"None of us are Mormon."

"Yeah." Sigh.

"Girls here do everything guys do, except that there are more men doing jobs you have to be strong for, and they can't do anything dangerous if they have a baby, and if they're having sex that might lead to a baby they can't do anything dangerous except piloting."

"Piloting?"

"So you know how I told you the aliens are fighting a war with us?"

"You mentioned they came in and killed people and wrecked stuff, I don't think you said war."

"Well, we don't know what they think they're trying to do, but 'war' is good enough, given the number of people they've killed. --Anyway, pilots are how we fight back."

"How do you have, like, planes?"

"The aliens aren't from our world. They're from a parallel world we call the dream world because it's-- dream-logic-y, the same way the forklifts and the waffle bars and the Something are. Using a special machine called the anima, we can transport ourselves from our world to theirs and travel through it safely."

"How do you... build special machines, though?"

A brief flash across his face--

"Asher, the former leader of Eros, reverse engineered the anima from drones we captured."

"Wow."

"The dream world is weird. Places in the dream world correspond to places in our world but they're-- different. Space is warped. Sometimes you ride ten floors in an elevator and end up at the place you started. Sometimes things are, for no readily apparent reason, castles or theme park rides or pizza restaurants. There are people but they're all like NPCs in a video game-- they have three or four or five lines, but they don't respond to new situations. It's also shaped by the people who are in it. Some people get stunningly beautiful landscapes with mountains and glaciers, even in the middle of Cleveland. Some people get weirdly still and eerie dreamscapes. Some people get mazes that they can't escape from. One person got into theirs, screamed, and then refused to ever get in an anima again."

"Did... they say what they saw?"

"Nothing except that it was horrible."

"Well... the glaciers one sounds nice!"

"Yep! The aliens themselves are awful though. They look like people you knew from the past-- your elementary school math teacher, your parents, your old crew leader. But when you look at them you know it's not them. And they have this-- aura of unthinkable horror. They're just-- wrong. And when you're around one it feels like you're moving through water, all your movements are slow, no matter how panicked you are and how much you want to speed it up."

"Yeah, that's a dream thing."

"The pilot goes into the dream world. To protect themselves, they form a giant robot we also call an anima. The anima is formed out of your relationships with people you love. The chassis of the robot comes from a person we call the anchor, who also acts as mission control. But you can turn other relationships into-- guns, or sensors, or fists, or whatever you like." 

"That doesn't make any sense," she points out.

"Dream logic?"

"But a relationship isn't stuff, you can't make it into a robot!"

"It's more-- your feelings that you're making into a robot. And it's the dream world, lots of things are physical there that aren't physical here."

"I guess," she says grudgingly. Catherine switches boobs.