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It's an ordinary, quiet night. The . . . patrons, or whatever they are, of the lab equipment shop downstairs, took off about forty-five minutes ago.
There's silence, mostly. You can only be out at night in Sothis if you have business. But there's some business. Every so often a party passes under Katie's window. Their conversation is mostly what Katie has become accustomed to thinking of as "focused", though occasionally some is just downright tense or revelrous.
Wind. Distant insects. Dogs.
Something shuffles downstairs.
And continues to shuffle.
"Are we good?" The voice is insistent, alto, and right underneath Katie. And it's female.
"Yes, fine". Higher. If Katie knows what female halflings sound like, it sounds like that.
The shuffling moves deeper into the shop. A glass clinks. Laughter starts, whispering at first, then merely hushed.
"Oh my god." A third voice.
"All this stuff is fake, you know. This and this and this used to be one bespoke fixture."
"Fuck."
Whoever it is is going through the merchandise.
Expensive, heavily regulated merchandise. Katie's parent have only been in Ulunat for two weeks, but she's picked up that the proprietors of this place have gone to a moderate effort to secure it against thieves.
eeeeee she likes being picked up and feeling special and important and valuable. "What's a scut?"
"I'm learning so much today!" Gods, Teg is cute. If she's so fancy and special and shit, she can have two girlfriends, right?
She puts on multifocals and turns back to a strange little silkweaving project. "Katie is making me think. Most recent thoughts on why energy production remains as inefficient as it does?"
"Primordial god-coalition is the only thing that explains it. That's why we can trust that Paradise has the leverage to win, it's a metastable configuration."
"Wait, what do you mean by 'energy production'? Like, coal mining, or something to do with the way the gods give their clerics Channel Energy?"
Really, Katie's brain is so giant?
"Energy production per land area, I should have said. There's no known limitation on making more food if you have more land."
"I still would've said 'farming'. Of course you get more food if you have more land, but producing more output per unit of input is what 'efficiency' means."
"Right, and there's not an apparent hard cap in how much all of mortal civilization working together can increase the efficiency of most 'simple' processes."