He leeeans on sketching things out. He's a visual sort of teacher and learner, apparently. "...So if you do it that way instead of just crashing the whole thing when the number's too big, it tries to change the variable type, and if that doesn't work it can just go back to the first part and say 'oops' and let you try again."

Lick, lick the ice cream. Ice cream is delicious.

"That makes it sound like eighty percent of code is error handling."

"Nnnnot necessarily inaccurate if you're really really thorough about it? But it depends on what you're coding. You need error handling the most when dealing with users. Someone told me, always assume the user is an idiot. And getting lazy with your error handling isn't instant doom, it's just frustrating to deal with if something breaks later."

She giggles at 'always assume the user is an idiot.'

"Yeah, I can see that."

"Anyway, ice cream."

He thinks of something and almost blushes just considering it, but he decides that Sadde probably would find it delightful. "I want to try the strawberry, d'you mind?"

"Sure." She offers him her ice cream, but the blush gives her a hint that may not be exactly what he's going for here.

She is...... Correct. Kiss!

Kiss! Cold ice cream kiss! Those are among her favorites!

It's a novel sensation to Terry, like pretty much every kind of kiss.

He does really like the double taste of Sadde and strawberry, though. "Mmm."

She pulls away and giggles. "You're too adorable."

"I'd say I try, but I'm not actually specifically trying for that! Two days ago I might have thought of that and not done it though, so you're either having a good or bad influence on me."

"How could it possibly be a bad influence when it leads to kisses?"

"Inadvisable kisses are, in fact a thing. I admit I have not experienced any examples personally though."

"When it leads to consensual kisses," she amends.

Nod, nod. Nom, nom. He starts discussing ideas for using Loop, especially in conjunction with cards they already have. Infinite electricity from looped water turbine, anyone?

She has such a good boyfriend. Infinite energy is the obvious application—are there any nonobvious ones?

Prison/safe haven/isolating a fight from innocents. Weapons testing zone. Really interesting mazes if you do it right, look at this sketch...

"Let's try to make the need for weapons obsolete in our martian empire, yes?"

"Stupidly powerful magic of any description might as well be a weapon but I agree on wanting to not develop anything specifically to hurt."

"Yeah. I mean, way I see it 'magic' is no more a weapon than 'the strong force.' The fact that you can in fact cause a whole lot of destruction when you play with it is more about intent than a feature of the thing."

"There's an old sci-fi novel I read... Can't remember the title. Some aliens are planning an invasion of human space for whatever reason. So, they send a scout to make reports. The scout says 'the humans don't realize that they are not alone in the universe. None of their ships even have weapons. It will be an effortless victory.' So, they invade. And are very very surprised when their ships start dying to ship propulsion systems hastily remounted on moons, mining lasers, and so on. The point of that story is that anything can be improvised as a weapon. But I get yours too."

"Exactly. But on the other hand, guns are, pretty much, exclusively weapons. Like, maybe you could find some other good use for them but it's still very much the case that they were made to hurt things. So we may not be able to do much about people who might want to use magic or whatever else as weapons, but at least those..."

"I think we really need to talk to a real sorcerer to get rolling on this, once we get some more cards anyway."

"I'm not sure how we'd go about it, though. 'Hello, so, we have magical artifacts that can do much more than you can, but that's okay, we won't misuse them, we just want to take over Mars with them.'"

"'We just want some introductory magic lessons, we'll pay you for your time.' And give more details or offer something else as needed."