"I wasn't good at it because I disagreed with most of my society's priorities! I thought it was sad that we ate people's brains, and I was conflicted about the mind-controlled slaves, and I wanted to go out and live a life with lots of deep and varied experiences myself instead of eating the brains of other people who had, and I thought that even though we were much much smarter than most other kinds of people and lived longer than a lot of them and had mind-control magic, that didn't mean we were better than everyone and should enslave them and eat their brains and also be really condescending about it. —also this language is really bad for answering multiple questions at once, I can't say two different things at the same time. My native language was good for that but I can't pronounce it anymore."

"What are the other kinds of aliens on your planet?"

"There were humans there but they seemed different from the humans here, although the differences were subtle and might have been mostly cultural. There were a lot of other kinds of people that mostly don't have names in English but a bunch of them were pretty similar to humans I think. Just about the only kind of people that my society respected was dragons," she borrows the term from Common, "because they could live as long as we could and often lived longer, and they could be as smart as we were and were sometimes smarter, and they were often much more magically powerful. But I think even though people respected them, they were usually kind of mad about it. My society wasn't very nice."

"It doesn't sound it. How exactly did you determine how smart you were relative to humans? You don't seem like an unusually smart human in casual conversation but I suppose it's possible turning into a human made you stupider."

"We can measure a lot of things about minds with the same magic that lets us control them! I didn't keep all my advantages but I can still think on multiple separate attention tracks, which humans can't ordinarily do, and I seem to think almost as fast as I used to, and be almost as good at doing math, and I am okay with trading a little bit of intelligence for the ability to feel human emotions because human emotions are really really nice."

"Do you know math we as a planet don't?"

"I haven't looked into local math because I'm not especially interested in it but I very well might! My society did know a lot of math that local humans didn't, and I think a lot of people thought humans weren't smart enough to learn some of our math at all, though I'm not sure they were right."

"So was your society really technologically advanced?"

"We had really different technology from this society. It's hard to measure who is more advanced because the priorities were so different. I think so far I like this society better, though. Grocery stores are really neat and as far as I know they don't contain any brains for sale."

"I think you can get monkey brains in some parts of Asia but don't remember where I heard that. Did your society have radios or anything? How about magic, like what transformed you, do you know how to do any of that?"

"All the magic I knew how to do was magic that worked based on alien biology I don't have anymore. It takes a long time to learn the more universal kinds. I know a little bit of magical theory but not very much. I'm not sure what a radio is to know whether we had them, but we did have time travel at one point, and then stopped having it on purpose for complicated reasons, but I think the Elder Brain still knows how to reinvent it if we need it for something."

"The Elder Brain is an astonishingly stupid name! I'm also really curious about the complicated reasons. Do you want to come over to my house for dinner?"

"Hearing you call things stupid for shallow reasons reminds me of my society's inadequate justifications for enslaving people and eating their brains and makes me sad! I would love to come over to your house for dinner, I expect it to involve lots of novel experiences."

"I don't want to enslave anyone or eat their brains and consider my unwillingness to do that one of the many ways in which I am better than most people although I think in that particular respect I am not especially unusual in this day and age! Our car is this way."

"We're not going to have brains for dinner. We're going to have lasagna."

"Lasagna is a novel food so I am very interested to try it!" she says to Elspeth; and to Isabella, "I think your shallow dismissal of perspectives you don't seem to understand could be dangerous in the same way that my society's shallow dismissal of less intelligent species was dangerous, because it enables you to think that other people's well-being and preferences are worth less than your own because you consider them inferior to you! But I'm not sure of that because I am unsure of most things because I am deeply and intensely aware of the vast amounts of context and background information that I'm missing at all times!"

"If you are aware of a perspective from which 'the Elder Brain' is not a stupid name, or observe me making any decisions based on it being a stupid name which may harm people, I invite you to let me know."

"It's an imperfect translation but I have an expectation that most other translations I could have tried would also have sounded stupid to you because you lack the cultural background to understand them in depth and I can't pronounce multiple distinct words at the same time with my human mouth."

"I wanna be able to pronounce multiple distinct words at the same time."

"I want that too! It was really useful and I miss it a lot especially now that I'm in a conversation with two different people at the same time and sometimes get asked several questions in a row and have trouble prioritizing which to answer first and sometimes can't say all of the answers in sequence while taking what I think is probably a reasonable length of conversational turn! Judging lengths of conversational turn is hard."

"How do aliens do it?"

"Both participants in a conversation can be speaking and listening on multiple tracks simultaneously! But even before I left I knew that humans can't speak and listen fluently at the same time, not even with only one track of each."

Bella lets them into the house. "Ned, I have invited an alien over for dinner!"

"She usedta eat brains but doesn't any more!"

"That sounds incredibly concerning even with the last clause!"