:It asked me if I loved it the way I love you! ...Or I think that was the question, anyway, it was that odd sort of concept-matrix with a blank or a question for one box of it, that it used to do as a baby: 

:I remember those but it didn't ask me that one!:

:I told it that I loved it too but in a rather different way from you: 

:I should hope so. Maybe when it can talk to other gods I can ask it if the Hardornen pair are actually anything resembling a couple:

:What an intriguing question. I find it rather hard to imagine what a god's romantic relationships would look like: 

:Yeah, I have no idea!:

:Well, it can go on the list of things we never had any idea of but can soon: Leareth is getting sleepy. He snuggles up against Belrun and closes his eyes. 

Zzzz.

The next day is back to doing various checks, most of which are very technical and hard for Leareth to explain to Belrun at all. He also spends a lot of time poking around the Foresight-cityscape, despite the fact that even the young god mostly doesn't know how to interpret it yet. 

"I am so pleased with how the Foresight came out," he says, proudly. "That is not the raw form that the god itself perceives, I am sure you noticed when you asked to see its deeper layer of thoughts, but I worked for a very long time on what would be most legible to humans. Part of it was Nayoki's primary research project for the last decade." 

"Did you pick the city metaphor in particular?"

"Not specifically, I picked a number of parameters for it but I was not sure how it would come out." 

"What parameters?"

Leareth can spend a while explaining. A lot of it is very abstract; some is based on Nayoki's research, studying people's minds to look at what kinds of concepts are easiest to reason in with what metaphors. Part of the initial specifications for the baby god involved providing a mapping of that for the god to explore, with its far greater than human ability to see multiple options and paths and pick the best one. 

Belrun thinks that is pretty neat. "I'm going to have to catch up on all of this, I think," she says. "Over however many hundreds of years."

"I look forward to it! I like it when I can talk to you about what is on my mind, and often it is this kind of thing." 

"I've noticed this about you."

"I will have to catch up with you on Healing-skill, too, I like it when you can show me things but my Healing-Sight is still not quite there, I probably need to prioritize more time to practice it." 

"Gotta stare at lots of tiny things."

"I will have to arrange for some tiny things to stare at. Are there intermediate steps of tiny things before you get down as tiny as your microbes?" 

"You don't have to arrange for them, you can start with stuff you always have handy. Little bitty bones in your ear, hair follicles, tiny blood vessels..."

"Tiny bones in my ear? I actually did not know about that, what do they do?" 

"I haven't totally figured it out!"

"Hmm." Leareth's eyes go out of focus and then kind of cross-eyed as he tries to tune his Healing-Sight to look inside his ears. 

Giggle.

Leareth suddenly looks very delighted. :You are right, I do have tiny bones in my ears! How fascinating: