"Quiet. Police officer - chief of police of the town, now, actually, although I think he got that promotion when I was - five or six."

"That's nice," he pronounces, a bit wistfully.

"He's happy. He goes fishing a lot. He took me once and I refused to ever go again because it was staggeringly boring. Cricket found it stimulating, though, he went along a few times without me."

"What does he enjoy about it? Cricket or your father, either."

"Kalars like the quiet. Cricket, contradictorily, likes the thrill of the hunt - obviously he doesn't use a fishing rod, he just gets right in there with his bare claws."

Edarial snickers at this. Then he winces, and murmurs, "Ow."

"Should I try not to make you laugh?"

"It's entirely all right," he assures. "It's keeping me awake."

"Okay. So I grew up principally in Emavan with Raney. And I learned younger than most kids how to handle household errand types of things because she's a scatterbrain. Nothing got to the point of danger, but the milk carrier would not deliver one day and she'd have to catch him at the neighbor's house the next and pay him, or we'd run entirely out of salt, things like that, so I wound up picking up most of the shopping as soon as I could because I have the knack of writing things down."

"That's somewhere between cute and worrying, I hope you grew up all right?"

"I was fine. Raney's lovely, just not organized. I was never hungry, neglected, allowed to go missing for more than two minutes at a time, or cold in the winter for lack of firewood. Occasionally we wouldn't have any salt, and I don't know if you've tried cooking without salt, but it doesn't work very well - so I learned to buy things, such as salt."

He manages another snicker, wincing again. "I have tried cooking without salt, actually. You can manage it if you substitute it with something else."

"You can add things that already have salt in them like cheese or whatever, but that doesn't work for cookies."

"... Now I'm tempted to try and make cheese cookies."

"It can be done, although they're not my favorite. I like a pumpkin cookie Raney makes."

"Oh? If you know the recipe you can bother the cooks to make it."

"I know it, yeah. Maybe I will. It's more of an autumn cookie though."

"...Edarial. You awake?"

"Mmmhmmm," he assures. Hand pat.

"Words, please."

"Words, right," he mumbles. "Okay, uh - which words? All of them? I don't have a dictionary..."

"Those words will suffice. Just enough to convince me you aren't drifting off. Cricket says I talk in my sleep, but I don't make intelligible sentences, and I don't think most people even do that much."

"You talk in your sleep?"

"Yep. Random words. Cricket's language and Marlese both. Is that interesting?"