"I don't seem to have any ability to steer the dreams or I'd - I don't know, look for key moments instead of further excerpts from her learning to master goldfish."

"Do you want me to give you highlights?"

"Yes please. Uh, we probably want to be surer than we currently are before - do you have her notebooks?"

"I do. I - wish I could have gotten her consent for this specific situation before she died, but alas. I did not account for this at all," says Aydanci dryly. "Do please forgive me. Tentatively, you may read them."

And Lu is handing him a parrot. "One for me, one for you. I have no idea what the trapper thinks I'm doing with them."

"He might," says Kidan, taking the parrot, "think you have a strange parrot obsession. Like a collector, but with parrot pets."

"Well, at any rate after a while we'll have a breeding population and can have them get busy making more parrots, in case we live to be a hundred and twenty but not longer than that and this batch's lifespan won't cut it. And then the trapper need no longer concern himself with my parrot obsession."

"As long as you never tell him that you're planning on getting a breeding population going. That'll make it worse."

"I was thinking we could order them if they didn't do it on their own. But we're not in a terribly desperate hurry for chicks, these ones are still young."

"Right, let's put that off for a while. I don't want to order parrots to have sex. Not to mention, we'll have to be careful about them to prevent inbreeding."

"The first generation shouldn't be related. If they lay eggs we can tell those chicks not to have sex with their siblings, I suppose."

"That's - helpful. Okay, and then if there is a third generation we tell them to not have sex with either siblings or cousins."

"Yep. That's us, the parrot dormitory monitors," she giggles. Her parrot is starting to becalm. She pets it. "These are prettier than the kind Kib and Aydanci left, those gray ones. But it's still a pity about the cats getting at them, that would've been cheaper if we'd just bred the grays."

"Yeah. Oh, well. How should we try and prevent another situation with the cats again, I mean, obviously the same thing's not going to happen, but if we - er, restart, they'll have at least twenty years left alone to fend off cats on their lonesome."

"We can put in a complicated door mechanism for the roof aviary and tell the parrots how to work it without divulging the secret to any cats?"

"Maybe also have them defend each other if attacked. A cat would attack one and the others nearby come by and peck at it to make it go away or something."

"Ooh, yes. Although I don't want them to actually hurt the cats. They might belong to somebody. Who, one, would be upset about the cats, and two, might follow the parrots home and figure out the door mechanism and get at the cache. I suppose Charp could also guard the parrots, but I don't want the neighbors wondering about the unattended golem on the roof."

"Let's not upset any cat owners," he agrees. His parrot's calmed enough to tolerate petting, and he takes advantage of this fact. "Uh - make them incapable of hurting living creatures. Might doom a few parrots to horrific death by cat, which I would feel bad about, but it's the smarter decision."

"I'm not sure about that - I mean, the parrots are live too. Just keep them from going for the eyes or anything, cats aren't by and large masochists."

"That works, I'm much happier with that outcome."

Lu hugs her parrot and leans on Kidan.

He smiles at her, leaning over to kiss her forehead before going back to petting his own parrot. Goooood parrot. Nice parrot. Become the lifelong servant of Kidan and his inevitable reincarnations. Bwuah. Ha. Ha.