Hug?

Hug. 

"I liked being somewhere where I could protect you."

"Yeah. It was nice.

"How were the horses?"

"Really neat! They're so smart and attentive and they move so fast and you can give them the subtlest cues and they're soft and they trust you, once you earn it. The horse I rode first is named Chamomile and she was very patient, but sort of in a low-expectations way at first until I understood how you're supposed to sit so that a horse can carry your weight more easily and how to give cues that aren't all contradictory, and then she cheered up and was a little bit more ambitious. We went out on a trail she knew well and you could tell she liked showing off how well, she kept angling herself to take turns well before they were even in view. Once I more or less had that down I tried a longer route on another horse, and his name was Chestnut, and -" 

He can go on about this for a while actually.

Awww! He's so good. She would like to hear all about the horses.

"You could come too, if you want, tomorrow."

"Maybe I will. We did have horses, in Norway, just, I didn't personally ever get to ride any. I think I trust Cassie to watch the baby, if she wants to."

"She seems all right. And babies don't seem too hard to watch."

"They need lots of snuggles. And I can't be away too long, have to feed her, but she's old enough now that we can tide her over with cold soup or something for a few hours."

"I'd like you to come out and ride horses with me."

"I would like that, too."

Fairies speak Quenya, he says to Karen. How'd the Gameboy go over?

Gamecubes and Gameboys are both successes. - does that mean you can, like, hear what they're saying to each other all the time, I kind of assumed they were all speaking medieval Norwegian, or whatever.

I assumed so too! In Milliways it sounded like Quenya to me but presumably it sounded like English to you and I didn't give it much thought. They're speaking Norwegian most of the time but they switch to Quenya when they don't want the kids to overhear.

They're a completely different species! They don't have our linguistics guilds! It doesn't make sense that they'd speak Quenya!

A completely different species featuring copies of you and your brothers. Like, at this point, I do have to suspect a little bit that the ghost of Gene Roddenberry is running everything and that he's not always paying close attention to all of his worldbuilding.

 - all right, fair enough. Well. They had a nice conversation about horses in Quenya.

Sounds like your mission was a success, then.

I think he'll stay unless we spook him, yeah. - possibly also unless he thinks she'll leave him. Not sure.

I would expect that to be pretty far up his list of priorities, I guess.

Yeah.

He doesn't abuse animals.

S' better than the alternative, I guess.

Zales asked me last night where the slavery thing was on a scale from Pikachu to the episode of Star Trek where everybody gets kidnapped and given shock collars and told to fight aliens to the death in gladiatorial combat. Told her Pikachu wasn't a slave and she said he just - wasn't treated like one, by Ash or the narrative, so you kind of forget. - I'm not sure if you're getting enough of this reference to know what I'm saying.

Some kids used to sit out of gym and play Pokemon but I'm not sure that gave me enough context for this.

Um, like -

- Pokemon is a game where, put uncharitably, you go around beating up adorable superpowered ambiguously sapient animals, capturing them in tiny capsules, and releasing them temporarily to command them in combat against other adorable superpowered ambiguously sapient animals. Most people who have pokemon do this to them, and it's presented neutrally by the narrative, and there doesn't really seem to be any proper government, so there are also crime rings who abuse their pokemon and which you have to stop by beating up all of their pokemon enough that you can shut down their operations.

It also runs on love, and trust, and listening to what's good for your pokemon and what's going to make them stronger and healthier and happier, and all of the pokemon outside the crime rings are said to be down with the fighting, like it's, I dunno, the equivalent of walking your dog. The TV show is about Ash and his Pikachu, who are, like, unusually close and in tune with each other, I guess, and really like going on adventures together. And in the first movie, there's a pokemon who gets captured by the crime rings and then tries to free all of the other pokemon from their trainers, under the assumption that they've all been enslaved, and Ash keeps arguing that his pokemon are his friends, and that people would be hurting them by talking them away, and he risks his life to keep them from being taken away from him, and - a bunch of plot happens and it all ends with Ash giving his life to stop the pokemon from hurting each other, and then there's this weirdly affecting scene where pikachu desperately tries to shock him back to life, and then all of the pokemon cry about Ash's sacrifice and somehow this magically revives him.

So, like, if I run into Ash and Pikachu someday, I'm not a hundred percent sure what I feel like either of them needs to hear about anything, y'know?

When she walked in, all she was thinking about was that it could be worse, it could be worse, she was a slave now but at least she was well-treated and it could be worse.

I don't - I agree sometimes people are doing their thing and you don't want to get in the way of it -

I don't really think she's.... okay. I'm just trying to work out what being okay looks like, for her, I guess.