She's not the only one in the pool.

That's not unusual. He will only attract her attention if it gets crowded enough that they have to share a lane.

No, it's not that crowded.

Swim swim.

She pauses to drink water, another thirty laps later.

...huh. Maybe it is her.

He'll ask after she's done, interrupting exercise is not nice.

She swims for about an hour and a half altogether, then gets out.

And someone gets out of the pool a few seconds after she does and— "Excuse me?" he calls.

She looks around.

Here's another grey who was in the pool with her. He slows down when she stops walking. "Hi! Are you by any chance Pelape Milath?"

"- yes, that's me."

"Oh wow that's so awesome—I read your website, I recognized you from the photo, it's so cool to meet you!"

"Oh! Uh, I'm glad you like it. What's your name -"

"I'm Sahde. Sahde Patam. And yeah, I really like it, I signed up to its news feeds. I—this is maybe not good moment to talk—"

"I was just going to the showers."

He beams. "I'm pretty much done with my laps too."

"Arcball?" she asks, heading showerward.

"When I'm bored, but I'm usually more interested in the—other stuff, politics and all that, particularly foreign policy."

"Neat. I can't overdo it but it's fun."

"Overdo it?"

"Make it too high a proportion of the blog."

"Why not?"

"Less clearly in-caste."

"—oh. Right. Is it, ah, exactly twenty percent of the website?"

"The rules are unclear about this kind of income - potential interpretations range from 'number of posts' through 'number of words' through 'percentage of visitor time' through 'degree of influence over donations and prediction market activity', so I mostly just have to make sure that nobody's out to get me and if any judge looked at the blog it'd just look like an arcball blog and not something else."

"...wow that sounds kinda really annoying."

"Yes."

"Is there no way to ask hypothetically what exactly would count? Although I guess who would you even ask—"

"I could write judges' offices but they'd still have individual discretion if it ever came up and that looks like I'm deliberately trying to game the system."

"Hmm, and I don't suppose a hypothetical—like, not mentioning your website at all—but then again who else is even doing that, it's just you." There's a fair amount of admiration in his voice.

"There are other statistics-heavy grey-run websites."

"Sure, but most of them are about arcball."

"I picked arcball because most of them are about other sports, but I take your point."

Grin. "What made you pick that? Most greys pick—well, greyer stuff."

"Well, I'm half orange, there's that."

"Now it makes complete sense," he says, still grinning. "I'm half orange too but ended up in the other ambiguously grey slash orange profession."

"See, when people only know I'm half orange they say 'oh, you must teach two year olds to swim'."

"Perhaps I'm a bit less caste-deterministic than most people. And publishing statistics about various international economic indexes doesn't strike me as particularly orange."

"It's not. If I'd been born in that one test city I wouldn't do this, though, I'd be in med school."

"I honestly have no idea what I'd have done in that one test city, med school would've probably been near the top of the list but I think making such a list would just make me feel sad."

"...why?"

"Because then I'd have it way more explicit in front of me all of the careers that'll just never be mine because of an accident of birth. Not that I hate sex work or anything, but it—would not be near the top of the list."

"I think I'd do all right with any set of options except grey. If it had to be orange in particular because of my mom, that wouldn't be abstractly fair but it'd be good enough."

"What's wrong with grey in particular?"

"I have a balance disorder."

"—oh, yeah, that'd do it. I think I make an okay grey and I'd make an okay orange and a terrible purple and an absolutely awful red but I'd do well in blue or green or yellow."

"Purple'd be next worst but it'd be okay, there's just - more choices."

"I suppose it wouldn't be so bad to be the entrepreneurial type of purple but I'm not sure I would be particularly suited for that, or enough to beat the prior odds."

Here are the showers.

"Yeah, I haven't spent that much time thinking about what I'd do purple."

He nods. "But alas, until we have FTL and can have an experimental caste-flexible or even casteless planet it's all speculation." He goes to find his stuff in a locker.

"At least while it's still excruciatingly hard to swap through Miolee grey, anyway. For some reason none of the Mioleens want to be grey in a country where that means anything."

"Well, given how Mioleens used to be red it's not really surprising. Greys hate reds," he says, making a face.

