"I'll add that as an annotation!" She taps her computer, which she wears strapped to her arm.

"I ought to head out. It was good meeting you."

She leaves. Her brother doesn't.

"Can I help you with anything?"

"I expect you can! I was wondering what the, uh, minimum story you'd accept is, because I can't follow that and I'm not going to try."

"If you just want to tell me about what you had for breakfast I can take that."

"I ate food today, it's true. And I thought about how stupid the war is. And I noticed that the sky was a nice color. - What about you?"

"Closed up shop on a place called Beach and came to man this booth here! It doesn't have a super good safety rating, since we're new here and don't have great stats on how likely locals are to attack us, but I figured it would be fine. How come you think the war's stupid?"

"Do I get more stuff if I answer? I can also tip you off about when people are likely to get violent."

"That'd be useful, my husband would be real annoyed if we had to clear out the savings account to get a resurrection for the baby."

"No one is going to get offended by the baby unless you do something on the scale of going out and finding someone else's baby and killing it slowly. Or - this is a lot of terrible things that you probably won't do, but I want to list them exhaustively so you can know there's nothing else on the list - if you did something sexual to a child, or committed rape, or kidnapped a bunch of young women and tortured them, or maybe even if it were a bunch of young men, under the circumstances. Or if you went to war and pretended to surrender and then that was a trick and you killed the people you pretended to surrender to. Or otherwise attacked them. Or if you killed your father or your mother. Or I guess if someone conquered Vanda Nossëo and you stood aside and let it happen, but I don't think Sesat would concern ourselves with the baby in that case, I think everyone would have other things to worry about. And even in those cases, your husband could come take the baby and we'd hand it over, if he didn't drag his heels about it or start off saying he wasn't going to. - Obviously that's only the subset of ways you could offend people that would be bad enough for something to happen to your child because of it, but if you don't do any of that, they're safe. I mean, other than diseases and accidents and... I was trying to reassure you but I'm not sure listing awful things that could hurt your baby is as good a strategy for that as I was thinking it might be when I started on it."

"I'm not mostly worried someone'll attack him, but if someone stabbed me and I fell over I could land on him," she explains.

"You are unlikely to get stabbed because you're a woman and it's not really the done thing to get women involved in violence, and you're not a serf or something - if you were a serf and you insulted me I'd hit you, but you're not, not that you should insult me but I'd have to respond to it differently - I guess if you said 'I only look like a human woman but actually where I come from lots of people who look like human women are in the army, and I also think you're trash and I deserve to own you' then I would attack you."

"My species doesn't really have gender," she says. "But I'd get fired if I said something like that."

"Okay, well, if you're not really a woman as I understand women and you don't want to get into a fight, then you shouldn't mortally insult anyone, or challenge anyone to a duel, or... work for Azan or something?"

"Yeah nah they don't have us float between booths in different polities on the same planet. If they decided to get rid of this one I'd wind up on another planet entirely probably."

"Yeah. You never did tell me if I'd get more stuff for telling you why the war is stupid."

"I can count it as a story."

But will she.

"Because it always is. There are so many things I'd rather be doing than dealing with the fact that people can't just agree that Sesat has the land and the people that it has and leave us alone. It never improves anything. And Azan is - ruthless and terrible, but I don't think they're cruel to their own people, and I want us to be able to leave them alone about it without that causing more problems."

She nods sympathetically. "Did you want tokens or something else?"

"I was thinking I'd get some meat, if you could explain how to open it and stuff, and, I don't know, what else do you recommend?"

"A knife'll do it, or grabbing it on either side of one of these notches and pulling hard. If you cook your food, or heat or light your house, with fire you might want a heater or one of these kettle-things you can cook stuff in or a lamp, or if you plan to keep using fire for that you might want an air filter, get some of the smoke out of your face."

"Are the heaters and kettle-things safer if there are kids or senile people around?"

"Safer than a fire, by a lot, except insofar as they might not already know to keep their hands off, but they do heat up. You can hang the heater from a ceiling and that works fine."

"I might want both but I also want the meat and I'm not sure what else I should say..."

"How many siblings do you have and what are your relationships like? What was your favorite toy as a kid? What do you usually do to earn money and how do you feel about that?" she suggests.