"Thanks."

"I'm not being completely altruistic, here. We'll do better if we can keep occupied."

"So will I, I'm pretty sure. I just... can't seem to get myself organized."

"Anything I can help with?"

"Maybe! I don't know!"

"But nothing so straightforward as alphabetizing your notes or something."

"Yeah, no, it's a problem with like... how I'm thinking about stuff. I'm used to just having something I want to get done and then jumping right in and doing it. I'd be great at coming up with ways for you guys to help if I was still like that, but instead I constantly forget everything I want to do and it all seems really hard until I'm right in the middle of it."

"Has this happened before?"

"I've never been in a situation like this before. I get in these really useless moods sometimes... I guess this could be what it looks like when I'm most of the way into a really useless mood but also have a lot of really urgent stuff to do."

"Is it urgent?"

"Not urgent urgent, I guess. But I don't want to spend a month sleeping on the grass and not helping you guys with anything."

"I'm not sure I get the significance of sleeping in the grass."

"One of the things I want to do is build myself a house? Sleeping on the grass is preferable to sleeping with all the rest of you until then?"

"Why didn't you take a mattress?"

"I don't care that much about having a mattress."

"...Okay."

"It's... sleeping on the grass isn't bad exactly, it's not uncomfortable, but it's happening because I can't get myself together enough to figure out how to build a house, and I want to be together enough to figure out how to build a house?"

"Okay, that makes sense."

"Yeah."

"Unfortunately while all of us come from the Duke's household one way or another he wasn't patronizing any of us for architecture."

He laughs.

"Leuska and Delsmiar were both there for their species magics, Yttren was a gardener, Luvai was one of the guards, Fondai and Proust worked in the kitchens, Mirrin was a messenger, Panga was a physician's apprentice, and Amalta, Kaleith and I all slipped in under Mama's patronage."

"'Mama's patronage'?"

"Stereotypically enough, our elf parent was a brilliant geneticist."

"I wouldn't have known it was a stereotype if you hadn't told me," he says.