"Now I'm worried I turned you off us!"

"You look better-off than anyone else I've passed in the last ten days and you're sharing your food, it'll take a lot to turn me off you. What is up with Eros?" 

"We can fight the aliens." She eats a bite of her food. "If you've been walking you might have noticed that there aren't any drones around here, and we didn't set anyone to watch for them."

"I had noticed that." He'd thought — he isn't sure what he'd thought. That he'd been lucky enough not to see them. "How?" 

"We reverse-engineered the drones so that instead of the aliens crossing into our world we're crossing into their world." She eats. "Places in their world correspond to places in our world, and if you clear out the aliens in the area they can't send any drones to that area."

He does not need reminders to keep eating, but if he did need them, he would have needed one then. 

"Holy fuck." 

"I know, right? --The reason people think we're a sex cult is that when a pilot's in the dream world they make a giant robot out of love, and the robot works better if you've had sex with people you're in love with."

"...that sounds like a weird comic book premise but I followed a wandering waffle bar for a day on my way here so why not, I guess." 

"People are like 'ha ha, you're from Eros, you're slutty' and I'm like 'uh, I'm Catholic? Like half the people in Eros?' and they're like 'give us a blowjob.'" She stabs her wild greens. "The name doesn't help."

"I bet it doesn't. How big is Eros?" 

"Few hundred people."

"Wow." 

"We mostly grow our own food these days, so a big population is helpful."

"I bet." That'll be a change — if they keep him, he doesn't want to get too comfortable in the assumption that they'll keep him. 

"There's a whole speech I'm supposed to give you but most of it's obvious or dumb. Don't attack people or fuck with their stuff, don't shirk work, don't try to overthrow Lev."

"I will not attack people or fuck with their stuff, shirk work, or try to overthrow Lev," he agrees. 

"Are you Catholic?"

"I'm not, my family was Jewish and I'm — something, probably, but Jesus is not involved." 

"Oh. Catholicism is true, you know. God performed a miracle and now we have the pope."

"And Orion protects you from the Something in winter when the nights are long and it's bad luck to touch oleander, so what?" 

"Okay, but the previous pope miraculously didn't succumb to the bliss until he gave permission for a priest to ordain a nine-year-old a bishop, and then that nine-year-old survived until today. That's a solid miracle right there."

"And once we figured out to ask Orion for help the Something didn't get any of us all winter long any winter after that. You have your miracles and I have mine." 

"I guess." Loki, seeing that conversion is not going to work super well today, continues to eat in silence.

The food is really, really good. 

They've going to scavenge for two more days, then it's three days to canoe back.