"I keep my diary on my computer and it's password protected but he keeps messing with my stuff."

"What do you do about that, then?"

"I'm trying to convince our parents to get a lock for my door. And I tell him to stop and he usually does for a few days until he forgets or something."

"If he's forgetting, you could put up a sign."

"That's a good idea."

"A sign didn't help me very much, though."

"Oh?"

"I had a sign on my room saying that people weren't invited in and sometimes people came in anyway."

"Why? Sometimes Mama comes into my room when I'm not there but that's different than when Erik does it."

"Because they wanted to borrow my stuff, or try to crack my diary cipher, or leave frogs in my bed, or hide from each other."

"...I think you grew up with bad people."

"I think they were pretty ordinary."

"How many co-prentices did you have? I only have two siblings."

"There were usually a total of six of us. Sometimes five for a while if the oldest one left and our teacher took a while to replace them. Five right now, I don't think he's replaced me yet."

"That's a bunch, but if he's not treating them like they're really his kids I guess it's not so much."

"And his wife had three or four. It was a big house. Not a lot of workshop space, though, we did most of our work on shines because you don't need a lot of room or equipment to make and program them compared to golems or automata."

"What did his wife do?"

"Makes shoes."

"That seems like it would take up space."

"There was workshop space, just not enough for seven people to all make large golems."

"Oh. I don't know how big golems are."

"You can make little ones, but you have to write all their programming on their surface area, so they can't be complicated if they're little, unless you make them out of paper, which is a good way for your golem to last about a week."

"So you program everything, not just shines?"

"No, it's just shines, automata, and golems. Pets and puppets don't get programmed."

"Pets are a kind of thing like golems and shines?"