"I, uh." Nautica rubbed the back of her neck, looking anywhere but at Tarn. The blank Decepticon mask paired with his impossibly pleasant voice made the compliment even more disorienting. "Thank you."

So, talking about something else, then.

Tarn spared her the work of coming up with a subject change, and at the mention of books, she immediately perked up, awkwardness disappearing into a scholar's enthusiasm.

"I've been playing catch-up," she said in roughly the same way a small child would talk about Christmas. "The hard sciences don't change and are mostly a matter of presentation, of course, but philosophy and the arts diverged so much, and I get to experience it in one vast arc. The sweep of history is awe-inspiring...and tragic, really. In retrospect, you can see the Functionist orthodoxy hardening, in a way that probably wasn't clear at the time, and the corresponding poverty of expression in the published literature. I'm sure there was underground art, because there always is, but so little of it survived, and--" she stopped when she realized she was lecturing and looked a little sheepish again. "Uh. Sorry."