"Well, we have a control room where we watch what she sees and listen to what she hears and so on, and we talk about what she should do and we have a control panel we can use to direct her feelings and thoughts and desires in directions that we think are helpful to her? Recently I've been helping her find ways to get back the parts of her life she lost when her family had to move from Minnesota to San Francisco, so I've been getting her to think about those things a lot. Also she was really rude to one of her friends and I've been getting her to look for ways to make up for that."

"Do you have emotions?"

"Yes. Mostly sadness, but not just sadness. I don't think mine are people."

"How would you know? Riley doesn't."

"I guess they could be? Do you think it might just keep going on forever?

You said you were pretty sure your emotions weren't people, is there a way to check?"

"I'm pretty sure because I'm a subtle artist - a telepath - and I'm studying to be a therapist, and part of that involves looking at how people's emotions work. They don't seem like people are directing them, and if I assume someone's directing them anyway, it doesn't seem like they're trying to be helpful. Also, you read to me like you're a person all by yourself, but people back home only have one person-signature, not several."

"Oh. I don't think our world has telepaths. I think we do have people who study how emotions work but Riley isn't one of them so I don't know how much they understand about us."

"I feel like twelve would be a little late to leave, uh, having a talk about the emotion-people who live in your head and... control your thoughts... if that were a known phenomenon... and she has generally responsible parents?"

"I guess it would be, yes. So I guess they must not know we're people?"

"Seems likely. Do you have any way to communicate more, uh, precisely with Riley?"

"No. I guess I could try to persuade the people who make her dreams to give her recurring ones about something?"

"That might work if they're precise and she's good at remembering dreams."

"She sometimes remembers dreams, and they can control her dreams precisely if they make an effort. But I don't know if the dream producers would agree to it. I'll tell them they should."

"What are their, uh, priorities? What kind of dreams do they usually give her?"

"I'm not sure what their priorities are. I think they probably enjoy making dreams, and like entertaining people with them? Recently a lot of the dreams have been about being lost in the corridors of her new school or the streets of her new city, and finding weird places there like a classroom that's set up like a regular one but is being used for gym class."

"These are entertaining to - other - residents of - Riley?"

"Yes."

"Does Riley like them?"

"She hasn't been remembering them much lately. She likes some of the ones she remembers."

"I mean while she's having them. Do humans in your world have nightmares?"

"They do. She doesn't enjoy the dreams about being lost when she's having them, she enjoys some of the other dreams she has though."

"It seems sort of mean to make someone have dreams they won't like and don't know why they're happening to entertain other people."

"I suppose so. Do you think we should try to get them to only give her happy dreams? I think Fear, Disgust, Anger and I would find it annoying to never get to be in control while she's dreaming, but I guess we can cope.

Though that's still assuming we can convince the dream producers to do things differently, and we might not be able to."

"What exactly is the, uh, relationship between you - emotions - being in control and the dreams' content?"

"Well. I like dealing with stuff like Riley losing important things forever or realizing she made a terrible mistake, but I don't have much idea about what to do about Riley flying through a beautiful landscape. So even when it's just a dream and it doesn't really matter if she reacts to things appropriately, I'd rather operate the controls during the dreams about loss and let Joy handle them during the dreams about flying. But I suppose I could try to stay away from the controls at night even when we get dreams about sad stuff."