"Yeah, sounds good!"

"Okay."

"See you, then!" And off he goes to his dom.

"Hello, pet."

"Hi, ma'am. How're you?"

"I'm all right. Have to do a group project though. Sometimes Selene pretends to be college hard enough to fool me and then, nope, technically junior high to high school range."

"Pretends to be a college?"

"We get to pick all our own classes with few exceptions, the scheduling's open, we have a campus with dorms and a bus to town and very light adult supervision, and not all of the teachers have doctorates but some of them do."

"Would college not have group projects, then?"

"Well, I think of it as being a high school thing, but maybe colleges do it. Shame on them."

He laughs. "What's the project about anyway?"

"Asian history. We have to agree on a topic, and I don't want to fight over it and neither does another person in the group but the other two are at each other's throats between Chinese pirates and Genghis Khan."

"Can't they toss a coin? Or maybe talk about how one has influenced the other or something?"

"I suggested the coin toss. I'm not sure if they heard me."

"I don't know enough Asian history to know if there's a way to reconcile the two things."

"My suspicion is that it would be a stretch to even compare-and-contrast the founding of the Mongolian Empire in land-based conquest versus grand theft on the high seas."

"The Mongolian Empire sounds way cooler, though."

"If I wind up in a position to break the impasse I'm likelier to go for Chinese pirates. Less done to death than the Khan."

"Fair enough. Was it the pirates that found America a ways back?"

"...I don't know, was it?"

"I think I read something about that, Asian ships having discovered America way before Columbus did."

"Huh. I don't know if it was pirates but that seems sort of unlikely."

"Might've been some conspiracy theory, then."

"Or something. Maybe we'll do the project on pirates and I can find out."

"See, you have a new argument to present to the Khan one."