Lottie beamed because her big brother did his sort of smile at her and she loved that. Then he actually stopped to look at the mud pie. He really looked at it too, not just looking for a second and then saying uh-huh-that's-nice or something. He hmed. Hming always meant that Than was thinking, and when he moved his head like that it meant that he was thinking a lot. Even better, he saw her creation for just what it was. She didn't know exactly what a mister peas was, but apparently she'd made a proper one, and that was very exciting. She was gonna tell everybody.
Later.
She shook her head when he asked her if she'd shown Mother. “Can't,” she explained. “Mother is out doing stuff with Moros and Father is talking with Styxie and I finded you! It's pretty, right? Right? I maked it just like Mother makes hers, 'cept I couldn't get it to look right with flours and eggs and stuff, it was just all gloppy and gloppy isn't right, so I had to find something else, so I thought and thought about what sticks together best and then I thought of mud because sometimes mud is really gloppy and sometimes it's runny but sometimes it can be just a little gooshy and gooshy would work better than gloppy, but it's even better now than when I first maked it because it's less gooshy almost like a real one, but I had to put the decorations on while it was still gooshy to make them stick right, and I had to look really really really hard to make sure they all look 'xactly alike, and they almost all do 'cept that one on the side 'cause it's a little darker, so then I had to make the other ones darker too so they got painted with some other mud from by Phleggie's river 'cause that's almost black, and then I found the pretty gold bits that I put on top, they look extra nice don't you think so, Thanatos? Don't you think so? It looks good, right? Right? It's a mister peas! A proper one!”
After stopping long enough to suck in another breath, Lottie asked her brother, “What are you doing? Wanna help me make another one? We can make it even bigger 'cause there's two of us!”