Luka raises an eyebrow. "Not therapy questions, I said. I... wouldn't necessarily be unwilling to keep trying under all possible circumstances..." Shrug. It's a weird shrug, overly tense and sort of out of step with the timing that would fit most naturally with his speech.

"Fair enough! You can just take it as an observation, then, and I'll leave it at that."

Ramona can see that Luka is hinting at something but she's not going to grab onto it and run with it. If he wants something, he can say so out loud; Ramona is simply not equipped to read his mind.

Ask ATA to send them to a mindreader next time? she scrawls in her notes.

There doesn't seem to be any sign that he was hoping for any other response. He smiles a little and doesn't seem to have anything else to say. Traveler attempts a Meaningful Look and Luka just watches the door as though he hasn't noticed.

"You're still taking notes?"

"Not, like, case notes, just notes to myself about follow-ups."

Ramona's phone vibrates and she peers at it.

"Food's here! I'll run down and get it. Be right back!"

And she's out the door.

(Luka and Traveler exchange looks.

"She said, quote, 'I'm not sure that any of what I have to offer is actually appropriate for you two, and I probably should have stopped trying much sooner rather than forging ahead,'" Traveler says.

"And now she schemes to do therapy at me and pass messages out of this timeline? What did - " you do to make that happen, Luka doesn't have to say and doesn't get the chance to say.

"I didn't! Other than the food. Are you - " interested in this at all, Traveler doesn't have to say aloud. And can we work together to keep this timeline?

"She could be harmless." Isn't, but could be, and that's what it would take to get Luka on board. "What you want is your problem."

"She doesn't - "

"You made her feel stupid first..."

" - Did you - " compliment her for any particular reason? Are you sure you weren't trying to keep her interested in working with us?

"Absolutely fucking not.")

When Ramona returns Traveler smiles slightly at her.

"Here it is!"

Ramona passes out the food. It's styrofoam trays with noodles and grilled meat and vegetables and a sauce. The things are mostly not touching each other. There are flimsy plastic forks.

"I ... hope you like it." Ramona didn't want to do an extensive what-do-you-like conversation, what with Luka actually starving, but now she wishes she'd put a little more time into it, if it was his first meal in a while.

It’s Traveler who sets on it like a starving person. Luka pauses after his first bite to smile and ask, "Did he tell you why he so badly wanted this?"

"He said... he'd starved you."

"After that I didn't ask any more questions, I just got you some food."

Luka takes a big bite while she's talking and chews rather less than is really wise.

"Oh, he did. For centuries the only person who visited me was my wife, and she - let's just say she was a bit too busy with other things to feed me. I could eat a bug if it crawled close enough to my mouth to catch it with my tongue, but that's all. But before that, when the world was young and we were young, before we had gold-plated skyscrapers to live in, when we were savages who ate whatever our spears could kill - back then - " Luka takes another bite, smaller this time, and swallows quickly so he can keep talking. " - we were still afraid of hunger. And we were still weak. And we each asked ourselves - 'what will happen to me if I'm alone and injured? Will I starve?' And so Traveler and I made promises to each other, promises we repeated and refined when the world was a little older and more of our meals happened at tables and under roofs. We promised each other - " Luka turns to Traveler and speaks as though not only talking about his promise but making it anew. (Traveler just keeps eating.) " - if I have food, if I have beer, then so will you." He turns to Ramona and smiles bitterly. "It was supposed to be a promise, not only to not do this to me, but to never let it happen. But, well, he always loved loopholes."

Traveler's suggestion that Ramona could get them food feels much more therapeutic, now that she has the backstory.

Ramona no longer feels insulted at all -- and indeed, even at the time, she felt confused about it. It's just that this case has been one big guessing game from the start.

"Thanks for explaining. I am so glad you could break your fast here. I can order more food, that's probably not nearly enough --"

"It's a poor guest who shows up hungry and eats his fill, but I'm afraid I can't find it in myself to turn you down."

Then Ramona will take a minute to flip through all the options and see who can deliver the most food the fastest.

She will order twenty pizzas.

No, that doesn't work, the app doesn't let her do that. She will order ten pizzas then.

(She'll attempt to bill ATA, and if that doesn't work, well, she's doing fine, she can afford it.)

While she's doing that, Luka favors Traveler with a skeptical look. Traveler favors Luka with a rather similar expression.

"What?" says Luka. "She bit off more than she could chew but she didn't wrong us." He takes another bite. It is not more than he can chew, though this really speaks to his ability to chew.

"I thought you would expect - since - " Traveler lifts his fork in a gesture, having already finished eating. (The thing he isn't saying is since you're demonstrating so much self-control, I think you've been out for a while, so you should know things about modern Earth, so you should have some idea how therapists work, and I don't expect you to like them much.)

