Meg shook her head. "Wow... that seems terribly inconvenient for you," she said. "Do people ever wonder why you're gone so long, or is it like tessering where time moves differently depending on where you go?"

Meg had begun carefully carving out the face on the jack-o'Lantern. "Yeah," she said. "I think you're right about people. There are some you would never convince me to actually *like*, but even the least pleasant people have reasons why they are that way. And Wolfram made that awful sex ed class kind of... fun."