"Cops hate reds, and not even all of them, but yeah, sampling bias abounds." She wrings out her hair.

"Yeah, sampling bias is right, from their perspective they just get in trouble whenever they run into greys and are not properly deferential and 'sir' and 'ma'am' a lot and even then it's a game of chance."

"Yeah. My dad grumbles about it, he's a cop. Anyway I don't think they have a problem with stats bloggers or sex workers but the ones who'd rather be grey in Anitam than casteless in Miolee are few and far between and then I'd have to swap back, you know?"

"Yeah. I haven't looked much into it, are many people swapping to Miolee?"

"Some but mostly purples."

"Huh. What's in it for them?"

"They get to do other-caste stuff? And most of the Mioleens have purple-compatible skills, same as most of the ex-reds here did, a lot of them can drive and stuff, so when they want out of permaspring they declare purple."

"Aha. Makes sense, yeah."

She sighs and shrugs. She starts changing into non-swim clothes.

Sigh is right. He also starts changing.

"Would you in fact try to swap into Miolee if there were more grey swaps?"

"Probably, yeah."

"Seems like a great injustice that there aren't, then."

"It might pick up once Miolee's gotten more batches from other countries, who knows."

"Am I guessing correctly that you'd go either yellow or green if given the choice?"

"Orange'd be fine and I can do the accent and have the relatives and everything, but yeah I'd strongly consider any of the three."

"I think all things considered I'd like to be blue—politician, maybe judge—but that's an outside perspective, maybe there are hidden horrors I haven't thought of."

"I'd like to be blue too but it'd be an extra handicap I don't need to try it on no assets, which is what I'd get if I tried going through Miolee even if someone from Miolee wanted to be grey in Anitam and also someone blue in Anitam wanted to be casteless in Miolee."

"Yeah, just pipe dreams. And I'm not sure I'd have preferred to have been born blue, I don't know what the effective isolation from other castes would've done to my worldview."

"I think I would've been all right, although I suppose I might have estranged my blue extended family and wound up handicapped that way."

"Might you?"

"I am not naturally tactful."

"Ah, I see how that might be a problem. Maybe they have lessons on this?"

"I assume they do. I'm not sure how much that masks actual political disagreement and have no idea how blue families handle it when they have those."

"Maybe they're so used to it they have cultural norms for decoupling work from social?" he suggests.

"That would be smart but I'm not sure they're that smart."

"Maybe not," he concedes. "But given the way the Anitami government works, I don't think they'd get much done if they let too much political rivalry leak into their personal relationships."

"How do you figure?"

"Our government is not a model of moral purity, to put it mildly. And when the way to get things done is asking the right person for the right favor, it seems like it wouldn't do to be disliked by too many right people."

"That just means that the ones who get anywhere are the ones who are good at navigating that, it doesn't suggest that no one gets pushed to the margins." She's all dressed at this point, and jerks her head toward the exit.

He is also dressed. He follows her. "Yeah, I suppose you're right. It does sound like the kind of knowledge and skill that's at least amenable to training and maybe even passed down generations, though."

"Maybe I would've been fine."

"You're probably smart enough to have picked it up if you needed to, to the extent that's a general intelligence thing."

"I think there's an extent to which social skills are separate, but it couldn't hurt."

"Yeah, probably."

"I don't think either of my parents would like being blue."

"They're cop and...?"

"Teacher. Grey one-year-olds."

"Ah, yeah, I can see how that wouldn't transfer. My father has cop and military background, I think he might find himself taking a liking to being in a position of power. My mother was a nanny, though, she wouldn't have. But patrilinear here."

"I guess my dad might do very local politics okay if he'd been raised to it. He's a very local sort of person. My mom would probably just travel and go to fancy blue parties and slum it in downscale restaurants while figuring this was very exciting."

"Your mother sounds interesting."

"She's fun. Very eclectic interests."

Grin. "So, I have a client in half an hour so I should get going, but are you free tomorrow evening?"

"- uh, technically, yes -"

Eyebrow raise. "Should I assume that's a no on the followup question of whether you wanna have dinner with me?"

"I don't date greys."

