Oh good. They try a salad bar kind of thing at dinner, modeling taking some greens and then piling them with nuts and cheese and dressing and chickpeas and turkey.

She'll eat all of it besides the dressing and the turkey. Also a bunch of the nuts go into her pockets instead of her salad.

Nuts are a good choice of pocket food and they will allow it.

The next day the two of them are going to stage a conversation about their families! Mikko is married. He has two children and one grandchild so far. Chioss is divorced and doesn't have any children. Mikko has more cousins than Chioss, but he doesn't have any siblings and she has a sister.

Eefa has at least heard of all these concepts, with the exception of "grandchild".

Well, if she doesn't ask, she will not learn what such things are. They do ask her if she has any siblings.

She has apparently never thought about whether she has any siblings!

Aunts and uncles? Grandparents?

She has heard those terms before.

They put on another movie. In this one a little purple is orphaned due to an offscreen industrial accident at the place her parents work. One set of grandparents takes her in; she has an uncle the same age as her and one much older, and she likes them, but she gets offended when people think she and her uncle are twins, because they're not even siblings. She spends the movie processing grief about her parents and training the kitten her grandparents get her and trying to make friends at her new school and gradually personalizing her side of the room she shares with her same-aged uncle.

This movie is weird and Eefa doesn't get it. She wanders off halfway through the movie.

Valid. The next day they will try one about a trio of grey fish who travel around saving other fish of various colors from riptides and barracudas and ship propellor intakes.

And other grey fish?

The barracudas are fish, sort of, but they're drawn very differently from all the people-fish and they don't talk and they're sort of shiny brown.

"Are they Wolves*?"

*The concept translates as having the threatening connotations the word wolves might have to a child, but being specific and scarier and stranger.

"Those? They're barracudas. Barracudas are a real kind of animal, but real fish don't talk or have feelings, so when the barracudas eat them it's not hurting any people."

That is a very obvious excuse to hurt things.

"I know you don't like to eat meat, but people can eat lots of kinds of plants. I don't think barracudas can do that."

"That's sad."

She thinks for a bit.

"You're not a barracuda."

"I'm not a barracuda. I don't actually know how long a person can be healthy without eating meat, but I know eating can be complicated for you and it's not dangerous for a short time."

"I eat meat sometimes. Just don't like it when someone goes out and kills something and brings it back and tells me to eat it."

"- well, if it matters, we don't kill the animals ourselves, they're farmed."

"Is that like how the Before Ones did it?" 

"I'm not sure who those are."

That's really weird thing for Mikkos to lie about!

"Were the Before Ones people from where you grew up?"