"I have friends I see a few times a year for lunch and friends I go climbing with and talk about life and stuff and friends I wave to every day but never really talk to and there's Theo who's more of a colleague except without a formal organizational context and I'm not sure how to sum up my relationship with Sara at all but it's different from all my other relationships."

"I mean, any given pair of people might wind up with more or less opportunity to hang out, over time, depending on their job duties and stuff."

"So do you basically not have qualitatively different relationships?"

"There's work-context superior-inferior relationships."

"Huh. I mean, humans have those, but humans have lots of kinds of relationships. What kind of thing is friendship, for you?"

"I kind of just mean anyone I'd rather be around than a random stranger."

"That's really broad! I have friends like that and friendly acquaintances and situationally there are people like Crystal who I'd want to be around if something really scary were happening and then there are celebrities and then there's this total asshole with an amazing singing voice who sings arias for hours every evening and it'd depend on whether we had to talk..."

"Maybe some Yeerks have that. I have spent roughly a week out of the Pool and there isn't that much to do in the Pool."

"It's weird that you didn't spend all your time before the past week constructing a complicated social web since there wasn't much else to do."

"There's some of that but we're mostly pretty young, talking by electrical pulse is less private and a little slower than talking aloud, and we're also supposed to spend a lot of time on education, and it's hard to find anyone in particular, or tell who someone nearby is without asking them. Some people are more aggressively social than me but I mostly drifted around eavesdropping in my downtime."

"I wouldn't like that."

"Neither do we."

"That sucks! It's also really weird, though, like... humans who grew up in natural human environments don't always think they're great, but a hunter-gatherer tribe out in a forest somewhere has every fundamental human thing! Maybe not the coolest versions of everything but they aren't missing out on whole categories of things humans care about. Except flying, I guess, if you think of that as its own thing and not a cooler version of running or climbing or jumping."

"- well, in a state of nature we do have hosts, the Gedds. They're too stupid to do much of anything without us which makes them kind of shitty company but it's company, and they can talk and see and stuff."

Nod. "And you like having headmates and can't make your own?"

"I'm not sure what that means but, uh, yeah, we prefer having hosts."

"Some people insist they have more people than bodies. Humans, anyway. I am agnostic about whether that's a real thing but maybe you'll find out. But at any rate you prefer hosts for the company, not just the hands?"

"People vary on whether it'd be plenty if we could shapeshift like Andalites and turn into whatever all by ourselves. I think it sounds miserable, though."

"Does it matter what kind of person you share with or will just anyone do?"

"It's pretty common to get attached to whoever one's regular host is but some people don't. It's not unheard of to actually dislike your host but if it were really common I'd think I'd see more people ceding theirs to someone else, there's more Yeerks than hosts."

"What goes into it besides familiarity?"

"I don't think I understand the question."

This is a really striking amount of detail on preferences other than not being tortured and doing or not doing what's right. It seems - expensive to come up with. Like Jess probably spent an entire day's worth of hours on Avatar: The Last Airbender to be prepared to comment on any part of it, and then she's also prepared to talk about romance, and types of friendship, and - how many other topics can she talk about in that much detail? How long has she spent having fun at other people's expense because she's a demon to be able to present herself the way she's doing now?

Maybe he's barking up the wrong tree, who knows.

"I mean, if you have two Yeerks, and one of them likes their host and one of them doesn't really care, is that just down to what the Yeerks are like? Or does it depend on things about them and their hosts, like if they have shared interests or something?"

<It's a coincidence she's seen Avatar but I think most people have opinions about most things that have happened to or around them if they think about it a bit.>

"I think some of it's the Yeerks, I don't remember hearing about anyone who hopped between a lot of hosts and then said they wanted to keep a specific one, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone didn't like their first and kept their second. I wouldn't think shared interests would be the thing, though."