"—oh, I suppose that would make sense, wouldn't it. Well, just as friends? You seem nice and interesting and I'd love to get to be your friend."

"- yeah. I'd like that."

"Awesome. Here's my email—" He has a business card. "We'll figure time and place out, if you don't have a favorite restaurant or somewhere you've been dying to go to in mind already. I should get going, though."

"See you tomorrow!"

"See you." Off he goes!

She emails him two restaurant options (sandwich place, fried dumpling place).

He tosses a coin and picks the fried dumpling place.

And she's there at dinnertime, dressed in the same outfit she put on post-swimming but in different colors.

Sahde isn't in the same outfit but pretty much just as casual.

"Hi! Nice to see you again."

"You too, how are you doing?"

"I'm great! How about you?"

"Doing fine. My little sister's recital is tomorrow and she's freaking out but I managed to get some work done around her."

"Ooh that's cool, what does she dance?"

"Modern rhythmic is her focus, she wants to do background dance for singers or something like that, but she does a few kinds."

"That's awesome. Why'd she pick that?"

"It was one of the things she aptitude tested for and she likes the music that goes with it. And it's doable solo. She likes social and pair dancing too, but it's harder to practice on your own and she likes the flexible schedule."

He nods. "So she doesn't have your qualms with being assigned grey."

"It works okay for her. And my dad."

"My little brother is probably gonna go the same route as my father, and my little sister is too small to really have a track."

"She one or two?"

"Two, he's four."

"Three's pretty good."

"They're actually half-siblings, my mother died when I was less than two and my father remarried."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"Thank you. It's been a while, and I don't live with my father anymore. We've had our—differences." He shrugs. "But I still see my siblings every now and then."

"I don't make enough money to live alone anywhere that doesn't price in the assumption that all the grey residents know self-defense so it doesn't matter if the area's high crime."

"My father made us get self-defense training so that wouldn't have been a problem but I do actually manage to get enough money to not have to deal with that."

"Lucky you. I got special tutoring in how to fall safely that didn't include the rest of the martial art."

"Why specifically how to fall safely? The balance issues?"

"Yeah. If you ever see me go over and do a cool roll that's not me being randomly dramatic that's me tripping and recovering."

He covers his mouth with a hand to hide a smile. "I don't endorse wanting to witness that someday."

"Well, it happens a lot, so you may be in luck."

He purses his lips but is still smiling when he lowers his hand. "So, should we order? What would you recommend?"

"The onion beef ones are good but so are the cheese ones."

"Hmm I think I'm gonna go with cheese."

"I'm gonna try the spicy chicken, I haven't had those before."

They soon receive baskets of dumplings!

Dumplings!

"So why'd you decide to start the website?"

"Uh, I had a good math teacher, when I was two and went to an intercaste school, and at first I tried to get him to stop, er, relating everything to grey interests, but then I got worried about my career prospects and went back when I dropped out later, and he helped me figure out what had already been done and which sport would be good to cover and so on."

Nod. "Did you consider any other options than that?"

"Yeah. I got pushed into teaching swim lessons, which I tried - I could do it if the alternative was going on social services but the blog is better. For a while I went along with an attempt to push me into every obscure non-locomoting sport - I'm tolerable at archery - but I wasn't good enough to compete professionally at any of them. Could have tried to skip all the legwork usual towards a detective sort of position, possibly via nepotism, I followed my dad to work a few times - culture was miserable, I would have hated everyone there except him, I have that problem in a lot of possible grey fields. Could have made book traditionally but there's a lot of competition for that and it's not interesting or creative in the same way."

"What was the culture like?"

"Uh - it's not trivial to describe in a way that doesn't sound even more judgmental than I mean to be. You ever read about how oranges get 'compassion burnout' from having to put all their cases through bureaucracy and having lots of them every day? The cops didn't bother having anything to burn out in the first place."

"Yeah I can see that."

"They're not all terrible, some of them are nice at least some of the time to victims or sympathetic perps, but they're handling it like - they go in and do things because that's what cops do - not because there's any underlying reason for why cops do those things."

He nods. "I never interacted much with them, when I was younger and my father worked in law enforcement but, yeah, that fits."