Luka makes a baffled face. Traveler makes a similarly baffled face.

"Don't you and yours - I know I and mine - " (Traveler is not saying haven't enough of the sort of people who would turn to you had bad experiences? Because I haven't been that impressed.)

"The opposite??" Luka says in a tone that suggests that absolutely nothing about this interaction makes any sense to him. But Traveler nods as though this makes perfect sense. "Okay, what - "

"You remember the very bad trip? That's all they have for the truly mad."

Luka makes an understatedly horrified face. "Well, no one is even talk--"

"Yes, but the ups--"

"I was expecting what I've seen - "

"Then I think Ramona is actually competent and could do fine," Traveler says. Luka just takes another bite and makes a skeptical face.

Ramona is just hitting submit on the pizza order when Traveler says she's competent and could do fine.

She clears her throat.

"Um. I don't actually think I could do fine? I think I should have gone with my first instincts and declined your case. I'm sorry."

"At no point since arriving here have I agreed with anyone else about your suitability as a relationship therapist for us. It's unfortunate. Do consider that you've kept your cool this entire time, gotten Luka to be more frank than he's been in many human lifetimes, and noticed and communicated clearly about the ways this situation differs from those you've been trained for. Though I rather imagine some of the problem might be that you would rather speak to more rewarding clients."

"Let me see if I can list all the ways I'm not equipped to help you."

"This is not actually relationship therapy, at least not so far. This is... tense diplomatic negotiations, with torture and lives and stars at stake. And even if it were relationship therapy, I can't help with every case. For some clients, the problem is that they actually want conflicting things, and there is no larger frame in which they can still be well connected despite the very real zero-sum tradeoffs. I don't know this for certain yet, but you two appear to have an irreconcilable conflict that is bigger than your relationship. If that's true, I can't help. On top of all of that, you both speak in riddles. You seem to think that I'm going to read between the lines and guess what you really mean rather than having to say it out loud. I have met many mind readers at this point in my career but I am not one of them."

Ramona pauses there, opens her mouth, closes it again, and shakes her head.

"There are probably more items that belong on that list but I find that I am tired and confused and don't know what they are. And those should be enough. Any one of them should be enough."

"I'm only speaking for myself but if I wanted you to solve my riddles, I might say something like 'I have as many branches as the flowing stream and my deposits feed the people who invest in me; what am I?' rather than acting like someone trying to have a fraught conversation in a second language with someone whom I have yet to receive any particular assurance isn't going to seize upon a technical falsehood or unwisely agreeable phrasing as a reason to claim insult or try to hold me to an unintended bargain."

Does Traveler realize that he's only underscoring Ramona's point?

"It is fair that you didn't trust me to start with; only my most credulous clients do. I'm accustomed to earning trust. This is something different."

"I am not actually smart enough to figure out what you mean, most of the time, and my standard techniques for clearing up confusion, such as repeating back what I think you said, have gone very poorly. As such, I resign from this case."

"You don't need to leave immediately, of course, there's really quite a lot of food on the way."

Well, that won’t lead to instantiating this timeline and getting him the knowledge from it for real.

"I understand," he says in a quiet, choked voice. "I - regret that I have given you the impression that the problem is with your intelligence. I am not half as knowledgeable about North American culture as I would like to be. I was more reluctant than you to even try to engage in this therapy across a significant culture gap and - well, I was impressed by how much you did achieve, but I would be a hypocrite if I were to demand that you keep trying to communicate with us instead of acknowledging the fact that you have done all that you were trained to do and more."

"When I say I'm not smart enough, I don't mean that... I inferred that you thought that, and if only you'd been more diplomatic I wouldn't have come away with that idea."

"I mean that the objective evidence strongly suggests it. You say words, I struggle to figure out what they mean, I try to ask questions or rephrase, I still don't understand. This is what it looks like when I'm just not keeping up."

Or, y'know, it's also what it looks like when people don't just speak plainly, but saying that didn't work either. And Ramona does actually believe that if she had IQ 200 she'd probably be doing a better job. There probably is actually enough data in Traveler and Luka's words for someone smarter than Ramona to squeeze more meaning out of them.

"Well, yes. And it's what it looks like when I don't know enough to speak in a way comprehensible to you - I could try a different register, if it would help; I do have some experience with more colloquial English. Or - I would be interested to know if it would work better if I pretended not to know anything about North America, in case I'm in an uncanny valley of just enough knowledge to obscure how much I don't know, but I rather imagine you might be too tired of trying to speak to me to want to test that."

"I notice that you are arguing with me about the particulars rather than accepting my statement of what I intend to do. Are you going to keep doing that all the way until the pizza comes?"

"You can obviously resign if you want, whatever I have to say about it. I could talk to Luka or stare into space instead, if I'm bothering you."