"They're cheap, it's a little all-boys' company. Boys' theater isn't usually in as much conversation with the rest of the oeuvre but that means they're sometimes so creative."

"Oh, I'll definitely have to see it, then. Fun little offshoots are my favorite."

"There you go then! Misokun's is also well worth seeing, of course, you just have to tolerate some literary cannibalism."

"Huh. Well, you did say it was going for shock value. And it would be nice to have a firmer idea of what's beyond propriety, here, maybe it'll help with that."

"- oh, well, I mean, eating people is against the law, if that's what you mean."

"That's good. It's generally not even something people joke about, at home. - I haven't felt threatened, exactly, but I haven't been sure whether I need to warn anyone else who might come over about it."

"You don't even smell like food and it's been months since anyone was eaten in this city, I wouldn't worry about it."

"All right. -you smell like food to each other? That's odd."

"I mean, fruitcysts are just people flesh, right? Except those come off without hurting anybody."

"I guess that makes sense. I don't think any of the species at home have anything like them."

"Wow, that sounds inconvenient!"

"I bet it is, in comparison. Being able to eat more kinds of food helps, though - most of us can get by on an all-plant diet if we need to, and I bet that keeps at least as well as fruitcysts."

"Oh, yeah, plants kept better before freezers were invented."

"Mmhmm. I don't know much about fruitcysts yet though... but if I get started asking you questions we'll be here all afternoon and I do want to do a reasonable job at the circle I'm teaching later."

"Ooh, what are you teaching?"

"My language! I do expect to be able to bring people back and forth sooner or later, so it'll be useful, even if I can only really teach the basics."

"Ooh, how sooner-or-later do you mean?"

"It depends on whether my friends back home can find me - if I'm very lucky it'll only be a month or two; if they get something from where I was but have to research it it might be six months or a year. I'll be able to get myself home eventually even if they can't, but that'll take longer, probably at least four or five years for my magic to get strong enough."

"Your magic gets stronger?"

"Mmhmm. There's different tiers of spells, and we can cast higher tiers of spells and more of the lower-tier ones per day, plus the spells themselves get stronger, with the right sort of - not practice like practicing the spells, but practicing what being a cleric is, doing things that have to do with that. - I'm probably going to do a circle on clerics, in a few days or something."

"Maybe I'll drop in on that!"

"I hope to see you there!"

And she pulls another play off the shelf and pushes it into his arms and then leaves with her own book.

He sets it aside and gets back to work, and looks it over when he's satisfied with his lesson plan.

It's from 130 years ago and titled Still Trees and it's about a family moving to the big city from their country burrow. The daughter wants an education so she can be a bridge engineer, the sons are intimidated by city girls, one of the male adults opposes the move and is crabby about it, the matriarch of the family doesn't like her new job as much as she expected. The crabby male has an affair, one of the sons tells on him to Mother, Mother and the affair have a brawl that ends with Mother dead. The daughter kicks out the offending male, implied to go crawling to his sister's farm to see if she'll take him in, and the daughter drops out of school to get a roadwork job to support her little brothers and shoves them as fast as she can into barely-acceptable mating situations so they won't overtake her limited earning ability. Sometime after the last one is out of the house one of her teachers she had in her limited time at school finds her and offers her a scholarship, so the play ends on a happy note.