"I guess. If you don't have anything more pressing to work on."

"Some people will probably have projects that are time-sensitive but not very many of them."

"Well. If they want to, I guess."

"Building houses is fun! And it's a useful skill to practice because once you can do it then if you ever want a house way out far away from everyone or anything you can do it."

"Yeah. That sounds like a useful thing to be able to do. In theory."

"In theory. Would one say, 'I'll get married some day, in theory.""

"Um, you could but it sounds kind of weird? I'd probably say 'I'll probably get married someday.' I guess."

"What's the difference exactly?"

"Ummm, probably is - I'm going to say this wrong - it seems more neutral and less marked as an expression of the fact that you expect the thing is true but you're not certain? And 'in theory' is, like, that makes sense on paper, or in a simple model of the thing, but kind of encodes the idea that for practical reasons you think it might not actually work out that way for you in real life?"

"So you would say, "someday I'll get married, in theory", if you do not think this will work out because nobody loves you?"

"Hmm. I think maybe you could say that if everyone was assuming you would get married and and you kind of doubted this but didn't want to discuss your reasoning too much. Or maybe if you did kind of think you'd get married but you weren't really thinking about this as having any practical implications for your life right now. It's - some phrases are kind of fuzzy like that. Especially the ones that are meant to be kind of fuzzy so you can leave some plausible deniability about what you're implying."

She feels like maybe she should be using a lot less of those but at this point it is pretty hopelessly habitual.

"I think you'll probably learn how to build houses. Some people can't pick up math because they're not very smart and I don't really know if you're smart but housebuilding isn't like math."

"I think Karen's smart. She came up with a very smart plan to learn the ritual to summon Nienna to take us home."

(People used to tell her she was smart, but that was a long, long time ago.)

"I did not super expect the plan to work. But... thanks."

"It involved pretend paperwork and more pretend paperwork and learning Aramaic chanting."

"What's Aramaic?"

"Deadish but I think not entirely dead language from the Middle East. I don't actually know it at all, though, I just looked up some stuff about pronunciation rules and took my best guess."

"How does a language get dead - or deadish -"

"Um, if everybody who spoke it dies off without successfully teaching it to their children? Which I guess mostly happens either because people were prevented from speaking it by some other group of people for a while, or because it got outcompeted by other more popular languages that more people wanted to learn. There're hundreds of languages, maybe a couple thousand, and they've kind of been dying like flies since modernization because now some languages are vastly more useful than other languages."

"You have that many people dying?"

"I mean. Everyone dies. Uh, Maitimo explained about - we don't come back, when we die, like you do. We just sort of stay dead."

"Maitimo explained that. But everyone dies? Of...what?"

"Of lots of stuff? Accidents, disease, violence, ultimately old age...?"

"Surely they can't all - what's old age?"

"When you've been alive for a long time and your body gives out - do you people not age -"