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.'"

"Hee! Zeds."

"Your father is..."

"The Mountain of Light."

"And he's got a gender and everything?"

"No, but they're the person who got my mother pregnant, and it's easier to say 'father' and 'grandfather' and 'grandmother' than just parent and interchangeable grandparents, or 'non-incubating parent' and iterations therefrom."

"Fair enough." Does this place have fortune cookies? Xander wants a fortune cookie.

This place does not have fortune cookies. 

"What kinda Chinese place doesn't have fortune cookies?" he mutters to himself on their way out.

"What is a fortune cookie."

"Bland folded-up cookie with a piece of paper inside that tells you your fortune. ...like for fun, no one believes them."

"If the cookie is bland why do you want one. Just for the silly fortune? I can write one for you if you want."

"No, it's... the whole experience."

"I suppose that makes sense. But it's apparently been over five hundred years, I'm not surprised the tradition didn't relevantly survive."

"It's just disappointing."

Shrug. "Things are, sometimes." 

Unspoken: we have bigger problems. Unspoken: well, so is people continuing to be dead. 

Back at the school Isabella picks up a book of short stories and sees if she recognizes anything.

Not all of them are in any way recognizable but there are some recognizable adaptations of fairy tales and aesop's fables and so on. 

Lucy locates a book she can use to start teaching herself the relevant Chinese dialect and dives in.