"Yeah, that."

"It's a good thing you met her, then. There's only one of her."

"There's only one of most people. It's pretty great that she's the one of her that she is, though."

"I mean there's only one person with her kind of magic."

"...What, ever? Ever everywhere?"

"Right now. They're really rare, so rare that it usually works out to there being one at a time."

"I dunno," he says, "it's so totally unlikely that I was the one who got here in the first place out of all the people in all the worlds it could've been, I'm not sure it's that much more unlikely that I happened to meet Keo while I was at it. Seems like she'd be a pretty good person to call if you had a guy trapped in a summoning circle screaming his head off even if she wasn't the summoner's mom."

"I've never heard of her going on trips to foreign countries to deal with things at all like you there," Leekath remarks.

He shrugs. "And how often do you hear about things at all like me?"

"You're very unlikely," Leekath says. "What I mean is I don't think Keo's that easily reachable for people who don't go to school here or know her personally."

"I guess. Get anything interesting from my hhikiiia since last time I asked?"

"A list of things you ate. Now it's listing the hairs on your human shape."

"What, all of 'em? One by one? Wouldn't that take a while?"

"Hhikiiias don't really care about that. I can tell it to skip to something else if I think of what to ask."

He giggles. "I don't know why, but I'm imagining a disembodied voice listing all of my hairs and it's really adorable."

"It's not exactly disembodied. It's coming from you and it sounds like you."

"It sounds like me? Really? But - I dunno, it's still not me, it's not embodied in the sense of belonging to the mind that goes with the body, you know?"

"It sounds like you," repeats Leekath. "And - I don't know, hhikiiias never belong to minds generally speaking, but if I hear a voice talking about this chair and it's coming from the chair it's mostly like the chair is talking. You just have two voices."

"...But one of those voices is me as in my mind talking, and the other one is - a magic thing you can do that tells you stuff," he says. "If you ask what the incantation is for my built-in torture function, only one of us is going to answer. - And please don't ask that, and if you find it out anyway don't say it to me, even though you don't have a linker core and wouldn't have the privileges to use it if you did, just - don't."

"Um, okay," says Leekath. "I'm not used to people having hhikiiias, I don't know how to - be polite about describing it."

He shrugs. "And I'm still trying to figure out what a hhikiiia is like in the first place. I don't know what would be polite if you were talking to somebody else, but for me - the difference between my voice and a voice I can't hear or control that just says things about me is important."

Leekath nods. "Okay."

He smiles at her.

"You have five million six hundred and four thousand eight hundred ninety-six hairs, if you wanted to know."

He giggles. "And that's still weirdly adorable."