"Well, it wouldn't have been a conversation about math if Inaaya weren't in it," Simone says sensibly.

"Well, now we have Miss Stark and Miss Sinope, so now we have twice the math."

"Right, Ichiro, because you're an idiot who doesn't know anything about anything."

Slight smile. "Perhaps so."

(He can't help finding Emma charming.)

Polite smile since that is apparently what they're doing. (She absolutely can help but find Emma charming.)

"I have a recent book you might find interesting, Miss Stark-- and perhaps you as well, Miss Sinope. A rare collection of star charts from the seventeenth century."

"Nice."

"You are both welcome to come by my office and take a look before I take it to a private collector."

perhaps this party was not, in fact, a mistake you can't think, that you'll jinx it; you get to be as silly and superstitious as you like in the confines of your own skull. But still Simone is happy with her math-related choices.

Inaaya's mouth is open. "Really?"

"Of course. I'm always glad to help a young scholar."

Meanwhile--

The couches are a place to sit down and rest your feet from dancing. The plush couches are softer than the threadbare hand-me-downs at your flats or furnished rooms; it’s nice to see how the other half lives sometimes. Couples sit, their arms around each other’s shoulders, their legs brushing together; with everyone in costume, it’s impossible to tell apart the queans from the women.

"The thing you psychiatrists don't get is that depression is the normal response to a sick system."

Carter is dressed as a monster no one but himself recognizes.

"And yet, somehow, not everyone in the world is depressed."

Leo is wearing a glittery mask and his normal outfit.

Terrence is not opposed to dancing or joviality but nonetheless he has gravitated, via natural processes, to his native party environment, which is the corner away from the music where the weirdest intellectual discussion is happening. "Some systems are sicker than others. We all find ourselves attuned to different parts of the world - surely that should affect the attitude as well."

He is wearing the colorful robes of an assumed Babylonian priest, complete with gold-foil diadem, and the addition of a matching magenta-fabric-covered mask. It's not especially accurate but it gets the point across. His beard is stately paper mache.

"Right! Exactly," Carter says. "Some of us are attuned to the beauty of our imaginations. And some of us are aware of the enormity of this sick, empty world."

"And some of us like living in the world that actually exists."

"There's no virtue in being well-adjusted to a world that is designed to crush the human spirit!"

"Perhaps you should find a new world to adjust yourself to, if this one serves you so poorly."

"There is only one world on offer," Carter says. "The response of the true aesthete is eternal discontentment."
 

Terrence is pretty sure that Leo Aarons is a leading Jungian psychoanalyst. He's read one of his books.

"I disagree! ...Well, rather. More that it seems as though the human condition is filling up darkness with bright things. Putting sea monsters in the corners of maps. I suppose you'd say that these are mere distractions from the horror of the shade, though."

Randolph Carter is a writer of mediocre stories which are published in the pulp magazines, mostly Weird Tales. His weird fiction straddles the binary between horror and poetic ode. He's from a good New England family, currently traveling the world. He has severe depression and spends a lot of time telling everyone that everything in the entire world is pointless and the only thing worse than all human science and philosophy and art is all other human endeavors. He was a military hero in the Great War; it's unclear how much this was a protracted suicide attempt.

"If the world had sea monsters," Randolph says, "I would have fewer objections. The so-called 'progress' of science is replacing sea monsters with nothing at all."

Terrence is hiding it but he's a little jazzed to be in this conversation and is trying not to make a fool of himself. He's also a little tipsy, which is not helping. "Giant squids," he says, eloquently.

"Instead of a mysterious monster, source of wonder and awe," Randolph says, "they're just another animal."

"If you can't feel wonder at things that actually exist you're going to be disappointed for the rest of your life."