They should do tourist things. Lalita hasn't been to this planet in a while, and he didn't do very many tourist things while he was here. They should go look at famous landmarks and kiss in front of them!

Whee!

"You could end up with a race even if you didn't mean to," he points out. "Once somebody knows it can be done, if they're smart enough to figure out how, they will. Whoever you drop it on, they're probably going to publish about it, and not everybody who reads them is going to be from the same culture."

"That's true. I'm not sure what that implies about where I should drop the plans, though."

"Hmmmm... the first one and the last one," he says. "You're right about those guys being Federation-friendly, and the last bunch has that 'historical neutrality' thing going for them; if there's going to be a race, having them in it might keep it low-key."

Isabella considers this suggestion, then nods, and narrows her scan to get an idea of the layout of the offices of the best candidate from the northern country. "Do you want to make one of the drops?"

"Sure!"

"D'you have a preference for which?"

"Nah," he says cheerfully.

Ooh ooh, Lalita can help with that too!

He can! He is welcome to. They will get it done faster that way. This will leave time for distraction. Especially since the scientists at that particular physics lab like to put in a late morning, apparently.

Excellent. Time for distraction is one of his favourite kinds of time.

"Oh, don't you just - I guess you can't target the beam that precisely," he says. "I can target the beam that precisely!"

"You can? You can land this," she says, holding up the plans, "on somebody's desk and we don't have to go down?"

"Sure," he shrugs.

"Well," blinks Isabella. "All right then, that's much safer."

He grins brightly.

She hands over the plans and gestures at the transporter pad, smiling back.

"We get out of here and falsify the logs to suggest that we left yesterday," says Isabella, plopping into the pilot's chair and punching up impulse power.

"Sounds good to me," says Lalita. He leans over her chair and kisses the top of her head.

"Ooh, pretty nebulas. They're pretty," he says sagely.

"Why yes, they are! We can take some pictures and use them as PADD wallpaper," laughs Isabella.

He giggles and leans over the back of her chair again to hug her.

Hugs! Isabella likes hugs. She likes having company. This was a good idea.

They are presently out of the system and warping along to the next. Isabella falsifies her records. "...Say, do you want to double-check my track-covering? No one's actually dug suspiciously around in my travel logs so I don't know if I'm doing a competent job at making it look like I wasn't around when 'warp was discovered' in the relevant systems."

"Sure," he says, and plops down in the copilot's chair and starts nosing around on the computer system.

Isabella's logs show - at least to casual inspection - that while she has visited all the systems that have mysteriously acquired warp (except for El'el Prime, which acquired warp while she was active but is not listed at all), it was never at the right time (except once when it was; it would not do to always be slightly off). Sometimes she finishes her surveys of those systems a week before, sometimes a month later.

"You should probably arrange to not have visited more of them," he comments. "Even with shifting the timing, it's a pattern, and it's not like there's a crowd of other ships visiting these systems that you can get lost in. There's the problem of refueling history, but I'm sure we can figure out a way around that if we try."

"All right," says Isabella. "I'll turn off logging for more places. Money would be tighter, if I turned in fewer logs - but I have you along to mitigate that, now, don't I."

"Yes you do!" he says, grinning.

"Aren't you convenient!"

"I'm so convenient," he agrees. "And now I think I'm going to go make convenient dinner."

"Mmm, dinner. What's for dinner?"

"I don't know yet!" he says serenely. "I'll think of something. Any preferences?"

"It's a special occasion," she says, referring to the warp drop. "Let's un-vacuum-seal a steak. I'm sure you'll do something marvelous with it."

"I absolutely will," he says, and kisses her, and wanders off to the kitchen.

Isabella puts on a Klingon opera soundtrack and reads along in the libretto as best she can. She's getting better!

From the kitchen, Lalita is singing along.

This is cute and he is cute!

And soon he is also bringing her steak!

Mmmmm steak. "Oh my. What did you do to it, this is really good - did you break into the bayleaves...? Mmmm."

"Magic," he says whimsically, and kisses her forehead, and sits down to eat.

She laughs. "Oh, would that it existed."

"I've been a magician!" he says.

"I just bet you have!" she laughs. "I'll be polite and not ask you the tricks of your trade."

"Good for you," he giggles.

"Did you have any particularly interesting tricks, though?"

"Lots!" he says, nodding. "I was a stage pickpocket for a while - that was lots of fun. And when I quit that, I tried card tricks next. Came in handy for cheating at poker."

"Why would you need to cheat at poker when you could just steal large amounts of money from yourself?"

He shrugs. "I had to get the large amounts of money from somewhere, didn't I?"

"You've had all those careers. They didn't suffice?"

"I've had all those careers and... that was one of them?" he says, puzzled.

"There's playing poker professionally, but you said cheating."

"Yes...? I can tell that this is a problem, I just can't tell why," he says.

"Because it's unfair for people who agreed to stake their money only on a game with certain rules."

"Well, I guess I'm unfair, then," he says mildly.

"Ah."

He shrugs.

"Anything else I might find an unpleasant surprise? I violate the Prime Directive as my life's work, I don't care about legality per se - but if I didn't care about ethics I wouldn't be violating the Prime Directive as my life's work."

"I've also killed some people," he says. "Some of them might have deserved it. I don't know, I wasn't really thinking about it at the time."

"I would expect it would be - easier, yes."

"Please don't kill anyone else unless it's defensively necessary."

"...As opposed to what?" he says, blinking. "I wasn't doing it for kicks before."

"You did not specify. You said some of them might have deserved it, that you weren't thinking about it."

"No, I was thinking about why I needed them to be dead and how I could get them that way without getting in worse trouble," he says. "Usually because they were about to hurt me somehow."

"Perhaps you can lead with that information if you ever have cause to admit to it again to someone who places immense value on sapient life."

"I don't know you well enough to know exactly which things you get worried about," he sighs. "You might think they're obvious, but they're not obvious to me."

"I am worried about - people," says Isabella. "Living. In conditions that are suited to thriving. Being lied to is a relatively minor harm, but I don't like it, and I don't like it happening to others, when there's not some overwhelming reason."

"Well, I'm worried about me living," he says. "And if I have to lie or kill or steal to keep doing that, I will."

"I have a self-preservation instinct of my own. It is very healthy. I avoid situations where successfully obeying it would mean silencing someone else's."

"I - not very much," murmurs Isabella.

"Imagine you're completely alone," he says softly. "If anyone you meet finds out anything true about who you are or where you came from, and gets to the authorities with it, you'll probably be killed. But you have to get money from somewhere, because nothing's free, and you're not sure if you can starve to death but you don't want to find out by trying it. You speak a dozen languages and you're familiar with thousands of years of cultural and political and military history from all over the planet, but nobody ever taught you how to get a job, cook, wash the dishes, do laundry, buy something from a store... you have to figure all that out by yourself, and hope nobody gets suspicious if you do it wrong. That's the world I grew up in. With crime rates hundreds of times what you're used to. 'I avoid situations where I might have to kill somebody' is the kind of thing you only say when you've never had to choose between the street where you'll probably get mugged and the street where you'll probably get arrested."

"I am sorry. I spoke without thinking."

"It's okay," he says wryly. "You didn't know."

"I should have. I turned over my entire life to providing more people the civilization I'm accustomed to, but don't often think about the details of what it means to lack it."

"Sometimes I forget that other people don't remember history as personally as I do," he murmurs.

She nods once. "I'm sorry," she repeats.

Isabella smiles weakly.

Lalita hugs her.

Hugs! Hugs are a good end to misunderstandings.

They are, it's true!