Sable grins and laughs, shaking her head. "I make stupid programmer money. I probably can't buy this many clothes every month forever, but even that's mostly just a probably. But getting used to this world is smart. Clever girls. Any other requests, like room decor or anything? Or d'you wanna wait until you've seen your room first?"

"Well... I don't know where you are on the internet, but I'm used to having a computer in my life. If I have to borrow yours that's okay, but it would be ideal for me to have my own. And I assume there'll be some form of education expected of me? It'd probably be worth it just for the political studies classes, honestly."

"Oh, we've got to get you a computer, for sure. Remains to be seen whether we do a laptop or a desktop, but that's happening, no question."

"As far as education... Yes. I have to make sure you're getting an education or the state will yell at me and take you away. The usual way is just to put kids in public schools, but those are usually kind of mediocre, and I'm a bit worried about teachers' and classmates' reactions if there's something you don't know, or if you let slip something otherworldly. On the other hand, homeschooling is a thing, and we can find activities in town to get you exposure to other kids your age."

"What do your schools cover, anyway? I can read and write and have good reading comprehension, at least with a word processor. My handwriting is atrocious but we don't emphasize it these days. I've done some celestial navigation with a sextant as part of my place-in-the-universe classes, though I'm a little rusty on it. I've seen the double slit experiment performed with a laser pointer in person, built an electronic six-sided die, know enough Cube to muddle along and build some simple games, like a 2d space shooter with a single source of gravity in the center... Obviously the local languages I'll have to learn... What else... I don't know much about chemistry, though of course I've heard of acids and bases and the periodic table of the elements, and I don't have a lot in the biological sciences either though I know some simple stuff like respiration and the fact DNA exists and have a broad idea of what modern cladistics is and does. Obviously all my political science education is for the wrong world entirely and probably will have to be rewritten from the basics given that you're, you know, aliens. And I would go into what my health classes have covered, like vaccines and so on, but I suspect you'd rather I not discuss the sex ed part in public from the face you made when I mentioned the effects of ellecol."

Her cheeks faintly pinken. "Oh, you caught that, did you? Yeah, this world is kind of hilariously bad about sex-shame. We can talk more about that in the car, though."

She shakes her head.

"As for the rest, I'm kind of impressed. You're ahead for your age on science and programming and reading, if I'm judging your enjoyment of the Lord of the Rings series right. Our schools typically have some required literature, civics, history, science, and math courses, along with what we call 'physical education', or just phys. ed. or PE for short, which is focused on exercise and physical fitness, and also tries to recruit kids for sports teams. Most schools have some kind of additional classes like art or shop or home economics (which mostly covers stuff like cooking and budgeting), but that really varies from school to school. There's usually some kind of health class, it's usually less informative than it should be and more than a little biased."

She leads the way to the front to check out all the clothes they picked out.

"I don't really think of myself as especially intelligent or dedicated. Method is, she's actually contributed a couple papers to the field of AI alignment and I am so fucking proud of her, she's such a great mom and she's helping to make sure the world doesn't go foom, but when she tries to teach me the math it just goes in one ear and out the other for me. I just can't understand tensors, and I've tried calculus and it's really hard too. I know they say there's better and worse ways to learn things, but I think some of these things might just be beyond my thinkoomph." 

She bobbles her head. 

"Civics and history I will for sure need to catch up on, and I suppose having to stay fit as a kid is a good intervention if you're going to do in person classes anyway. What sports? Any good capture the flag leagues? I'm not very good at cooking but I can follow instructions on packages; my auntie Method has always handled budgeting for me, since I tend to not have the discipline to do double-entry bookkeeping on every purchase. She gives me an allowance I'm allowed to spend each month and the rest of my life-float goes to rent and food and savings. And I've always wanted to learn to draw, but never really had the patience to learn - I think it could be fun to do art classes!"

Blink blink.

"Teaching twelve-year-olds calculus? Clever people doing AI alignment work? Yeah, your world is just better, I'm officially envious."

Another headshake. "We don't usually have capture the flag leagues in school, most people are obsessed with sports like baseball, football, or soccer — which is also called football in countries that don't have what this country calls football. I can pull up some recorded games of each if you wanna find out what they're like once we get home, or I can try my hand at describing them. For now though..."

They arrive at the cashier and quickly get rung up.

"It's not standard to teach twelve year olds calculus, I just wanted to try anyway and Method was willing to give me a little of her time even though she was working on More Important World Issues. Spherical trig yes though, it's considered important that people are able to do experiments to measure things like the distance to the moon so they don't reject astronomical and geologic scales out of hand."

Checking out, checking out, and out they go to the car.

"Goodness. We typically cover flat trig in the teens."

She makes a face. "It would probably be better if we taught math better here so more people didn't get confused and think the world was flat."

"Somehow I am less surprised than I should be. It does happen sometimes on Terra in worse countries, but..." 

She shakes her head and gets in the car.

"Spherical trig isn't really that much worse than flat trig though, you just have slightly more complex laws of cosines and so on. It's very doable if you know how to cancel variables."

"Yeah, part of the problem is our world is crap at teaching math," Sable replies once she finishes loading everything into the trunk. "We've got tropes about hating math, at this point. It's practically comical how bad we are at it."

"Oof." Audrey winces. "Let's get off this topic for the moment if you don't mind, it's making me anxious."

"Oh, sorry about that, sweetie. Yeah, we can set it aside. Wanna head home for now, or is there anything else you want tonight?"

"Let's head home for now. I want to get used to your house a little more."

"Can do." She puts the car into gear and starts driving. "What sort of music would you like on the way home?"

"Let me see if you have any more albums by Pendulum."

She starts going through the discs again. 

"They only have the one so far, but I've heard they're working on another that they're going to release this year."

There's plenty of other electronica, lots of punk, a bunch of pop, classic rock, some folk, and more, but no more Pendulum albums. "I wonder if you'd like Beth Patterson. She's a folk musician from the state I grew up in, with both Celtic and local Cajun influences. There should be a few of her albums in there."

"I have no idea what either of those things are but I can certainly give it a listen!" 

She flips through and pops in the CD for Hybrid Vigor. 

The album opens with expressive folk violin, then builds into some wordless vocals in the middle of the first track. Sable starts bouncing a bit in her seat, grinning.

"Ooh, this is nice!" Audrey bops along as well, and taps her foot to the music. 

"Glad you like it, sweetie. Any more juices or such you wanna stock up on on the way?"

"Do you have coffee here? I drink it regularly and if I go a day without it I'll probably have to deal with headache and fatigue the next morning."