Back in the galley, Lara and I were having a lively debate about who came in second, since Heather had landed the champion, a really fat striped bass ...hat was unquestionably a prizewinner.“Frej said that it was a really big blackfish,” I observed. “And your striper was really small compared to normal.”“But still bigger than yours.”“Size isn’t everything,” Heather observed.“Thank you,” I said to her.“Easy for you to say, Heather,” Lara replied with a laugh. “You have the biggest one.”I pressed. "Dan chuckled as he nested the container inside another that he'd already wiped out. "It lasts forever if you take care of it." So you don't use any more plastic than you have to?" Yeah," he answered, a bit embarrassed. One of the things that had always set him apart from his peers was his conservation-minded upbringing, which he'd espoused constantly when he was younger. It had taken quite some time to get over bringing it up in every conversation, and only because his mother had convinced him. "Come on in". She said.I entered her small apartment. I looked around, no cats. "Jenny, where are they?" I asked her. I turned to her and looked her straight in her beautiful brown eyes. "Probably in the bedroom Paul, look there, I'll put some water on would you like to have a cup of tea?"I opened the door to the bedroom and saw the cats on her bed, deeply in sleep. I sat on the bed and felt that I sat on something hard. I pulled the blankets aside and saw that there was a vibrator. I could. We didn’t always have a healer with us, and sometimes even when we did their mana had been spent on more serious injuries while we left the superficial ones to heal on their own or with potions. None of our old scars were as big as these, or as raised, but it wasn’t as though the concept was new to me, and they didn’t change anything about how I felt, of course. Alistair was mine – regardless of what he looked like. And a couple of scars – which he’d gotten while protecting me, no less – hardly.