"One of our friends may come by later who'd want to meet Rúmil but she's not a priority for us today."

"I am sure my mother would be delighted to give you a ride back to her home, if that's convenient. Mother, will you see to it they have a way to get back to the palace eventually, I have apartments for them here -"

"They can make another shuttle, right?"

"Sure." She rummages in her desk, pulls out two pretty bracelet-things. "These'll pretend to be chips for you. They have money, they'll let you into your rooms...Timothy, you're in the left wing, third floor, Cam I know you said you didn't need to sleep but I got you a room anyway, right wing, second floor."

"So far apart! We're not telepathic, what if we wanted to talk amongst ourselves and didn't have other technological solutions for that." He puts on a bracelet.

"I do apologize! Given more advance notice I could wrangle closer ones. I take it you do have other technological solutions for that?"

"Yeah, we have computers. Mine's fancier, it requires brain surgery." He waves it around a bit; he has been using it to look up poems and such all along.

"How do those work -"

"Uh, do you want me to explain the computation, the projector, the underlying knowledge base I've been searching, the messaging protocol between the computers, the brain interface, or something else - I know the answer is 'all of them' where do you want me to start."

" - computation, then the underlying knowledge base -"

"Okay! Comp sci 101!" And he starts with logic gates and goes from there as they head to her house.

She's a terrible driver; some of this might be attributable to the fascinating conversation. They get to the house. "Girls! Time-travellers!"

"That's a new one." She is balancing two tiny babies on the back of her giant dog. "Hi, time-travellers!"

"When did they time-travel from?"

"Elsewhen," says Cam. He carefully does not look at the giant dog. He had forgotten there was going to be a giant dog.

The toddlers on the giant dog steer her towards the time-travellers; she doesn't take much steering. She bounds over and eagerly sniffs them.

"She doesn't bite," she says to Cam. "The babies do, though."

"Do not," the baby in front objects, and topples; Huan gracefully flops sideways to catch her.

"I wouldn't dream of accusing any of them."

"Do too!" cries the second toddler, and clambers off Huan to try to touch Cam's wings.

And is grabbed. "Hey hey hey, those look delicate -"

"They're not, they can touch them."

She releases the babies. The babies touch the wings. The babies are delighted about the wings and say so with high-pitched sounds that mostly only their siblings can interpret. Tyelcormë combs Huan's hair back flat. "Hi!"

"Hi."

"What're the wings made out of?"