"I don't know, I'm not a physicist!"

"That's fair, sorry. It's just very concerning-sounding."

"I guess it would be."

"So many things are concerning outside the Neath and the Mountain-Light. Possibly as many as are concerning inside the Neath." She flops backwards with a sigh. 

"With some but I guess not all that much overlap!"

"I think the main point of overlap is how passive people are about it all. Like...most people look at all the problems in the world and hardly try to fix any of them."

"People get busy, you know? They have jobs and families and if they drop them that'll catch up with them. I suppose you could argue people should have families less, not get busy with romances and children and funding that whole deal."

"I mean, the thing that's concerning isn't that people have other priorities, it's--that people mostly don't acknowledge trying as a thing you could do, like, I understand that I have more resources for fixing things than most people but I don't understand how people are surprised by what I do with them. Like, in the general case, rather than specific. People are surprised when I stand up for Rubbery Men and Tomb-Colonists and burgle souls out of the Brass Embassy to return to their owners and empty the graveyards and wheedle the University for mummies and wipe Seekers clean and yell at Presbyters and spit in the Masters' eyes when they're being stupid."

"Yeah, that I don't have as charitable an explanation for. What's a Presbyter?"

"Uh, the Presbyrate is the biggest country on the Elder Continent and the one my father is located in, which means they reap the most benefits of direct and consistent exposure to Mountain-Light, and they have concerns about overpopulation which they resolve not by placing any limits on how many children one can have or under what circumstances but by putting a legal limit on how long you are allowed to live."

"I hear China's one child policy doesn't actually work that well but that's not a great excuse even if they had that in mind, which I assume they did not."

"I don't know what that is and also they enforce it by, if they find out you've lived more than your allotted thousand years, not only killing you but sentencing your children to only a hundred years each."

"Wow!"

"Yep! It's fucked up!"

"Does this happen a lot?"

"Only the one time that I specifically know of."

"Well, I guess it's better than everybody dying of old age in their eighties."

"It is! And yet. I mean, I've never wanted to scream at my father, Father's great, they operate on non-human timescales but inventing the light in the first place was awesome."

"Sounds like it."

"You know, I think you're the first kindred spirit I've ever met who wasn't my parents or my big brother." 

"Really? I guess that's complimentary but it doesn't say much about the selection."

"I've met lots of people!"

"Even the people you raise from the dead aren't really into it?"

"I mean, they're generally glad not to be dead, but that doesn't mean they won't throw rocks at Rubbery Men or whatever."

"What do people not like about Rubbery Men?"