"It's probably different department to department and precinct to precinct, honestly, but finding one that would work for me would be really difficult and one doesn't typically get full control over assignments like that."

Nod. "And the underlying—thing that permits this sort of culture to exist and develop in the first place is a bit more widespread."

"Yeah. The year I was three school was horrible."

"People pick on you 'cause of the balance or something more—general? Or, well, both."

"The first year of school my mom was my class's primary teacher. I stuck close to her and got other kids in trouble pretty casually if they bothered me. My mom's school only has one-year-olds, so after that I went to an intercaste school, which only covered through age two. Then I couldn't get into any plausible specialty schools because they all have fitness tests or military service requirements, and I mainstreamed grey and - I mean, the balance thing was typical as a target, and I got tripped and knocked over more than I got anything else in particular, but I didn't get as much crap as the wheelchair sports teams. I think it was an intersection of not having anything visibly wrong with me as an excuse and the lack of culture fit. I marked time till I could drop out and then self-taught from there, my parents worried about my being caste-nonconforming and think it'll bite me later but I just couldn't stick it out another year ahead in all the academics and pathetic in all the gym."

"I'm sorry," he sighs. "I didn't really have anything people picked on me for, per se, but I used to try to stand up for the kids who were picked on and we often got slotted together. I used to fight back something fierce, though."

"I got that advice once. Tried it. I needed fifteen stitches afterwards."

"...yeowch."

"Yeah."

"I'm—really glad you got out of there."

"Me too."

"Let's talk about happier things. What d'you do between the awesome blog and swimming?"

"I watch my sister when my parents are busy, I go to arcball games and take notes. I read a lot."

"What do you like to read?"

"Mix of old fiction - only Anitami or hand-translated, the thing I like about old fiction doesn't survive machine translation reliably - and sorta popular-level nonfiction, I don't drill deep into most topics to the point where I can go around nibbling on legit research papers but I read the sort of thing nonspecialist greens would read. Like, uh, I liked Mountains, Ilata Imentami, it's cultural geography."

"That's cool! What is it you like about old fiction?"

"The stuff that's still read is usually still read because it's good along multiple axes - cultural resonance and linguistic sophistication disappear in machine translation but a good manual translation can keep it or transform it."

"...you know, I never thought about it like that before. Maybe I should give it a try."

"If you tell me what your taste's like generally I can recommend something."

"I like some science fiction, but more for the—exploration of our capabilities, of the ways society would or could be—that aspect. So that's sort of hit-and-miss, when it's miss it misses badly but when it's hit it's pretty good. I like stuff that explores the way society—is, the day-to-day things, the way people live their lives, especially in other castes and other cultures. And I like speculative fiction."

"Science fiction about future technology gets incredibly dated so it's convenient that's not the kind you're into. Hmm, how do you feel about time travel?"

"Intrigued!"

"Try Pahmo Alti's Thousand Tomorrows."

He grabs his pocket everything and writes that down. "Thanks!"

"You're welcome!"

"I like some nonfiction, too, but it's usually some pretty specific stuff. Blue stuff."

"Like biographies or like transcripts of debates on credit policy?"

"Bit o' both, and also some of the more—sciencey parts, I guess those would be mostly green but I can't imagine blues don't learn some of that social psychology and economics."

"I'm sure they do, yeah, just in distilled form."

"Maybe I should get some distilled versions and see what's up with those."

"Let me know if they're interesting."

"You know, I'd actually expect them to, I'd stereotypically expect that blues probably don't care about the subject matter as much as greens do so the author had better make it otherwise interesting."

"But they don't need all blues to pop out of school ready to do things, they can mostly live off investments."

"I suppose that's true, they wouldn't need to make it that much more otherwise-interesting."

"I wonder if blues' teachers have a hard time interesting the students in things when on no level are the things going to be necessary in later life per se."

"I dunno, I like to think that I'd still want to learn stuff and work even if I didn't have to to eat."

"Oh, sure, some of 'em, I guess maybe there's selective blue schools, but even the kids who don't want to, of whom I assume there are many, still need to show up to class."

"I suppose. On the other hand that might make for some clever ways of holding kids' attention in class."

