It is closed. It closes at four thirty.

Drat. He'll have to return earlier tomorrow. Oh, well. He can go catch a bus back to school.

School has all of its usual properties.

Including, amongst them, Isabella, on whose door he will knock after showering and brushing his teeth.

She's already in her pajamas. "Hi, lovely, how was the movie?"

"It was really cute! It had talking animals and important life lessons."

"And what important life lessons did you learn?"

"That family isn't about who's related to you but rather about who cares for you, or something." Pause. "Which, I mean, I knew already from quite extensive personal experience."

Hug pat pat.

"Uneventful. Lots of sorting my memory out, I think I got a good efficiency jump."

"Really? What happened?"

"Mm - does it make any sense if I say I streamlined the metadata by which I call up a memory?"

"Lemme parse that," he says, and thinks for a second. "You made the... associations... or whatever-it-is that's information about which memory is which more organized or easier to read or something along those lines?"

"Sort of, yeah."

"What is your metadata?"

"Times, places, emotions, people who were present, subjects I was thinking about, weather, all kinds of stuff."

"And what changed between before and now?"

"I have it more systematized. Like, the places and times - nest."

"Nest? Like, a tree structure or something?"

"Yeah. If I'm thinking of a particular Tuesday, now that day's noon and four o'clock and so on go inside it."

"Wow. I'm. Kinda jealous."

"Psionics is cool!"

"It really is! After we take over the world and make everyone immortal and fix everything we need to find a way to share magic."