Sunny put her coffee aside and folded her hands on the table, leaning forward a bit and her eyes lighting up. This was one of her passions in life and had been for years, since she was a kid. "Human stories change a lot, down to the way they're told. Novels didn't even exist in the English language until about three hundred years ago, it was all in verse before then. And it's only two hundred years that novels have been taken seriously as an art form."

She tried to keep her hands still, but eventually she started gesticulating as she spoke. "The kinds of heroes people write about change all the time, especially as epic gave way to novel. Themes change, too, as the world does. Politics, technology, social norms... but most stories come back to a few key questions. What it means to be an admirable person, the burden of choice, loyalty, love, family, death. ... Our stories teach us what it means to be human, I suppose."