It might have been different, somehow, if Pippa had asked him these questions in a hectoring and contentious style. But she just wasn’t that way; her affect was unfailingly calm and pleasant. She spoke in the tone of a sweet, curious child. She wasn’t trying to flaunt the amount of research she had performed. It simply had never crossed her mind that anyone would get as deeply into this as Laks already had without knowing all these things. To illustrate some of her points she took Laks outside where she could get better satellite and showed him a few of the more relevant video channels. There seemed to be dozens of these—enough that their thumbnails covered at least one screen, anyway. Each was the record that had been uploaded by one streamer—a streamer such as Pippa aspired to be—on his or her journey along the Line of Actual Control. And each had at least a few (some had dozens of) videos depicting noteworthy moments in the conflict. Some of the streamers were in the mold of documentary filmmakers who wanted to show behind-the-lines stuff. Support volunteers ladling lentils in makeshift langars, that sort of thing. But others were stone martial arts geeks obsessed with different styles of stick fighting and following specific combatants, like kids collecting Pokémon. They had titles like "DEVASTATING leg strike by Big Talib on SHOCKED Chinese fighter at Kangju Ridge" and "NSFW! NOT FOR SQUEAMISH! Chinese rocker gets COMPOUND FRACTURE in glacier battle!"