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[oom: Confidence]

Guppy has his two little girls with him tonight, in a cosy booth near the fire. The girls are making collage pictures with various magazines, which the waitrats are helping to supply, and Guppy is helping to cut out.

"And what's this one doing?" he asks, passing a newly cut out iguana picture to Coral.

"He's having a banana and a apple and a grape and a pea and a bean." Coral says, dragging the glue stick over her piece of card.

"That's a lot." Guppy says. "Is he having his five a day?"

"Yeh." Coral says.

"I think you need more than one pea and one bean for your five a day." Guppy says.

"No no because it's a big one." Coral says, demonstrating the big bean.

Brooke, who has been sticking her pictures in something more of a random manner, thrusts a picture of a tribble for her father to cut out.

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Father Harman comes in from the outside, and gives Guppy and his children a brief, polite smile.

He is trained in not bearing grudges, but won't begrudge it if Guppy isn't.

Guppy gives him a nod; he knows people around here can change, and he's prepared to give that chance.

"I see you're settling in, Father?" he says, smiling slightly, and nodding towards the various signs.

"I am," Father Harman says. "Not going to waste precious time in the cells again. There is so much else to do!"

"You can make a picture." Coral suggests, offering him a piece of cardboard.

"What do you want to have a picture of?" Father Harman asks.

Kids are far from his core competency, but he won't allow himself to be scared by them.

"This one is mine, that one is yours." Coral says, pushing him the pile of magazines.

The top one is in an alien language, and shows pictures of some fashions on a green alien lady.

Father Harman starts going through the stack, quite astonished at some of the strangeness. Aliens and sentient squids and sentient squid aliens!

Brooke toddles over, bringing him a magazine of scary looking spiders.

"I think the rats got us some unusual ones." Guppy says, grinning.

"Do you think these spiders are sentient aliens?" Father Harman says. "And they still print on paper?"

"That's National Geographic." Guppy says. "The green ones I think are the aliens."

"So it is," Father Harman says. "Still, the green ones do print on paper."

"Yeah, I guess they do. Or something similar." Guppy looks at the magazine. "There's a lot of overlap between world cultures here."

"They do at least all have to be oxygen breathers, or they'd drop dead simply from breathing the air," Father Harman muses.

"I'm not sure - one of the groups of people I know here live inside computers."

"How does that work?" Father Harman asks, astonished.

"With difficulty!" Guppy laughs. "You have to be digitised to go there."

"I..." Father Harman says, "... don't think I'd want that, thank you very much."

"It doesn't hurt, I was a binome." Coral says.

"You've actually gone there??" Father Harman says.

"We both have." Guppy says. "I gave a talk on the circulatory system."

"They were interested in that, inside the computer?" Father Harman says, sounding both amused and a little lost.

"Some of the population are aware of the people outside - users, they call them."

Father Harman shakes his head. "I do hope there are no little entities inside my own computer at home," he says.

"You should chat to Enzo, he can get it tested."

"I am rather sure there aren't," Father Harman says. "I doubt I live in that kind of world."