"When I was a kid I loved a lot of the games they market to little blues, maybe they play those all day."

"Ooh, what sorts of games?"

"Especially realistic civ-builder and city-manager sort of games. My favorite was Planet Tehapla."

"Oh I've actually heard of that one. Never played it, though, and I used to be more into puzzle games and some old-school platformers."

"I've tried some puzzle games but most of them seem too wheel-spinny to me."

Giggle. "I guess they can be that."

"For a timewaster on the train trips too short to really read, I like the arty little apps? Where you drop sand or draw snowflakes or something."

"The types of puzzle games I tend to like are more—I wanna say hardcore without sounding lame but I don't think there's a way to do that—when I'm looking for timewasters I mostly listen to music."

"I listen to music too but it's not an activity all by itself, for me."

"Depends on the music, for me. Some I can have in the background, listen to it while I'm doing other stuff, but some I often like to just—listen to as a full-time activity."

"Maybe there's a deeper level of music appreciation than I've reached at which that would make sense. Sometimes I won't do very much else while listening to something new, or something with a story to it."

"Musicals are a very good example of that, yeah."

"A lot of them are too cheesy for me, but some of them are nice."

"The cheesiness is sometimes part of the appeal!—sometimes."

"Sometimes?"

"I mean, there's some cheesiness that's inherent to the medium, you can only break out into song so many times in random situations before it becomes a bit too much, right? But some musicals are good enough, musically and stuff, that you can just straightforwardly enjoy them—Oahk is a particularly moving example, I do recommend—and others embrace the silliness and only sometimes succeed."

"I've listened to one song from Oahk but not the whole thing. I forget the title, the chorus ends 'let's doom our children too' or something like that."

"'Let's damn our children too,' yeah, the song's A Future Bright. On the side of musicals that embrace the silliness you have ones like Amantana, which is one of the good ones, and The Erethani Prince, which is laughably terrible and incredibly melodramatic."

"I don't think I've heard any songs from those." She writes them down on her everything.

"Erethani Prince fails lots of, like, basic history and sociology checks and just tries to coast on the whole thing about, like, 'well everyone is grey in Ereith right?' And fails to make a compelling plot out of it."

"How does it coast on that?"

"Everything's an excuse for dueling or fighting, everyone's settling disputes by physical competitions, a bunch of scenes and songs are about being physically superior to your political opponent..."

"Sounds cheesily musical."

"Exactly!"

"Ereith is conceptually really interesting but I know very little about it in practice."

"I used to follow this Erethani blogger and she had a very scathing review of this musical and it's how I heard about it in the first place so then I just had to check it out and it was exactly as bad as she said it was."

"Ha. I wonder if there's anything that bad about Anitam? We're better represented internationally but people manage to be pretty darn ignorant..."

"Maybe something that leans real hard on the lack of centralized power? Or the patrilinearity, but Anitam's not the only place with that..."

"Patrilineality's not really complicated enough to get wrong."

"Yeah, I wasn't thinking complicated so much as 'let's try to make this a plot point and fail'."

"Like, hm, what's that story where somebody's pretending to be a man to get the wrong kind of birth control while the Oahkar are marching around forcing it on everyone, and then gets pregnant?"

"Oh, I know which one you mean, what's it called, is it War Secrets...?"

"Something like that, it'll hit me some random day if I don't look it up first."

"Maybe the corruption thing, although I'm not sure there isn't enough variance in that to make it hard to actually get it wrong."

"How do you mean?"

"Not being a blue, I'm not sure how much corruption there actually is and how much it actually accomplishes but I don't think it's too unlikely that any fictional depiction of it might have in fact happened at some point, so it might be difficult to be absurd enough."

"Yeah, fair enough."

And he's done with his food.

"Dessert?" she wonders, when she's finished with hers.

"Sounds good! I'll again take suggestions."

"Sweet cheese or cherry chocolate, I'll get whichever you don't."

"Cheese again, then."

And they have sweet cheese and cherry chocolate. Pelape takes the liberty of trading one of each across the plates.

Yum. This restaurant was a good idea!

"I'm glad you like the dumplings."

"Dessert's good too, and so was the company. I'd like to do this again."

