Kyeo is running his hand up and down Sarham's back, as though counting scars he can't feel, and then there is something, in the room, something enormous, and he sees his own face and Sarham's mirrored in an incoming oval and then -
- they aren't sitting on Kyeo's bed in Crane Mountain any more.
"What kind of mandatory minimum prosociality lets people starve seven year olds without realizing they're the villains."
"That's not - an exact translation - one that strongly values the social fabric and the high quality of life it allows us all?"
"It would not have actually been better if I had been exiled or if I had been able to stay in there indefinitely, mostly alone and with nothing to do, until I was old enough to emigrate but without having gained any of the skills or experience necessary to make it a feasible life path . . ."
"I - knew what I was doing, here; I'm still perfectly capable of understanding that you wouldn't actually find that funny, and putting the year conversion at the end for dramatic effect and - I apologize. I just - want - "
"I am not judging you for - whatever your motives but particularly the ones I'm imagining where no one has ever been sympathetic to you having been starved into acquiring mandatory personality traits when you were seven and you found somebody who would be."
"It's best, for Creta, if you don't - if staying here is truly the best choice for you. And that means not hiding things from you, and it means making sure you have someone who's absolutely on your side, to fight to get you dispensations from mandatory personality traits for a few decades and to personally escort you out of the country and beyond should you want that, because - that's really the only way to get what we want, and what I want, desperately - more food for everyone, even though it's only a luxury for us, and better travel, and fancier and more durable clothes, and radios - I want everything, for everyone, and if that makes things good enough that other places can suddenly compete with Creta then I don't care even on the levels you might object to because Creta will also be better - and - I genuinely think this is the best place to uplift the world from and in addition to perhaps desiring sympathy I am trying to - be someone you can cooperate fully with. Is that at all coherent."
"I'm mostly not especially worried for myself? If I wake up one morning with the ability to copy stuff and somebody says well well well we have rules about that here, cool, I'll leave. I'm not seven. Kyeo, though -
- I like Kyeo -"
"I did mean my 'you's as plural, for what it's worth. Though I have less an idea of how I would broach the subject with him."
"Well, ideally you could. But that if he manifests magic he shouldn't give in to any official pressure about it - I did get the two of you fifty local years but if someone who didn't know that got to him first, he seems . . . I don't have a very good reading on him. And that if the two of you do need to leave I will spend nearly arbitrary resources to accommodate it."
"I haven't looked at him with an eye towards that, but - if you're right he might just already have enough - "
"I guess it'd be a weight off my mind if he did but I suspect it's not - necessarily aimed how you usually want it here? But I don't really know exactly how you want it here because I had been imagining it as a nice fluffy thing that definitely precluded starving children."
"The ones for the general populace are typically - fluffier, than the ones for people operating in some sort of official capacity. There's variety."
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