(Her heart is pounding, but)

"W-well, all right. I don't know how to not 'try too hard to be a person' but."

She puts her hands up and shakes her head.

"Nor, obviously, do I."

"You don't have to pay taxes. I assume that makes it easier."

"Ha!"

Su-Yeong covers her mouth.

"Sorry, I just—was hiding in the woods for at least a week before this, and it sucked, but. You're right, I definitely wasn't worrying about taxes there."

(She's still giggling.)

"One of the few generally accepted advantages to hiding in the woods! I've considered it, but I think it'd defeat the purpose to bring a computer and the infrastructure to keep it running, and if I didn't that'd suck."

The beach's dunes thin out until they're only smears of sand on asphalt. The handful of stares they've been receiving ebb; apparently being a gay alien on the beach is substantially weirder than being a gay alien in the streets of San Diego.

Su-Yeong can live with the decreased stares! She isn't actually paying that much attention, though, because:

"What's a computer? And what kinda stuff do you need to keep it running?"

"I am apparently bad at Galaxy Quest - which is to say, explaining things to aliens. Computers are... machines for processing and communicating large amounts of information... and since you can use them to communicate across great distances they are important for being friends with people on the other side of the planet. Which is necessary if you are so bad at making friends that you need to get them from the other side of the planet. Also, video games... which are... kind of very distantly like an improvisational play that has a bunch of ways it can go, and you play one of the parts? Anyway, you need electricity and internet; electricity you could generate in the woods but it'd be annoying, and internet you can basically only get from organizations big enough to put up towers, and they tend not to do that in the woods."

Su-Yeong tries to picture it.

"That sounds… kind of like the telephone network back home. Uh, telephones are magical artifacts that can all connect to each other to transmit sounds. The phone network is smaller than the whole planet, though, and I never had one of my own. My boss did, he's rich. I think mostly rich people and government people use them, and the really important government people can talk to other government people across the country. Maybe the king has a telephone network of other kings? That 'video games' thing sounds… maybe like the kind of thing I'd have to see to understand, right now my brain's just hung up on… do you need a bunch of other actors? Do you put together your own costumes?"

"We have telephones! They're not magic! It is absolutely bizarre that you call your magic telephones that, though I can't actually defend my thesis there."

"You have to know she's not speaking English."

"– right. It's surprisingly difficult to ignore the part where she is very much speaking in English. Telephones are extremely common at least around here, it's surprising if someone doesn't have one. And you don't need a group for most video games because the computer plays as many roles as it needs to. Some video games you can play with a group but I tend not to. It's much less like theater than you're picturing, you – I was going to say you don't dress up but actually dressing up is very important, you just don't do it with your actual body. Um."

She takes out a rectangle, which starts glowing and emitting a picture of the gay alien she's pretending to be. She taps repeatedly through several other pictures, then turns the screen to Su-Yeong.

"This is a picture from a video game. If I were playing it instead of just showing you a picture, I would be 'playing' her, and I could make her climb down to the ground and run around and shoot things with lightning. And the computer would show me the place where she is and the people she interacts with and the things she shoots. And the sounds she makes while climbing."

"Huh! And you move her around without magic? That's really interesting."

Also, pretty. Not just the character's costume, but the image quality and clarity. She's never seen a magical illusion that detailed, though that says more about her personal experience, she supposes.

"It has been said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Which is not strictly true, in theory I could make a rudimentary telephone myself but I could not throw even the saddest little fireball no matter how much I meditate. But I think it's true enough to be getting on with."

"Humans can learn fire magic. Who told you humans can't - right, the World Prosaic."

"That is ridiculously exciting but I do not think it changes the substance of Clarke's Third Law."