"Sounds good! When works for you, I assume you have a more constrained schedule than I do - I have a thing on the ninth and games to watch every day divisible by five but other than that nothing really -"

"I'm free most evenings, my recording sessions are usually in the day and I don't have too many clients when it's not spring."

"Makes sense. Eighth?"

"Sounds good!"

"Sandwich place or somewhere else?"

"Sandwich place sounds good."

"See you then."

"See you!"

She shows up at the agreed upon time at the sandwich place.

"Hi again! Good to see you!"

"You too, how goes?"

"I'm pretty great, how about you? How'd your sister's recital go?"

"Pretty well! She wasn't objectively the star of the show but she put on a good performance."

"That's awesome. Do you have videos of it? And would she be okay with you sharing?"

"I didn't do amateur videography but there might be one up on the school website..." She pulls out her everything and rummages, and finds the result to link him to.

"Thanks! I'll watch it later." And they're at a restaurant so table and: "Recommendations here?"

"Pickle beef with whatever your favorite cheese is."

He orders that!

She gets a battered and fried eggplant lamb salsa sandwich. "Trade you half for half."

"Deal." He cuts his in half.

Trade executed. She takes a bite. "Do you not eat out much that you've been wanting recommendations? Do you cook?"

"Yeah. It's not that I don't enjoy eating out, but when I was little and used to live with my mum we mostly cooked together and nowadays I've kept the habit; I know the way I like to cook stuff and it's cheaper even though that's not a constraint anymore."

"Makes sense. My dad is a completely hopeless cook; my mom and I aren't bad but we wind up preferring cheap delivery a lot of the time."

"I get cheap delivery every now and then but mostly when I don't have time to cook," he nods.

"It's not objectively good but there's this picklepot place, greasy and salty and arrives in these flimsy containers, that we usually order from when we have a movie night."

He giggles. "Why that for movie night?"

"I don't remember! It was already tradition by the time I was one."

"That's cute. What kinds of movies do you usually watch?"

"It's all over the place. The last four were a Fen Neli biopic, the latest installment in the Shukal Bunch's Music and Merriment Fest by Sofa's request, that time travel movie from last winter Time for Everything, and a cop drama I forget the title of."

"That is all over the place. Which one did you like best?"

"Time for Everything. It was silly but I didn't catch any plot holes until after it was over, which is good for a time travel movie."

He giggles again. "That's high praise! I'll have to watch it sometime."

"It's not the best time travel movie, I think that's When I Was Twice."

"I've heard of that one but didn't watch on the principle of 'time travel movies tend to be awful,' what's that one like?"

"Uh, do you want the plot summary or the go-home-and-get-a-copy-no-spoilers -"

"Hmm, if you tell me it's worth actually watching the latter, otherwise hit me with everything."

"I don't know enough about your taste in movies to be sure but I really like it - it - it passes up obvious boring opportunities and finds good ones instead. It's very sweet. Its fault is that it makes a lot of use of montages, I guess, but if it didn't it'd be sixteen hours long? Don't watch it if you hate montages."

"I don't mind montages. I'll watch it."

"Let me know what you think of it."

"I will. I tend to go more for the SF&F cluster—I guess one could characterise time travel as that but it's not exactly what I mean."

"What is?"

"Like—okay I really like stuff that explores alien societies, especially ones that are actually smart and thoughtful about their castes. I like sci-fi that treats the lightspeed limit like the hard problem it is instead of handwaving it away. I like exploration of alternate presents where some technological changes were or weren't made, and I like speculative future fiction, particularly when it's careful about its societal worldbuilding. Does this paint a picture?"

"Hm, I think so. Social science fiction."

"Yeah, that sounds like a good description."

"Ever read Twelve?"

"Don't think so, what's it about? Guessing twelve castes?"

"Yes, and they're divided up really unusually, it's been called 'the anti-Blackout' but I think it's - differently different."

"Why anti-Blackout? And how different?"

"Well, Blackout's one or rather no castes, see, and they get categorized near each other but Twelve's by a Voan and intended for a more... serious audience, and has different background tropes."

"Interesting. I'll need to look it up."

"It only got hand-translated recently, might be why you haven't seen it."

