's bag turns up. "Let's get home and drop that off," Lima says.

"Yeah! Maybe some people don't have enough drama in their own lives and have to make it up in other people's? I dunno." She grabs her bag and follows. "You have dinner with them on, like, a regular basis?"

"Yeah, I don't go to every family dinner, maybe half? Sometimes I do stuff with my side of the family then, or if Isama and Kantil aren't going and I'd feel weird."

"Yeah, that totally makes sense," nods Zada. She supposes that if she had regular access to Afen Kisan-fucking-tami then she would probably also not feel the need to make use of it literally one hundred percent of the time. Besides, it would probably seem like less of a big deal if she were the coolest person in the world. "How old is Kaloa exactly? I should be better about checking up on people, I just keep being intermittently terrible about it - "

"Kaloa's one! And if you come to one of the dinners she's got a cousin in-cohort. So does Hala, she and Ana are three now."

"Aww! That's so good. One-year-olds are amazing, they're so small but they know things."

"Kaloa knows all kinds of things! She will count all the way up to three hundred if you let her and at three hundred she scrunched up her nose and said that we should probably look up the rest if we wanted to know them."

"So good! Does she know anything about space yet? I was absolutely obsessed with stars when I was tiny - you probably remember that, come to think of it - "

"I do," grins Klimati. The train pulls up; she and Zada can sit together but Lima winds up halfway down the car. "Stars and dragons. Kaloa likes memorizing the names of chemicals, she likes stars fine but they're not her favorite."

"Gosh, a baby chemist. Is it just names, or does she like learning about chemical reactions, too? Chemistry is honestly really neat, I'm glad we have a baby scientist working hard on that front. Seems like the sort of thing the other babies might tend to neglect."

Klimati giggles. "She has a few reactions memorized - I don't think she knows what's happening, not that I do either, just that this and that make the other thing."

"Oooh, the physics underlying it is so cool, though! Though admittedly pretty heavy for a one-year-old. I don't think I understood what was happening with electron shells and stuff until I was at least two. Oh, I should look up more chemical names in Anitami - I try to read technical stuff in different languages so I pick up all the vocabulary evenly, but I'm not sure I've read enough in Anitami about chemistry in particular..."

"I bet Kaloa would like you to read it aloud."

"Huh! Maybe I will, then."

Klimati giggles.

"We change lines here," Lima calls across the car as they slide to a stop, and they head to another platform to do that.

Zada follows them home, continuing to make small talk about the adorable baby chemist in their lives.

And when they get to Klimati's house an adorable baby chemist flings herself at Klimati and is scooped up!

"Kaloa, this is my friend Zada."

"Zada," repeats Kaloa.

"She can pronounce it because of her grandfather, she didn't have to practice so much," says Klimati.

What an adorable baby chemist!

"Aww! That's so cool! I can speak Anitami because Klimati taught it to me when I was really small."

"Afen wants all his grandkids to know at least five," says Klimati. "It's sticking better with some than others - Hala and Kaloa are supposed to be working on Voan and Tapap and Oahkar and Evaleen. Hala's solid on the ones they support in her school and she can more or less watch TV in Voan and Evaleen, it's hard to tell this early how well everything'll stick for Kaloa."

"I know most of those! Not anywhere near fluent in Oahkar - Oahkar's so different from place to place that it didn't seem like one of the best choices if my goal was to maximize the number of people I could talk to, but I think my Tapap is pretty decent? It's not as strong as my Anitami, but I think it's pretty good. And I can totally blabber at people in Voan if anyone wants that while I'm here. How many does Afen know?"

"Oh, I have no idea, he just sort of - eats them - at least thirty -"

"All of them," says Kaloa confidently.

"That is so cool."

It does mean that she's gonna have to find some different axes on which to surpass Afen Kisan-fucking-tami when she gets around to doing that, but hey, nothing worth making your life's work is easy.

"How many languages are you gonna learn, Kaloa?"

"All of them," says Kaloa.

"Good for you! I'm a native Voan speaker and I'm pretty much fluent in Tapap and Evaleen. If you wanna try talking in any of those while I'm here, I'd be really happy to help you practice. I heard you like chemistry, too, that's awesome."

"I like chemistry," Kaloa says in Voan.

She switches over to Voan. "Awesome! I like chemistry, too. My favorite things are physics and astronomy, but understanding chemistry is really important sometimes, too."

"Which one is physics," whispers Kaloa.

"Physics is the one that tells you how things move and exert force on each other!" She gives the equivalent word in Anitami. "It's really important when you're working with spaceships."

"Spaceships!" says Kaloa, and she squirms from Klimati's arms and runs off and comes back with a toy spaceship.

"Oh, cool!" She admires Kaloa's toy spaceship. "This one is really nice! Spaceships are my favorite things ever."

"Once Hala went to the moon without me," pouts Kaloa.

"Aww, I'm sorry! I'm sure you'll get to go to the moon, too. I spend lots of time on the Voan one."

"We will go this winter," says Kaloa.

Klimati can't follow much of this conversation; she scoops up Kaloa again and plops onto a couch.

 She plops onto the couch beside them. "Neat! I'm gonna be back up in space before then, I'm on vacation right now."

"What do you do in space?" Kaloa wants to know.

"I fix spaceships! You have to be really sure that spaceships are in top-notch condition before you send them anywhere. They're not like cars or planes, you can't really make emergency landings in space. I'm fundamentally the same as any other kind of mechanic, though, just with more expensive toys and much lower margins for error."

Kaloa giggles.

"I recognize 'spaceship'," says Klimati.

"It's such a good word!" says Zada, in Anitami.

Klimati giggles. "I should really have picked up more Voan, considering, but somehow I did not."

"It's a lot harder if you're older! Plus it's hard to pick up new things from speech if you don't already know a sizable chunk of the vocabulary. Way easier to isolate and remember new vocab if you're missing one word in a sentence than if you're missing all but one."

"I guess that makes sense. But like you used to talk to me in Voan, when you were yea big," she jostles Kaloa, "and I had subtitles..."

"Man, Kairda watches stuff with subtitles all the time, and she's never picked up anything but Voan either. Little kids and Afen Kisantami have language-processing superpowers. Everyone else has to go through, like, actual language-learning regimens. Which you could still do, if you want to learn Voan, but you should note that your sample of how many languages the average person speaks has been pretty hopelessly skewed."

"Isama only knows Anitami, she hires people for everything else," says Klimati. "So I guess there's that."

"Yeah. Just depends what you're trying to do." She smiles reassuringly. 

"I dunno, I have all this time, and people have gameified language learning, supposedly. My brother tried to sell me on Converse but I didn't like it."

"Oh! Well if you want to learn Voan, then I'm sure we can find a method that works." She pulls out her everything and searches for stuff. "Lotsa flashcard things... there are games, but most of the ones I've tried kind of suck as games. Maybe I could make a game, drawing on ones I already know you like. Be a lot of effort for a side project, but if it's also a programming exercise for me then I don't think I'm super against it. I can't do art, though, how do you feel about those super ancient games with like no graphics....?"

"They're harder to focus on and take actions with - text is less - prompty."

"Makes sense. We''l figure that out, then. I dunno any arty people off the top of my head who I can hit up for random projects, but maybe Kairda knows someone." She spends a minute messaging her aunt to think about the subject. "I can totally whip something up, but I will probably need some food before I do."

"Oh yeah, what do you want? I think we still have some potato stew but Lima can make basically anything."

"I'm good with basically anything."

She very seriously asks Kaloa what she recommends.

"Cheese bread," says Kaloa.

"She always wants cheese bread," says Klimati. "My mom thinks she needs more protein -"

"Cheese bread," Kaloa says again.

"We can have cheese bread," says Zada. "I think I'll have cheese bread and also whatever Klimati recommends, I want to be able to draw on a lot of experience when people inevitably ask me how the food was." 

"Maybe chicken salad," says Klimati. "Oh and nut cookies, those nice nut cookies with the ginger."

"All right, I'll put in the grocery order and get going on those," says Lima.

She is happy to converse and wait for food and hang out with her friend and her friend's tiny niece.

"Cheese bread is better than chicken salad," says Kaloa.

"Is that so?" asks Klimati. "Why's that?"

"It tastes better."

"But I like chicken salad more."

"But cheese bread is better."

"I'm sure they both have important merits as food items."

"Okay but cheese bread is better," says Kaloa.

"Mm. I think I'll have to examine the evidence."

Zada dutifully reserves judgement until the both cheese bread and the chicken salad are served.

Lima collects the grocery delivery at the door and tips the delivery purple and has cheese bread out eight minutes later, chicken salad fifteen.