Shavan collects her after school hours.

She's reading one of the books instead of sleeping when he does so; she slides it into the coat pocket and dons the coat and follows him.

More buses run in nyoom-unfriendly weather and this is how he gets home. There's a stop right in front of the school and he passes up the first bus to get an express one that will skip the odd-numbered stops. They spend twelve minutes on the bus and then get off where a block of rowhouses spikes off from the main drag. The houses are each four stories high and two or three rooms wide, though it's impossible to tell from the street how far back they go. Shavan's house is dark purple with gold trim and some spiraly designs in white added on top of the purple. There's a snow sculpture out front, though it's hard to tell what it's supposed to be. He takes off a glove to poke the door security pad and it doesn't open and finally he swears at it softly and taps out a number sequence instead, then lets Cyllene in.

Everything humans build is so marvelous; Cyllene marvels at all of it.  The bus in particular is amazing, this must be at least a little like what boats were like and for.  She loves it.

"DADDY," yells a voice from around the corner as Shavan steps in.

"Hi kiddo!" he calls. "Where's your mom?"

"She is fixing the guest room! I bred a purple horse in my game, come see -"

"I'll look at it in a bit, sweetheart, I -"

"- it's DARK purple with LIGHT purple spots on its BUTT and -"

"- how about you tell Cyllene about it while I talk to your mom?"

"Cyllene come look at the PURPLE HORSE!"

. . . Cyllene knows that a horse is one of those big creatures from outside (which so far she's only seen outside), and she knows what games are and what breeding is, but she has next to no clue how all those things could combine to form a sentence like that.  But yes okay she will come look at the PURPLE HORSE.

There is a drawing of a coltish PURPLE HORSE on a screen that a seven-year-old is gazing at. It has a bunch of text underneath it announcing that the horse's name is AUBERGINE and that its parents are PINKPINK and THE SKY ABOVE and that it has the following numbers associated with its age and speed and health checkup results and so on.

"See, its mom is blue and its dad is pink and so it's purple! It doesn't always work that way, it's got a brother who's white, but this time I fed the mom some lucky hay, which you get by solving puzzles and doing quests and stuff, and so this time I finally got a purple one! You start this game with only NORMAL horse colors and need a lot of lucky hay to get them to be colors like pink and purple."

There's a lot to take in here.

The seven year old continues chattering about it energetically. "So now that I have Aubergine, my new purple horse with the spots on his butt - it's a good thing he's a boy because that means he can have more foals, but this part of my score here will go down if I do too many - anyway I think I'm going to breed him with my paisley roan a few times, I think if I give her enough lucky hay they can have a paisley purple baby, and also my friend has a pink zorse and we are having a real bad time deciding who will get the babies if we breed them but I really want a stripey purple one... they might not even be able to have babies without a LOT of hay though, zorses mostly can't have babies in real life and that means in the game they need the lucky hay. My friend thinks she should keep all the babies and just pay me in tokens but I don't think that's fair and I WON'T breed Aubergine to her zorse if I don't get to keep any babies, but then she said I could keep any that didn't come out very pretty and I said that she was stupid and evil and now she isn't talking to me but she will again tomorrow. My cousin says I should offer to supply all the lucky hay for two babies and agree in advance that one of us gets the first one and the other one gets the second one but what if she changes her mind before the second one? So I want the first, because whoever has the mom horse gets to keep the babies unless they decide to send them to another player, but then SHE might think I won't breed them again if I already have the foal I want..."

. . . Cyllene taps the edge of the screen twice with a questioning look.

"That's my account profile!" She performs computing actions and a different screen pops up. "See, it has my screen name, woolquilt, and it has stuff like my birthday and my email and my scores and my barns - I'm really excited right now about Aubergine but I actually mostly do sheep -" She navigates to her sheep barn, where there are pictures of variously exotic sheep. "I'm trying to get their softness up to 75 but so far the best one I have is 66 and none of her lambs are that good, it sucks."

Nod nod.

She will continue in this vein basically indefinitely if Cyllene sits through it till Shavan's return.

Yes, she does.  It's interesting enough and will presumably be much more so when some basic context gets filled in.

Shavan shows up about fifteen minutes later with a short plump woman on his arm. "Cyllene, this is my wife Zian. And my daughter there is Sesh, if she hasn't introduced herself."

"It's short for Seshikarmia!" says Sesh. "But I like it short."

Wave wave!

"Sesh, can you lend Cyllene your keyboard?"

"No, it's mine and I DON'T have to share."

Shavan sighs. "I suppose. Cyllene, come upstairs with me and I'll find a music app on my computer, I suppose."

Cyllene in her eagerness stands up a little too quickly and trips, but she walks fine the rest of the way upstairs.

Shavan finds a virtual keyboard for Cyllene to make music with and turns her loose on it.

!!

!!!

Oh she can make more than one note on this at the same time??!!!!!!!

She sure can!

They will wait patiently for about fifteen minutes before Shavan feels like he owes it to his wife to prod her about doing magic.

That's not long enough to become proficient at this but she can switch back to the recorder.  It apparently takes more time to create a ball of light than it did to control an existing one; she plays for several minutes with no visible effect.  But then: yes, here's an intangible light source.  Hovering in front of her.

Zian yelps and steps back into her husband's arms; he pats her. "Breathe," he tells her.

Cyllene cuts off her playing mid-note.

"One of the kids touched it," Shavan says. "It didn't hurt him."

"The kid probably thought it was a fancy light projection!"

"Probably, but he still touched it and it still didn't hurt him."