"Bwuahaha. I expect visible improvements of the world at large within the next month, or else I will make faces!"

"Oh no! Not faces! I'm not even partially inoculated because you don't very strongly resemble your past lives!"

"Yeeees. All part of my evil plan. You will do exactly what you were planning to do anyway!"

"But I will do it under scrutiny. Oh no."

"Scrutiny with offers of assistance. The worst of all things."

"Shines are a bit like automata in the programming," muses Sylvi. "I was surprised at how easy programming the horse was, actually."

"Ooo. I might have to pick up basic knowledge of shines, my teacher liked having things be there and concrete."

Sylvi reaches for a spot of light on her desk and plants her finger at its edge and tugs on it. It separates, only to be immediately replaced with more sunshine, but persists where she dragged it. "There you go. Puppet shine. Play with it, get a feel for it. When I'm caught up on notebooks or bored sick of 'em I'll walk you through basic shine syntax."

"Thank you!" says Avedan, grinning. He retrieves the book of math, opens it to where he left off, and starts playing with the little shine as he reads.

"I didn't use to travel a lot - uh, but I wasn't very comfortable living with my teacher anymore after I turned in one of my co-prentices for raping the girl down the street, so I moved out in pretty short order once Public Order saying he was convicted didn't soften them up on the subject. And then I thought I might as well go to Lapis."

Avedan blinks. "Wow, they - were upset with you for that? I'm so sorry, that's terrible."

"Various combinations of thought I was mistaken, thought I was being too hard on him, and thought I ought to have sided with the household over the neighbor girl," sighs Sylvi.

"... Too hard on someone for rape by turning them in to the authorities," says Avedan blankly. "And - side with the household over the victim of a crime? What?!"

"I didn't have prolonged conversations with them about their reasons for being annoyed with me, so I can't be very detailed about same," says Sylvi. "I determined that they were annoyed with me and put my belongings in my horse and got some camp gear and left."

"Well I'm - genuinely sorry it went that way. It was idiotic of them to be annoyed with you for doing what is essentially the right thing."

"Thanks. I don't - miss them a lot, or anything, I'm mostly fine about having to move, I'm just kind of disappointed in them."

"Yeah. That makes sense. I'm - rather disappointed in them, too, and I don't even know them."

"Well, if they hadn't been - awful about it, I wouldn't have been in Lapis this early and you would have had to wait for me, although I'm not sure if that would've made it easier to handle or not."

"True. I also would have been attacked by parrots for longer, having to find a password and all."

"Charp has the password, it's just only supposed to distribute it after whoever finds it and reads the letters intended for them and engages it in enough conversation to convince it that they're invested in figuring out the thing."

"Well, yeah, but in the meantime I would have still been attacked by parrots."

"Oh no, the horror?" giggles Sylvi.

"The terror. The absolute gut-wrenching terror."