"How's your IPA?" "Not bad." "So...are your classes going okay?" "Well, yes and no. Are you finding that these students think differently than we did? It's like they take everything literally." "No sense of poetry or metaphor, you mean? I see the same thing with the math students. For instance, the idea of imaginary numbers." Two men talking...but this is no normal conversation. Too many heady ideas. It's more like role-playing or something. Who are they, and what's going on?