"No, do you want to go parading around naked and see what it does to you?"

"I think I'll pass! I've done my time in prison. It was not very fun."

"Well, I'm not keen to try it either, and it turns out persons shaped like animals are exempt from the rule so Cricket couldn't try it even if I cared to shave him."

"I wonder what heuristics Milliways uses for that kind of thing."

"No idea! If it were catering to Elves it'd allow nudity but not loose hair."

"Elves seem like a one-off, though, whereas humans are everywhere."

"We're an infestation."

"Better than it being us, we're kind of - set up to be hard to accommodate - in a way humans aren't."

"Little bit."

"Such a versatile non-utility-monster species you are!"

"Yep! With assorted possible magic systems! I'm not as urgent as Cam about it but I'm hoping someone comes through who can detach spirit animals - did you ever hear about how that works -"

"Mitros described it, yeah, it sounds - like a very frustrating hard-to-solve problem - the way I imagine species whose babies are more people-ish feel about abortion, only moreso -"

"A bit, yes. Some people bind their familiars and then just send them off to do whatever but they don't speak the language and have an awful time learning it."

"I assume you've been set up with the latest in machine translation -"

"The latest in machine translation needs a corpus. Familiar languages don't even come with writing."

Nod. "And Milliways isn't really a great solution - your magic system can't do translation?"

"If it could Fannar would've done it."

" - fair enough."

"It's complicated in exactly the wrong way."

"A way not amenable to flowcharts, you mean."

"It'd get pretty ridiculous. Telepathy is doable, a kind that doesn't use language might be."

"Would it be permanent or something you'd have to cast to have a conversation... is that a design thing or just a mystery until the spell first goes..."

"Mitros has a one way thing that lets him talk in people's heads, he casts it and then he can do that for awhile."

" - ooooh. I am jealous."

"I picked it up because the chart was around but I seldom see the point."