How It All Goes Down
The Ribeira House
- The epigraph is from Ouanda, explaining in her notes to Miro that the new piggy named Human is the son of Rooter. This leads Ouanda to think that the piggies they talk to aren't low status bachelors, but high status important piggies.
- Yonder at the plot, Ender senses at once through his empathy powers that the Ribeira house is very unhappy.
- Olhado goes inside; Quara is still there. Ender tries to ask where her mom is but she says nothing.
- Then Grego, the little terror, comes in with a knife strapped to his leg and attacks Ender.
- But Ender is a super-awesome fighter (as you'd know if you read Ender's Game), so he disarms Grego and holds him upside down.
- Quara goes to get Ela, who comes back in and apologizes. Ender says he won't let Grego go until he's assured he won't attack.
- Ender's being rude, but we know it's for the family's own good, and not just because he's a jerk. (You know that, right?)
- Ender wows them with his Church knowledge, because he knows everything.
- Miro finally gets to his house (from where we left him last chapter), and he's hostile at first, but then realizes Ender is awesome and lets him keep hold of Grego.
- Quim, who is really into religion and distrusts the Speaker, is still cranky.
- Grego pees in his pants to get Ender to let him go, but Ender has trained himself not to fear pee, so he doesn't.
- Olhado and Miro and Ela agree that their father sucked; Ender says he was called to speak their dad's death.
- More bickering. Olhado hooks up his eye to show a scene of their dad beating their mother, and Jane says she's going to hack everything in Olhado's eye while he's hooked up, which seems ethically dubious. So much for the right to privacy.
- Quim cries because he prayed for their father to die and then he, well, died.
- Grego cries on the Speaker's neck after Ender explains that Grego has been grieving for his father, but couldn't tell the others because they all hated Marcao.
- Quara tells Ender he stinks, which is the first time she's spoken to anyone outside the family in a long time.
- And so Ender wins over the unhappy family because he is that awesome. (Are you sensing a pattern here?)
- They offer to let Ender stay to talk to Novinha, and get him new pants.