"Okay, fair enough."

Nod. (Rip, tear, mangle, chew.)

Bella goes back for dessert. She returns with decorously narrow slices of three kinds of pie and one each of four sorts of cookies.

"Excellent choices," Ariel approves around most of a pie.

Sally sighs theatrically and demonstrates the appropriate use of a knife and fork for Ariel's benefit.

Ariel cheerfully ignores her, as always.

"Incidentally, rumor has it you are in the market for silver, generally speaking," Bella says to Sally. "What does it go for here by the OZT, what is an OZT, I had my sister look it up for me and she doesn't know."

"OZT is troy ounce, of which there are 14.6 to an avoirdupois pound. I do need a lot of silver, but I usually get it at bulk rates from suppliers, so I'm getting about the best rate you can get in the US at the moment. It's at $16.5 to the troy, but I get it at $190 a pound, which evens out to $11.51. Why, are you from a planet made of it or something?"

"Oh my God I forgot to tell you. Back where she's from it's 2004. And the market prices are about the same."

"I am delighted to help with precious-metal arbitrage to cover my transit and incidentals. However, in the event that I can't get either government to take fiat currency from the other despite the fact that both of them are United Stateses, I should probably find something that I can arbitrage in the other direction. Magic things might be it, but require more marketing than commodities, which would take time and expertise I'd rather not respectively spend and acquire. Elsewise, I wind up having to earn all the money I use to buy you silver by doing actual work at home, and I'm rich here and my mom continues sleeping on a couch and competing for imported canned goods at the grocery store - because Yellowstone exploded. And having a job at home would cut into my plans here considerably."

"Eesh. Friggin' Yellowstone. You can ask payment from the government in the event of us sending over wizards and/or devisors to fix the Yellowstoning, I guess?"

"That also requires marketing and it might be a little harder to get a cut, but I'll look into it. But are there any moderately portable commodities that you think might currently be cheaper here than there? Because of mutants or the calendar year or for that matter Yellowstone?"

"...Well, I mean, food..."

"We have the ability to vat-grow arbitrary amounts of meat given sufficient energy, courtesy an unusually public-minded supervillain who wanted his dictatorial micronation allied with the States. We've got adamantium, which is a material that's the next thing to literally unbreakable, and I specifically can make it in quantities far outstripping any industrial source. We have superscientific fabrics, construction materials, and energy sources. Any of those sound saleable?"

"Yes. All of them sound saleable. It's just not something I can send home and delegate entirely to my sister. She could find instructions on how to sell, I don't know, zinc, on the internet, probably, if I prodded her enough; she can't do that with things that have no existing market. That makes it a longer-term problem, and my immediate family is not completely insulated from Yellowstone. I was doing the grocery shopping in foreign countries before I got summoned. This is more important, but I'd like to be able to mitigate the inconvenience as soon as I can. She can probably get help from the Junebugs, but they might want a cut of their own or try to take the entire thing out of my hands - I mean, if the Junebugs make a ton of revenue they'll probably use it to give people including me large cash awards for our services during the disaster, the Junebugs aren't out to turn a profit, but it means I can't direct it as precisely."

"If you can get me a list I can make my sister look 'em up. I'm still also interested in all the other ideas, of course." She has written them down in between bites of pie.

"Descending quantity: lead, tin, iron, copper zinc, aluminum, iridium, and osmium. 'Cept we need the osmium, it's useful. And expensive."

Scribble scribble. "Can I just walk off with the non-osmium or is there a price tag?"

"The price is that you take this shit off our hands. Please, oh please."

"Great. And I don't have a clear picture - the price sheet for interdimensional transit, does that scale with mass or volume or sentient creatures involved or nothing?"

"Nah, it's like one extra sigil per ten tons. Sentients is a bit moreso, but it's like a few hundred bucks a head. Most of the whole thing is just getting over the interdimensional energy barrier and making sure you aren't devoured by planar boll weevils or something. Not a thing, for reference, just unprotected planar travel is fucked-up dangerous."

Scribble scribble. "Okay. So anything I can unload for more than the cost of the spell as I've heard quoted is a good deal, and inbound silver definitely adds up fast enough if a troy ounce is remotely like a regular ounce."

"They're almost but not quite identical. It's quite irritating. But good, in this case."