"Guess that makes sense."

"Anyway, things don't always end up how you'd guess, and this," she gestures at the book, "is probably more important."

"Yeah. Sorry, it's easy to get distracted."

"It's good to know! And we're doing this because we have a few days to kill." 

"Yeah." But she reads quietly for the next while.

That's totally acceptable. Future science is so cool!!!

Eventually, though, bellies will start grumbling. 

"Let's go see what's available for lunch."

"Place is half Chinese, right, maybe they have hot 'n sour soup."

"What is hot 'n sour soup."

"It's a soup I like at Chinese restaurants? It is hot. And sour. - hot in the spicy sense. There's tofu in it? I think?"

"What is tofu." 

"...a mysterious Asian food that is probably made of ingredients."

"It's made of soybeans."

"Those I think I have heard of." 

Hot and sour soup is available. Lucy is quietly bewildered as to how sour soup is desirable and decides she has to try it because otherwise she is going to go on being bewildered, isn't she. 

"Okay, I think I like tofu," is the thoughtful verdict, "I'm less sure about the concept of sour soup, but I've had much worse, so." 

Isabella has dumplings. She lets Lucy have one.

Dumplings are delightful!!! Lucy is delighted. 

"I think I like dumplings better than tofu," she says cheerfully when she's finished it, "I will definitely remember that next time. Thank you!!!" 

"You're welcome!"

Oh no Isabella looks huggable and she is going on twenty-four hours without having hugged someone this could get to be a problem. 

"My first instinct is to suggest checking out the church when we're done eating but there are plenty of books at the school we didn't look at and those are frankly more likely to be useful than random books found in a church."

"They probably are, yeah, I'd rather read textbooks than Space Bibles. There's probably a lot of competing religious beliefs anyway, we wouldn't get very good information on system-wide prevailing opinion."

"Oh, hm, that makes sense. I don't know much about other religions besides the Anglican Church and even that's probably not very similar, like, I don't know why exactly but theology...changed...a lot...when London fell."

"I think theology changes a lot whenever basically anything happens? But I have not specifically studied it. I'm an atheist. With respect to my homeworld, anyway, I don't know if you have a Space Deity running around."

"Depends on how you count deities, really. Zai--Sailors worship my father, sometimes. People have worshipped the sun. There's arguments to be made. But we don't as far as I know have anything equivalent to the Christian idea of God."

"Zai-sailors?"

"So I'm not sure what direction all the causality is in, but the great salt lake of the Neath is called the 'Unterzee,' and sailors usually replace their esses with zeds, and people call them 'zailors.'"