Foxy giggles. "Always going over the top*, aren't you?"

*The expression here is different on Heart, which didn't have widespread trench warfare; but for our purposes it's been localized. 

"It's kind of my thing."

"And I love you for it," Vi says with a grin, sitting down at the table. "Anything I can help with, loves, or do you have it covered?"

"Go fetch the books and show them to us!"

"What the lady said." Liv fishes out a plastic container of mixed berries from the fridge.

She laughs and rises, dancing out to the cuddleroom and fetching the messenger bag. Ten books get carefully unpacked onto the table, spread out for her loves to see.

Liv sets down the berries on the counter and comes over to have a look. She picks up the slimmest of the volumes and turns it over in her hands. 

"The Death-Songs of Dreaming Reef, huh? Cheery. Do you have summaries of these or something, Vi? I don't want to spoil myself, but neither do I want to read something dark right now."

"Ah, knew I was forgetting something. Lemme see if my scraper caught them." She twirls back to grab her purse, fishing out her phone and checking.

"Yep, her you go, girls."

She hands her phone to Liv, scraped summaries from the publisher's site filling the screen.

Liv sets aside the poetry collection and the abuse novel. "These two seem too dark to start with, they'd ruin the mood. The rest seem like they're okay. Do we want porn this morning or not-porn?"

"Not porn," Foxy calls. "I want to save it for when we can all do something about it."

Liv sets aside another three books - the two from Homerealm, and Devotions and Debates, the work from Hearthome.

"Okay, so that leaves us with Reinventions, Building a Mess, Downriver-Path, and the one from the Periverse whose title doesn't translate. I think playing A Dream of Shifting Sands is less of a social activity. Do you girls want an alien-historical mystery cult story, a terraforming novel with a bunch of infodumps, a fantasy story with a bunch of copies of the same person, or a biography about coming in contact with aliens?"

Violet hums thoughtfully for a moment. "Mystery cult's my top pick, followed by the one with the copies."

"I'm fine with whatever my Keeper wants."

"Alright, let's have pancakes first and then do reading. Getting syrup on the first edition alien books would be blasphemous."

"Agreed," she says with a firm nod. She stacks the books into her arms and carries them off, fitting them neatly into a bookshelf before returning to the kitchen.

Foxy pulls another pancake off the stove and stacks it up on a plate. "I've got a stack here for someone."

"Vi, how many sausages do you want? Berries and whipped cream?"

"Three, yes, and yes, thank you~"

Liv pops a plate of sausages and a cup of syrup in the microwave and starts them nuking; in the meantime she spoons out berries onto Vi's plate and adds a sizeable dollop of whipped cream.

"I wonder how good the translations are of these. It must have taken a lot of effort since they're all in different alien languages, right?"

"Good question! I haven't heard any news of complaints about that yet, but it's only been a day. I wonder whether translation was done on our end or theirs."

"I don't know. I hope it wasn't done by amateurs. I've heard some stories about Anadician editions that were completely different books than the Eravian ones - not for the alien books specifically, just in general."

"I've seen a few books like that! The very first translations of the Lost Magi books were fan-made, and one version had some stark differences. Guess we'll find out."