"Yeah, let's continue to make a point of not leaving the bar unoccupied."

"Yep. 

I should probably start talking to my alt before he gets impatient."

"Well, you can hang out with me until one of them comes down and even if it's Findekáno your alt will be watching."

"Yeah. I was going to avoid Findekáno but I guess that's not really going to help very much."

"Not really, no."

He scowls at the transcripts. "He is trying to nudge him into ending scarcity by making him jealous, isn't he."

"If all you have is a hammer..."

"Yeah."

"Is that likely to be as transparent to your alt as to you?"

"Definitely, but he might let him get away with it anyway - he hasn't overwritten him, he must get something out of having him in exactly the state he's currently in - it is possible my alt would be worse than me at picking up that Findekáno's faking something to be jealous over, if my alt is a jealous person and wouldn't have had recent chances to be exposed to what Findekáno-actually-wanting-someone looks like..."

"It did seem a little weird - hundred percent fake?"

"Latched onto you slightly, think that's real. But - pretty much, yeah. Why?"

"Wanted to know how weirded out to be."

"I think he's using the heuristic 'when people do things that I want Maitimo to do, be annoyingly-to-Maitimo excited by this and by them', not 'when I read a book prologue written by an adoring and overly zealous biographer, develop a crush'".

"Good. Sort of. I should like write Thea a letter or something at some point, I had no idea she'd done this book..."

"Where's she now?"

"Not sure what she'd have turned into..." He checks, gets a butterfly wing. "Fairyland."

"She seems at least enamored for the right reasons."

"There used to be this website where people could rate their professors and one of the things you could rate them on was how hot they were. People wrote very silly things on there."

"Really? No hope for accurate appraisals of your hotness?"

"Silly, I didn't comment on inaccuracy. I got lots of what I assume were sincere appraisals of my hotness."

"It's weird to think that was only a dozen Years ago."

"It feels like a long time to me."

"They were an eventful dozen Years. 

I wish you'd lived longer, I bet your world'd be correspondingly nicer."

"Maybe. If I'd thought of something else cool."