"People should be nice to each other. It's - the world gets happier, when that happens. If people are mean, the world gets sadder, and that's sad, and I want to help the people who were mean to, so they'll be okay, and the people who were mean, so they'll stop being mean."

"...how does helping mean people make them stop?"

"Lots of the species I'm familiar with are usually mean 'cause there's something they can't get if they're nice? Or feel they can't get, or they think they'll lose something they need if they're nice. Sometimes there's just a values clash, but I think Amentans value the same basic stuff as lots of Earth species? Like, being happy. So if you make it so they won't get anything from being mean, and they'll get what they need from being nice, they'll be nicer if they're good at self-interest. And if they're a social species they'll usually be nicer even if you just give them the chance to be nice without losing anything."

"I guess. If you say helping mean people it sounds like helping them be mean."

She shakes her head. "Helping them be nice."

"But what if they don't want to?"

"Well, there's gotta be some reason for that, or at least some reason they don't wanna just avoid people they don't like."

"I think some people don't like anybody."

"Then they shouldn't be around the everyone they dislike."

"They need to live somewhere..."

"Yeah. I think it's easier to say that on Earth, where people mostly don't get all into huge groups anyways... But I think most people will be nice if you give them enough reason. I don't know about the ones who're really really stubborn about being mean, though."

"If you have to have a reason to be nice is it really nice?"

"It's still having nice effects?"

"Yeah..."

"I think that's - what really matters."

He chews the last bite of his sandwich contemplatively.

She doesn't bring it up again for the rest of lunch.

At recess, Zon has gotten his cooking class teacher to come up with a list of various things sort of like Bright's noodle soup from all over the world.

Heh. It's a really long list! Do they want to go through the whole thing?

"I'm going to look up recipes and see which ones are most different and which ones are basically the same thing but with like different vegetables on top or whatever."

"Yeah, that makes sense, and'll help narrow stuff down."

"Yup. Did your thing have vegetables?"

"Some!" She describes the vegetables as best she can.

Zon writes bits of this down and asks things like that "was that a root or a stem?"

Bright knows enough about plants to answer most of that!