"I can close my eyes. To pants with us." Hup.

Then they can sit on the edge of the bed and her can put his hand on the back of her neck and close his eyes while she performs clothing related maneuvers.

"There, done."

"This is your captain speaking," he says, scooping her up to go back down the stairs, "please observe that we do not have a no smoking sign, but regardless kindly do not light up during this excursion..."

Giggle.

And the quilt goes on and they go out and up up and away! "So what about French do you think could most use the practice, are you low on vocabulary or not fluent with the grammar or missing distinctions in listening that you know when you see them written..."

(He says this in French, though nice and slow.)

(also in French) "Vocabulary and listening practice. Though...I might have forgotten how some irregular verbs work."

"Irregular verbs are a bitch! Native speakers learn them by feel, not by writing them all in charts, so I think practice is the best way to get a really authentic sense of them."

"Makes sense, there is lot of irregular verbs in English also."

"There are, and I'm never going 'what is the future perfect tense of to be', it just comes out however it's supposed to - or if I make a mistake it's not going to be one that interferes, just part of the language changing."

"Right, do you have suggestions on how to practice?"

"I do it by finding conversations I want to have anyway, with people who speak French! I bother academics from Québec and France and occasionally Switzerland or Belgium or in one case Senegal. And when I'm not backlashed, I read French literature, it helps that I like classic novels by dead people so Victor Hugo was a big draw, and Jules Verne and so on."

"You bother these people for blog interviews?"

"Not every conversation is a post in the making, often I just talk to them on background and get maybe one quote. Or sometimes I'm telling them things they want to know, if they're having trouble getting espers to talk to them for their research."

"What sorts of things have you told people?"

"I tell them about how policies and requests about things like harvesting dungeon materials get interpreted on the ground, and which espers are having drama that means their dream-team synergy idea isn't going to get tried, and corroborate their estimates about response times and monster variety, and I take photo requests, and once a guy had special permission to keep a Menagerie monster in a special highly secure cage and wanted me to go catch one for him when Menagerie hit Calgary last year..."

"What did the guy want with the monster?" The rest of that is all mostly standard 'talking to middle/upper management' stuff which is sort of comforting. Management is the same even when there's magic involved apparently.

"He wanted to see how hard it was to train one to do stuff. Last I heard the answer is very hard, but that could be individual variation, they're all different."

"Has anyone tried training orphan monsters to do anything useful? Also, you said Cricket does dungeons sometimes, are their any other intelligent orphaned monsters that are doing that?"

"Cricket's very special because his dungeon was four dimensional and he can still see and navigate in four dimensions, which is a very rare esper ability. Most monsters don't have anything quite that valuable. There is a chimera sort of thing in Taiwan which runs dungeons but I think they - uh, the heads have separate apparent personalities - mostly just physically fight monsters and don't have any additional powers."

"Well being large with lots of teeth is useful for that particular application. And Cricket having a unique and valuable ability explains why the agency kept him around even if nobody got along with him. Did you sign on with that agency? Did you investigate other agencies as well?  I'm not sure how they differ or if the difference is mostly the individual agents?"

"I'm with Maple, yeah, and I interviewed a few agents but the agencies didn't seem importantly different to me so I didn't shop around between those. I could be wrong, but that was my impression."

"I don't know how..personal..one tends to get with an agent?..."

"Varies. I lean on mine a fair bit for backlashed conversation but you can keep it strictly professional with yours, that won't make them worse at their job."

"Well  I will want somebody who is at least reasonably baseline pleasant to interact with. It...just won't work if they're too prone to go beyond that. It's..going to be a balancing act."

"Yeah. It should be someone who can know what your backlash is, even if you want to keep that generally buttoned up."