"Ah, makes sense. Machine-translated books aren't that bad, though."

"Machine translation is good enough for browsing the internet but there are a lot of books published in the world and all else being equal native or hand-translated is just better."

"Well yeah, I said not that bad, it's still mostly not good. But yeah I haven't read any machine-translated books in a while. You should add a fiction recommendation thing to your blog, you have good taste."

"I could maybe add a link to a side blog for that, I don't want to unnecessarily dilute the site's greyness."

"—oh right yeah there's that constraint. Ugh."

"Ugh!"

"Well, I'll at least get to appreciate your good taste, selfishly."

"You're very lucky. Although I'll consider doing a side blog for fiction, it's not like I don't write down all my opinions anyway."

He giggles. "And Amenta thanks you for it. Are there many opinions other than the predictions you wish you could post but don't?"

"I don't mean anything specific, I just write a lot. I wouldn't mind copying the fiction musings to a blog and lightly editing."

"I know, I just meant in general, whether there was something in the category."

"Sometimes I want to go a little heavier on the politics than I do but it's usually not worth the extra arcball articles."

"I think I might have watched arcball three times in my life."

"It's a good sport as they go. Well, as the ones with enough to write statistics articles about go, I'd probably have had a slightly easier time generating a sincere interest in gymnastics but I think there's less material without the team aspect and the noisy performance information."

"On the other hand creating a statistical model for it might be a genuinely interesting problem."

"Maybe I'll whip something up in time for the next national meet."

He grins. "That'd be impressive."

"I'm mostly being facetious but I'll probably at least write a post about how I'd start if I were going to."

"Maybe I'll pick it up and do it," he says, archly. "Giving you the credits for the idea, of course."

"Go for it. If I decide I wish I'd kept it I'll do figure skating."

"I'd have to brush up on my stats, I haven't read anything about it other than your blog since I picked up a book on it for fun a couple of years ago."

"My reference is Soshal's Statistical Encyclopedia but it might not be the best textbook to learn from."

"I might only need to learn the more advanced stuff, I'm generally good with maths."

"That's handy."

"Yeah! Got picked on a bit when I was a kid because of that but after I bit one of the other kids hard enough to draw blood they stopped that."

"Grey schools have so much of a problem, and I don't know what should be done about it."

"Yeah. After that I actually got in some more trouble when I tried to stand up for other kids that were being bullied. First time I broke my arm was when a bunch of other kids decided to gang up on me but at least that the school punished."

"Well, it's good that they draw lines sometimes somewhere."

"It's just kids being kids. Some roughhousing is normal at that age. Do you remember when you were that age? Surely you wouldn't have wanted adults meddling. Oh he'll be better next week. It builds character," he recites.

"You'll never fit in with your peers if you call in authority figures over every little thing. She says you fell down the stairs, and let's be honest, that sounds like something you'd do. Of course emotions were running high after the big match. I'm sure your little friends were just upset that you didn't qualify for the next grade of team, they want to play with you, don't you want to play with them. Why do you even have encrypted documents."

"—encrypted documents?"

"So people wouldn't read my diary."

"...and why were they trying to read your diary, what the fuck."

"Because they were jerks."

Sigh. "Grey kids."

"In fairness, there were less jerky grey kids. They just weren't as memorable."

"I mean yeah but they also didn't do anything about the jerks. It's, like you said, a problem."

"I don't think I blame my fellow three year olds for not standing between me and jerks. That's a lot to put on a kid who has to keep coming back to school every day themselves too."

"I don't blame them, but... like, I'd thank them? And it would've been much easier to have had some help."

"Yeah. There were some okay kids who'd give me notes if I missed school and stuff, but it would've been nice to have backup and friends."

"To be honest the problem is more that the kids—don't really feel like they can, I think? Or, there's the whole environment set up, if the adults don't do anything or even approve of it, then the kids keep the status quo. And then they grow up into adults who think that's just a normal part of growing up, and the bullied kids won't actually go work at grey schools."

"Yeah, you get the teacher track orange kids floating around but they're not really embedded in the same way."

"Yeah. They mean well, but..."

