Hand on cheek just like last time she was awake. "I'll tell Cam and Epic whichever one of them is free sooner should be ready to give you a computer chip?"

"Oh, good. That way I can know all the people before I go out and meet them."

"And all the people will be like 'you must be one of that redheaded template that knows everybody'!"

"Do the others all look alike?"

"The Elves do. Human one has short hair and a beard but he's recognizable. Andalite one - that's the centaur aliens - looks like a centaur alien, but when he shapeshifted into a human he somehow landed on the same phenotype, it's weird."

"That's really weird. Just him, or does any centaur alien who morphs human land on the phenotype their alts have..."

"This happened with all the ones who picked up human forms before the world pealed, yeah - since then they've just been acquiring their alts as shapeshifting templates."

"Can we have shapeshifting or is it a centaur alien only thing?"

"You can have it but it only works in the neighborhood, that's why that world is square on the map."

"Awww. ....we should probably have at least one psion who's going to stay here all the time who people should come tell immediately if bad things happen anywhere - if you're going to want to travel -"

"Yeah, good plan."

Lean.

"I missed you."

"I'm so sorry."

Shoulderpats. "Occasionally I'd sit with you like you were just actually asleep but it felt weird so I mostly didn't."

"Lucid dreaming wouldn't work? Not that I'd have appreciated it, but you could hypothetically do whatever you wanted -"

"It works, it's just all - dreamy. By that logic I should never bother doing anything in real life that I could put together in dream form. And you do realize that insofar as I can determine that you don't appreciate things that affects both my enjoyment of a hypothetical and my resolve to hypothetically try it?"

"...right."

"I did check what happened if you woke up. It was 'complain and price psions on the internet'."

"Sorry, I should've thought that you might do that and resolved to be delightful for an hour after waking up."

"That would've had its own problems."

"I have a blind spot in modeling you where even when I'm conditioning on you not being Maira I still expect you to be, on some level."

"Well, the problem isn't even just 'pretending-based delightfulness is nondelightful', since you did demonstrate I could maybe not tell; there's also 'what if you'd been asleep for thirty years and I'd developed a two hour range'."

"That would have been awkward."

"A bit."