I'm not angry with you, I'm just a little cooled off. If this state were likely to persist I wouldn't have gone out with you today at all.

I would enjoy taking you to theatre events and up the wall even if you expected to persistently be disinterested in sex. For what that's worth.

Well, Kib says, I might have gone to the play but I would have clarified that it wasn't a date.

Cuddles are nice.

I am very sorry, he says, for playing games and hurting you.

As long as you don't have any more in progress I will forgive you.

None at all.

Kiss? Kiss.

Kiss.

Goodnight, Kib.

Fëanáro can't think of anything offhand presuming Kib is a sensible person and wants nothing to do with songs that'd alter his short-term memory.

Kib is indeed too sensible to want anything to do with that.

Then it'd be easy to test his vocabulary and reading but hard to test them in a way that wouldn't make him better at the language, and they can't even use anyone else doing the same vocabulary and reading exercises as a control because people vary so much in language-learning ability and the only other human here is three weeks old.

Yeah, that was about as far as he got on the question too. Since there's nothing worth preserving about Kib's half-ignorance of the language... Well, since Fëanáro presumably only knows how to read Harthanic and the things that Kib is pretty sure he can reproduce flawlessly are the accent and fluid casual grammar maybe they should go have Harthanic conversations?

Fëanáro would love that.

So Kib goes down to his place and demonstrates an extremely limited vocabulary with nearly native ability to reassign the parts of speech of words, produce natural-sounding compounds, and deploy Harthanic's several varieties of syntactically meaningful reduplication.

Harthanic is such a cool language and Fëanáro is extremely excited about this.

"It's weird," Kib comments, "I think I'm getting most of my vocabulary from actual dream-induced memory, which is why it's so spotty and I can talk about dolphins and not chickens and stuff like that, but I think I'm getting most of the grammar and so on from remembering being somebody who had access to it rather than from remembering actually using or thinking about it. Might be some kind of procedural/factual distinction."

"Oooh! Are there other skills Aly had you might have seemingly-natural inclinations towards?"

"She was a servantmaker too so that's hopelessly confounded, I didn't notice a jump in how good I was at assembling chassis or programming or anything when the dreams got underway. And I've always spent a lot of time just reading. She cooked more than I've tended to, I guess?"

"I wouldn't expect that to be a thing where we could easily distinguish talent. Hmm."

"Yeah, inconveniently being the same person means we spent a lot of our time in the same ways."