"Have to be respectful of the other caste's culture. I wonder if oranges' teachers are less - conformist that way -"

"How do you mean?"

"Because an orange doesn't have to be respectful of orange culture in the same way, doesn't have to recuse their judgment."

"Ah, yeah, makes sense. But it's not even just that, because even if there was an orange that didn't recuse judgment they wouldn't be hired or would be fired fairly quickly if it looked like they were interfering with grey culture."

"There's probably room for the occasional teacher to spend their entire career trying to make a difference and playing career politics well enough to keep their job - or just start a weird little grey school with different rules where everyone knows what's up when they enroll - but yeah it's not a good overall pressure."

"And one teacher can't really change much large-scale."

"Oranges do curriculum guidelines and consult on education policy but it'd take a long careful career."

"Maybe that's worth some careful persuasion."

"Is that the sort of thing you do in your spare time?"

"Usually with less grand consequences but I'm only six, gimme some time yet."

"I'll expect results in four years."

"Yes, ma'am. Sounds like a reasonable timeframe."

Giggle.

"Have anyone you need persuading? You could throw me at them."

"Ooh, not on hand but I'll keep an eye out."

"Speaking of persuasion, I've been talking to this green online, we have a date next week."

"The kind you persuade to do educational research or the kind you persuade to write you odes?"

"Neither, more the kind that builds crazy inventions."

"What kind of crazy?"

He unconsciously reaches for his hair in a "I'm not green, but" gesture, but aborts it before it completes. "He has to use a wheelchair, and apparently he added all sorts of cool stuff that aren't technically robotics to it."

"'Not technically robotics' is - I guess much less risky these days, here -"

"I don't think he publishes any not-technically-robotics stuff he makes, he called it a hobby."

"Safer still. I will be curious to hear about his nifty chair."

"I'll tell you all about it. He said it can go as fast as a motorcycle."

"Ooooh."

"I hope he wears a helmet, and I can't really think where he'd ride that wheelchair but." Shrug.

"Racetrack when it's not in use?"

"That might be it. Maybe he'll show me."

"Get video."

"Good idea, I will."

The sandwiches are long gone. "Dessert?"

"Sure! I think I'll have a chocolate pudding."

She puts in the order for that and a cherry syrup pot on their table's tablet. Their desserts arrive a couple minutes later.

Pudding. Nom!

Pudding theft!

"Hey!" he laughs, and steals some of her cherry thing, too.

She giggles. "It's more efficient to share desserts. My old favorite restaurant used to have tasting plates you could get with combinations of tiny portions of anything on the menu that looked good, but they shut down."

"Aww, why did they? That sounds like a really cool idea."

"It was great! I was so annoyed when they closed without inspiring a genre."

"I should add that to my list of things to persuade people of, next time I meet an enterprising purple."

"And they'll say, 'a restaurant your friend liked that went out of business, sounds like a real winner, Sahde'."

"Well, the reason it went out of business was probably not because of that specific idea, restaurants can have good ideas and still go under!"

"I don't know what it was, though."

"I think restaurants in general are not super profitable? And it's actually pretty hard to keep one going. It could be just that."

"I mean, yes, but if I were an enterprising purple I wouldn't want to retry an enterprising idea that was the only known distinguishing characteristic of a failed restaurant."

"Oh, no, I'm not thinking this should be the enterprising idea, just an idea on top of whatever else they had going for their potential restaurant."

"Ah, that might go over better."

"Yeah, 'cause then if it is the reason they failed this new place won't and then we'll know. And if it's not, it will hopefully be a successful enough restaurants that others will want to copy."

"Maybe."

"And if it doesn't work all I lost is the opportunity to convince an enterprising purple of an idea." Pause. "So in fact I should think harder about ideas to give enterprising purples."

"Enterprising purples only come along so often."

"Exactly! Scarce resource, they are, need to make the best of them."

"Have you advised any on their careers before?"

"I'm not actually sure. Some clients like pillow talk and some of them are enterprising and some pillow talk eventually turns to my having opinions about what an enterprising person should do but I never treated those conversations as anything serious and I don't think my clients did, either. I've gone on more serious dates with a couple of purples but they weren't the enterprising sort."