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"The divine doesn't deal with things, it just is," growled n'Barit, completely off his agreeable tangent. Clearly this clouded stranger had mistaken the divine path for a religion. He also clarified, "And humanity's not inferior, just unclean." Under different circumstances he might have agreed with Alice's sentiment, but never when he was being extremely technical, as he had decided to be for the moment. Technicality was required when someone had part of it right and all of it wrong.

Kirkcaldy said somewhat quietly, "Being a Tuulani is not superior to being a Yuulani, the two are equal the sand." It was not a direct quote from the Texts she had been learning, more of an extrapolation, and in n'Barit's mind her conclusion was the equal of Yuul's greatest scholar's. He was immensely and silently proud and would tell her as much later when they were alone and he could be less openly obstinate.

Had Alice not understood a single brilliant word Kirkcaldy said? pondered n'Barit, miffed. His daughter was clearly destined to be a great scholar. Anyone who failed to see that and understand her wisdom was irredeemable. "The fault's in your translation matrix," n'Barit said bitterly, the pair of words plucked from some technical corner of his translation chip and forced into his dialogue. It was a sort of vocabulary override designed to aid a biotechnician in diagnosing chip problems. The user of the chip needed the vocabulary to be able to communicate clearly with the technician without actually knowing any of the chip's components in detail.

Kirkcaldy tilted her head to the side, silently pondering what Alice meant by benefits.

N'Barit resisted the urge to try and use some of the slang Daub did, not entirely sure of the word meanings and not willing to risk using them incorrectly. He settled for something simpler and more direct: "You're wrong. Humans are unclean. Everything they touch is corrupted, and anyone that touches them risks that same corruption. Like you." He had no idea what Alice meant by any part of the utopia race, but as usual was unwilling to admit the gap in his knowledge. He also knew he was dangerously repeating himself, but apparently Alice did not get it, and without knowing what she meant it was hard to argue the finer points.

Kirkcaldy knew full well where her father's logic was going: yet another unclean person. She had a feeling they would be heading for the nearest body of water as soon as Alice backed down from the argument, and she looked forward to it. This Alice woman was making her nervous, especially with the water coming down around her. Perhaps the water was simply so wholly repulsed by this woman's ideas that it was being repelled around her as it clashed with her soul. Regardless, Kirkcaldy was beginning to feel dirtied despite her recent ritual. She scratched her arm where Alice had earlier grabbed it.

"Things cannot have any aspect of cleanliness more than their innate properties regardless of the hands that made them," remarked n'Barit matter-of-factly, as if this was something an elementary school student should know (though the way in which he said it was too convoluted to be comprehensible at an elementary level). It did seem to contradict his statement a moment earlier, but as usual, n'Barit had gotten his words out in a way that did not convey the exact meaning he intended, so the apparent contradiction was accidental. He knew what he meant, even if no one else did. Which was a fair guess at this point. Even Kirkcaldy was getting a bit confused.

"Don't twist my words!" said n'Barit angrily, and really, he was doing a good enough job of that himself. He switched tactics. "If you're too stupid to understand, don't blame me for it." To show the absolute finality of this conclusion, he crossed his arms, crutches wedged under his armpits, and turned his nose up at Alice.

Kirkcaldy frowned worriedly at her indyadin. She sadly knew already by this point that n'Barit was not the brightest of thinkers, which was why he usually fell back onto recorded rhetoric in arguments, and when his rhetoric failed him, he just shut down completely and used any old tactic he could to get what he considered to be a victory.

N'Barit was beginning to think this woman was mentally deficient in some capacity in addition to being criminally stupid. "Are you mentally halved?" he demanded. Immediately he had an idea of how to get rid of her.

"You," said n'Barit pointedly, narrowing his eyes, "ought to go back to whatever care facility you escaped from."

Poor Kirkcaldy just looked at n'Barit with a helpless expression, then at Alice. This whole situation was beyond solution at this point and there seemed to be nothing she could do. N'Barit would not be talked down and Alice would not be bullied. She wished Daub were here, to change the parameters of the situation if nothing else. Certainly no one was going to listen to her while things were as they stood. Alice might listen to her, maybe, but trying to talk to a clearly marked "enemy" would only make n'Barit angry. He would probably see it as an attempt to upstage him. He hated third parties in arguments. Her best chance was to try and distract n'Barit, as soon as he was in a frame of mind to be distracted. She bit her lip and waited for some opportunity to present itself.

None of that meant anything to n'Barit. It was hard to even come up with something to say, but he had a large repertoire of insults to draw upon, and if he seemed like he wasn't listening to her, all the better. "Where I come from, halfwits like you are put out in the desert to die," he informed her. "Why don't you just do us all a favor and find a bridge or an oven or something?" Oven wasn't a method employed by his species, but n'Barit had been grimly fascinated by the idea ever since he had heard about it.