"Also, once every few months is not a lot of opportunity to see a monster. There are tons of animals in the woods that people never see or notice."

"True enough," he agrees. "Temple said you can communicate with animals?" He asks Franklyn. "I'm guessing you can't with these?"

"I can, but their instinct is to kill me... and everything. Hard to build anything out of that."

"I guess it would be," he agrees quietly. "And the only way to fix this is to find more people to attune to the vault?"

(Would Franklyn like a hug?)

(Franklyn is not particularly upset, but he would love a hug.)

"As far we know. It might be possible there is a magical lever that we can pull to tone it down, but the need sufficient people to stabilize the thing looks like a hard limit."

"Temple hopes that there is a way to tamper with the thing once there is a better grasp of magic or at least divine how it works, but that's a long way and the sort of poking that causes monsters to jump out of the thing as a defense."

(That's fine, you don't have to be sad to be hugged)

He nods. "Inconvenient, but I suppose it makes sense." As an extremely faulty security system, anyway. 

(Hug)

There is not a soul in this house that disagrees with Alexei's unspoken sentiment. "We will eventually figure it out, but it's depending on either finding more of us, or, well, making them."

"Mn," he nods. "I wonder if they'll find anything about that vanished uncle," he muses. 

"That would be great. Even, if it is just the one guy, and it might not be."

"Yep. Hopefully 'missing' means 'ran away', not 'mysteriously dead'." 

Sigh. "But they are looking into it anyway."

Nod. He goes back to the food, out of questions for the moment. He passes Jamie another pastry as well. 

They can finish dinner talking things of less consequence than lost relatives and magic. Then Adam can show Alex his musical paraphernalia.

Music things! Alex would like to refamiliarize himself with various instruments, but he can also listen to Adam's attempts at composition. What seems to be the problem? 

Mostly indecision, Adam is the sort that tries every single variation of a song, and then can't decide between the multiple choices. It's also might be relevant that he has super-human pitch and no one around that's into music.

There's really nothing wrong with having a lot of variations? Artists will play a song half-a-dozen different ways over their careers, if not more. He doesn't have to whittle it down to one if he likes the others as well. Alex can point out the ones he likes best, if Adam wants, but different people have different tastes, anyway. 

Adam appreciates having someone to talk to this regardless.

It's certainly no hardship. 

Jamie goes looking for Temple once they're all done eating, peeking behind various unlocked doors to see if he might be behind them.

He is at the library doing something at the computer.

He will approach the computer, then, looking around the library curiously.