So she flies them back to campus. It's getting dark, but there's enough artificial lighting that this doesn't make it a worse look at the city, just a different one.

It's a pretty good city.

It is a really great city and Odette is so proud of it.

She briefly considers the bit of garden where she gave him some of his first lessons in Genoshan, for the symmetry of it, but decides that no, novelty is the order of the day.

Novelty is great.

And there are a lot of pretty gardens.

Gosh. So pretty.

Yes.

(They may be thinking of slightly different things when referring to prettiness.)

Language lessons?

Language lessons!

"I wish I could sing, I know a couple of songs in Laefarrin. There's a sad one and a rude one."

"You can't sing?"

"Not such that I would inflict the results on anyone else."

"Huh, alright. I guess it'll have to wait until I've got Sympathy telepathy worked out."

"Guess so."

"It's sort of weird how many things have been developed but only for one branch."

"Mm?"

"Oh, it's something I see a lot of--there's a special library where you can look up--how to do things, basically, and there's a lot of cases where the instructions will be for only on branch, or sometimes two but not the third, or it looks like there's only one but the others are there just more obscure and complicated."

"- huh. Yeah, that's weird."

"I think it's mostly that on aggregate a lot of people find certain things easier to do using certain mindsets but I'm not sure."

"And then there's people like me who can do Sympathy and Conquest simultaneously without particular difficulty."

"That's still really weird. I mean, not bad weird, but still way unusual."

"It seems perfectly natural to me! They're the same thing, from a certain perspective!"

"And it's a weird perspective!"

"I suppose."

"Milan, does it surprise you that you're exceptional?"

"Well. No."

"Well then."