"That sounds, uh, good for the animals, probably? Man, they have so many things here, I lost count of how many different flavors of drinks they had last night."

"Oh, I think they're just showing off at a certain point, any decent bar will make you something off-menu if you tell them what you want."

"So what you're saying is the overwhelmingly vast assortment I saw didn't even begin to cover it."

"Oh yeah, they're big on the local artisanal stuff in that place. And that's just cocktails, I like a place back home that does interesting, like, horchata and juice blends and stuff like that."

"Wow. What's that like?"

"My favorite is the pineapple coconut thing, I hear it's a classic combo on Earths but I'm from Atarale so I'd never had either one before they were imported."

"I haven't heard about Atarale yet."

"It's off Eclipse, so we get eclipses there, but I didn't get magic, more's the pity, so here I am. There's two kinds of people there, us and these birdy kinda guys."

"Sounds exciting."

"Oh, uh, before you look us up and see the one thing everyone knows about Atarale if they know anything about Atarale? Yes we used to eat their eggs, yeah that was fucked up, no we don't do it any more. - I mean, not real ones. The replicators have it programmed in now."

Convenient how lunch gives him an excuse to not talk for a second while he considers and disregards responses like but isn't it still cannibalism and do they only lay fertilized eggs and oh gods where did the eggs in my omelet not come from.

"In my country if your parents are both slaves they assume you're not fit for anything better and give you a tattoo before you're even old enough to talk so everyone knows never to respect you and also you're not allowed to have a name."

"Wow. Being from fucked up worlds earbump. - oh, right, humans don't do earbumps."

"...I'd offer to try to learn how but it sounds like a bad habit to be in given the existence of Yeerks. I think I get what you mean, though."

"Yeerks actually can't get in through our ears, we have four earholes if you look close, see? And the route from the ear to the brain is too complicated. But smart anyway."

"On a less grim note, did I miss anything interesting last night or do people here mostly just talk a lot when they're drunk?"

"I mean, on my planet we also have dance-offs, but nobody seemed into it yesterday."

"Dance-offs?"

"Where everybody claps and stomps and croons, and two people dance along to it, and the crowd'll try to trip them up, and get faster, and whoever falls over or does something stupid first loses."

"Sounds like fun."

"It is! But you need a bunch of people to have the right energy going."

"I guess you would. They've got dances where I come from but not like that."

"What are yours like?"

"You hold hands in a couple of circles and usually do specific fixed sets of steps, usually to music, and... in general you're not trying to do it better than other people, you're trying to do it with them."

"Huh. Sounds sort of relaxing? But not as creative."

"Yeah, I don't think of it as creative at all. But your way would be."