Hello, everyone. I have a little project—I think it might serve us to have some agreed-upon replies to hard questions. Say someone asks you what is a rifter. Or they ask if it is true we once housed the mage Anders. The kind of thing where a wrong answer might cause us some trouble.

We will not settle on the right answers today. That will a longer conversation with the Diplomacy Division, I think. If you had a very clever answer that impressed someone very much, you are welcome to share it, of course, but right now I really want to know what difficult questions you have been asked while you are working, or while you are out in the city, or when your mother writes to you worried about the company you are keeping—although it does seem like most of us are not being written to by any mothers.

Separate question, if you have a living parent who writes to you, say so.