Seph visited Alban all the time. At first he would arrive home and find that the professor was reading on the floor of his hallway, cross-legged, with a book in his lap that rivaled the size of a small child; Alban then would look up with his broad smile and say, "Would you like to come over for dinner?" Later, Seph became accustomed to having the same words scrawled in midair, on the blinking part of his curtain. The letters would be faded and bloated and patchy, which told him that Alban had wrote them some while before.

Seph would usually agree, because that was easiest, and because Alban's food was better than anything than he could come up with, both talent- and money-wise. Usually there were variations on soup (especially when Alban was grading or formulating tests, or else in the final drafts of his papers), but sometimes there would be a gem of a thing, a small and well-dressed specimen of poultry or other unknown creature, sometimes little legs and ribs all fat and meaty and gleaming with oil. The only time Seph winced was when there were feasts of dirt and worms, which really only happened when Alban's roommate returned and dined with them as well.

The first time this had happened, it had been without warning, and ever since then Seph had been slightly more careful about agreeing to see Alban for dinner, though even with some observation it was hard to tell if the passerine man had already arrived a great time before or was still due. Even so, though, Seph found that the right kind of grub was not too reprehensible, and the right kind of dirt too was rich and dense and rather like chewing crumbled-up cakes, though with less sugar and softness and more grit and odd chewy bits.

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