fandomhigh | How to Win Friends and Influence People

Kanan had a techinicolor dalmatian with him today. He seemed less perturbed about that fact than even he felt like he should be, but he couldn't quite shake the thing, and he hadn't managed to nerve himself to dragging it back off the island and leaving it with its own kind again before the island had moved on.

That, and it cried whenever he left it behind in the apartment.

"How to win people to your way of thinking," he began, and then set the book down on the desk. "This chapter is full of things like 'avoiding arguments' and 'let the other person talk a lot.' Oh, and my personal favorite, 'let them think that your idea was their idea.'" Or something like that, anyway. Kanan was paraphrasing. He shook his head a bit. "And yeah, I guess people do love listening to themselves talk, but the amount of seeding you'd have to do in a conversation to make a person have the exact same idea as you while they're doing all the talking seems less like work and more like some kind of top spy espionage or something."

"Things like that tend to work best in arguments," Bob said. "Get them really annoyed, and they'll agree to things before they know what they're doing. Emotions are your tools." He grinned.

Kanan shook his head.

"A little pleasantness can go a long way. And actually taking into consideration the person you're talking to. You want to win someone over, engage them in a situation where they're comfortable and not on their guard. Ask 'em out for caf. Coffee." He gave Bob a side-eye, and then sighed. "Or you could bribe them."

That seemed to be an answer that came up a lot this semester already, okay?

It was a time-honored tradition! It worked!

"Trickery's a great way, too," Bob offered. "If they're not the sort to be won over by pure logic - if they are, well, there you go, just find a logical argument - get them to feel sorry for you, or as I said, annoy them, or just get them up in arms about something unrelated. Overly emotional people are less likely to accurately judge the worth of what you want. Get them on your side or violently against you, and they're easy to manipulate."

Which he'd actually learned from hundreds of years of manipulating people with talking, and not simply from watching politicians.

"So, pair up again, and pick something interesting, then try to get your partner to agree to your point of view. Any questions?"

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". . . I guess?" That wasn't a phrase Tip had encountered much in her fourteen years so far, either. "I mean, me being here means we fight a whole lot less, so that's probably a relief. We've never had the most traditional mother-daughter relationship."

Actually, the fighting part was perfectly traditional for a mother and teenage daughter, but Tip still didn't entirely believe it.

"I... have no idea what a traditional mother-daughter relationship is supposed to look like," Kanan confessed. "But if this is working out better for the both of you, then I guess I can't knock it, either."

"Your ten year old daughter's not supposed to be the one who makes your doctors' appointments for you," Tip advised.

Kanan blinked. And then Kanan nodded.

"Fair enough. Though bonus points to you for having your poodoo together enough to handle that," he offered. "Ten's no age to be taking responsibility of somebody who really should know better."

Fourteen, however, was a perfectly acceptable age to go to war.

How about eleven? Was eleven a good age?

"It really helped when the next year she got abducted by aliens and I had to spend six months on my own."

"... That would do it, yeah." Kanan grimaced, but there was a little more empathy in that grimace than anybody should have for a situation like that. "You have her back, now. Was that your own doing, or did somebody else reunite you?"

He was genuinely curious, yes. Tip had it together more than a lot of kids her age who hadn't been raised in an order of laser sword soldier-monks.

"Little of both," Tip said. "Going to find her was how I met J.Lo. And when we got to the new Human Preserve, there was a whole network of people working to reunite families. But there was a whole continent of trying not to get caught or killed before we got there."

'Human preserve.'

...

Kanan looked appropriately horrified, at least.

"And things are better now?"

She did have a dog and a pet billboard, so he could probably assume they were, but he had to check anyway.

"Yeah. We helped the Boov get rid of the even nastier aliens that liked to kill them, so in return they agreed to leave Earth and pick a new planet to colonize. Better deal than most colonized populations get."

Kanan gave a low whistle at that, which mostly just got the dog looking up at him and buttwaggling again.

"Yeah, I'll say," he agreed. "I guess humans didn't really have much going for them on a galactic scale yet, huh? The Boov are the first alien race you've encountered?"

"Yeah. We'd barely gotten to the moon before."

"Ouch."

Seriously, ouch. Kanan was trying to imagine a planet that was so cut off from everything else, and living one's entire life in such a place. The island was the closest he got, and it physically moved itself from world to world.

"I've got experience with hostile combatants," he noted, looking thoughtful, "but I came from a place where we prepared for that sort of thing. Good on you for making it through. But at the same time, I'm sorry it was something you had to experience at all. Not that sorry changes anything, I know."

Tip shrugged. "I got a best friend out of it. And thanks to Boov technology, Mom doesn't have to work all the time to pay rent and feed us both. It was pretty terrifying, but then. I mean, that's what life is like, right? Sometimes you get invaded by aliens, sometimes a monster turns you into an orange, sometimes you get pushed off a roof by someone trying to figure out human anatomy."

Tip had an odd perspective on what constituted a normal life.

Hey, sometimes your brothers-in-arms turned around and brutally murdered everyone you ever knew in your life. Kanan's perspective wasn't so normal, either.

"... And the important part is that you walk away from it all in more or less one piece and the proper shape," he settled on. Because that part, at least, seemed fairly universal.

An orange.

She was never going to be able to look at citrus the same way again.

"Plus, I've got some good material to write about," Tip said. ". . . Though I think I'll probably get a reputation as a surrealist at this point."

"Well, there are worse reputations a person can have," Kanan offered. "Just so long as you can work with it, you'll probably do just fine."

"I'm pretty good at going with the flow."

She had to be, at this point.

How to Win Friends and Influence People | Friday, period 1

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