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“You want to – to convert one of the abandoned buildings into a poorhouse?”   Resklin Tarajirra had never seen Professor Lokeg-Fridelabout look quite so surprised.  Up until now, he hadn’t know the professor had emotions beyond snide, annoyed, and cruelly pleased – although the annoyed had gotten awfully dark last week when Trenner Oujiduie showed up with a Feltenner chicken chick following her around.  “Tarajirra, that seems rather dark for one of your sort – it seems dark even for me,” the professor admitted in a rare moment of self-awareness.  “If you wanted to eliminate the poor, there are kinder ways than feeding them to Feltenner chickens and the Wind Alone knows what else lives in there.  What did Oujiduie’s paper say? Ferrets?”

Ah, a snide sneer.  That was more like it.

“Ferrets, yes, Professor.  You see, I don’t want to feed the poor to the chickens.  Or the ferrets.  My thought is more in the other direction – with the analysis that we’ve been working on, if we could feed the chicken eggs to the poor, we could start a very reasonable work house there, move some of the more tedious research in that direction –”

“That, Tarajirra, is what graduate students are for.”
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