She can pick the battering off! And sample some of it to see if it's hard to digest carby stuff or not; sometimes she has different amounts of trouble.

And meringues look good!

The carby stuff is made of cornstarch and wheat flour and stuff to make it foam up, plus oil it absorbed in the frying process.

Meringues prove to be ninety nine percent protein and sugar.

She doesn't think she likes the breading, so she just eats the fish and the meringues. Meringues go on her 'definitely good food' list, though.

Sardun sits with his friends at lunch! He is friends with this other blue Parbe, and also these two yellows and this purple and this green.

Hi!!!

They all introduce themselves and ask her how she's liking school so far!

She introduces herself too. And she likes school more than she was expecting to! She and her mom used to live with humans and human schools are boring, and shoggoths mostly do just individual teaching?

"Why do they do that?" asks the yellow.

"Humans or shoggoths?"

"Shoggoths," says the yellow.

"I want to know why human schools are boring, too," says the green.

"Human schools are boring because they just want you to memorize stuff, and they want you to sit still and just listen to the teacher talk."

"Shoggoths don't do schools because we don't have a whole bunch of kids all the same age? And the big things you gotta learn right away, either you learn super young because they're safety stuff, or you learn from just your family because they're specific stuff like family history. You learn from your parent or by finding someone who knows the thing and can teach you, like an apprentice. Bigger settlements might have learning groups for common stuff, but I haven't been to one."

"But what about, like, math, that's not specific or safety," says the purple.

"Mom taught me math. I guess that's the type of thing you'd do group learning for, if you had enough people who wanted or needed to learn. If I wanted more than the basics and I was living with shoggoths I could ask mom or go find a math person and ask them. We don't get less good at learning stuff when we're older, so there's not really a rush, and we're old enough for apprenticeships by when we're like three anyways."

"Huh," says the purple.

"You're visiting more schools, right?" asks Sardun. "How'd you pick which ones to visit?"

"I made a list of schools before they sent in the videos and put symbols next to them for stuff I liked. And when they sent videos I used those and the symbol lists to pick four with the most stuff I like."

"What'd you like about here?" asks the purple.

"Rainbow school, and I like the way you guys do classes so I can take lots of different stuff, and I like the accommodations for attention and organization disorders, and I like the two recesses. I think the taking hyposensitives is also good since while I can memorize the pollution rules, shoggoths don't have much pollution-causing stuff so I might not be as good at it as a hypersensitive would like? From my symbol list. And in the video I liked the clubs."

"The clubs are good!" agrees the yellow. "I'm in journalism club and board game club."

"Do you have an attention and organization disorder?" wonders Sardun. "Or do you just seem like that 'cause you're an alien?"

"Clubs are good! And I dunno? I think I'm in normal range for a shoggoth kid but I also think the stuff that's attention and organization disorders here aren't as big of disorders with shoggoths because the society is set up different? Lots of the stuff I'm bad at is mostly the stuff you'd notice with school."

"Like what?" asks the green.

"Like... I can't just get into a zone for a whole day on a cool thing because other classes exist, and I can't just jump between whatever part of a thing is fun right now, and I can't be like running around or swimming while I'm talking to someone, and the teaching has to go at like an average pace instead of an individual's best pace, and the teaching is still more teacher telling us stuff and less a story or conversation?"

"Some of that's still a problem with work," the yellow says.

"I think shoggoths also do work differently? But I haven't done that stuff yet. Still, I think I'll get better at the focus stuff once I'm older."

"Yeah, some people kind of grow out of it," nods the yellow.

"I know mom kind of just decided she wanted to study humans and then just... Went and did that? And the community decided it was useful to have someone who knows a lot about humans around sometimes, even if she didn't have stuff or knowledge she could trade for favors or things."