"We've got spaceships that can take us to the moon and back, but they don't flap their wings, that's true."

"Uh-huh!"

"Do you got a question for me? Or I can try to think of stuff to tell?"

"Do you have another parent? Amentans always have two biological parents."

"Shoggoths can make new shoggoths just through budding on their own. Sometimes two or more will do a half-budding thing and make a baby together. Mom married my dad, who's a human, and she managed to splice in some of his genes but not a lot of them, so I'm mostly like her. We can also trade genes with other shoggoths, but that's hard and you're only supposed to do it when you're an adult and really understand what you're doing."

"That's really interesting! Where's your dad now?"

"...He died when I was really small."

"I'm so sorry to hear that."

"Yeah. There was an accident."

"Do you have any other questions?" She doesn't really like thinking this much about sad things, even if mom's now moving to hug her.

"What sorts of things do humans trade with Deep Ones?"

"Uh..."

She has to ask mom for that, and: "We think the Deep Ones trade fish a lot? Since they can fish better than humans and also really deep? And mom thinks they get stuff from humans that's hard to manufacture underwater or when your fingers are webbed."

"That makes sense. Most humans don't trade with them?"

"No. There aren't a ton of Deep Ones and they're paranoid about humans, so they mostly trade with isolated coastal villages they've known for decades and trust."

"Huh. Are we higher-tech than humans are?"

"Yeah. Humans have trucks and trains and cameras you gotta hold real still for and black-and-white movies, but they don't have pocket everythings or space shuttles yet, though the way there's old Elder Things technology some places messes stuff up because sometimes someone figures out how to operate it and then weird things happen."

"Deep Ones mostly don't bother with advanced technology. Shoggoths have a lot of stuff that's useful to us, some of it that we stole from the Elder Things and kept maintained and some that we managed to trade the Mi-Go for, but the main colonies are currently underwater and also isolationist so we haven't needed space shuttles or stuff like that."

"What kinds of things can Elder Thing technology and Mi-Go technology do?"

"Uh... Mi-Go can remove brains and put them in new bodies, and can modify people's brains, is the big thing we sometimes get into arguments with them about because they sometimes kidnap people to use as labor. Mi-Go also have interplanetary travel in the same solar system, and they have really good adaptive technology for being on Earth for short times. Their technology we actually trade for is kind of just a lot of generically useful stuff? Like underwater lights, which are annoying to make while you're underwater."

"The Elder Things had a lot of energy generators which we managed to keep running, and there's some stuff we use to create sea-caves for shoggoths who're really sick and need to get rid of some of their body, and to purge those caves after they leave the sick parts behind. I think people sometimes talk about actually getting some of their underwater transport or city stuff back up and running but no one feels we really need to bother right now?"

"The humans sometimes still find things like energy beam weapons and stuff that does weird things to your head and sealed failed biological experiments, because humans have really weird luck."

"Weird luck?"

"Humans are always finding the bizarre dangerous stuff, or at least managing to do bizarre dangerous things with normal stuff."

"Is there a specific reason for that or is it just that there are more of them around?"

"There's more of them around, probably also a lot of the war was fought on the surface where they live, and also mom says humans are kind of really stupidly curious? So most shoggoths will leave the weird ominously glowing thing alone and a human's going to poke it with a stick."

"Circling back a little... it's weird that the Mi-Go would be able to do brain things to lots of different kinds of people, since probably everybody's brains are different, do you know much about how that works?"

"They probably experiment on a lot of people from each type first. They've been around humans and shoggoths really long, so."

"Why do they want to kidnap people for labor, when the living conditions on their world are so different to begin with?"

"I think they have some stuff happening on asteroids near them? But they're also really weird; shoggoths and humans can kind of agree on similar priorities but the Mi-Go have bizarre ones and follow them weirdly."

"Can you give more examples?"