A fairy willing to turn some people into sparrows answers the ad. He turns Thorn and Blossom into sparrows and accepts some shaped wood from one of Promise's trees.

Huh. Cool. Mortal even had a nice mortal doodad to give, but that's good enough.

And now Yellow's officially free.

Off he zooms.

A couple of days later, Mortal's done with his little project and presents it to Promise: a Sony Reader, loaded with books! Mortal ones, but well, it's what he had access to.

"What is it?"

"It's an e-reader! This one was released last month, it's pretty great, it has lots of books in it. I got some help to automate a little program that crosses out given names so you won't accidentally learn any you might not want."

"Oh! Cool. How do I... read it?"

He shows her how to access the books and turn pages and stuff, and gives her the little instructions manual in case she wants to do anything fancy.

"Thanks!"

What's on here?

There's a bit of everything! All of Shakespeare and Jane Austen, then bits and pieces of other genres all the way to the present, in the "fiction" folder. There's also a technical folder with textbooks on physics and biology and maths and geography and astronomy and various other sciences, in case those strike her fancy.

Ooh.

Eeee! Smiley Promise! Happy Promise! That makes Mortal happy. He kinda wishes it were as easy to filter out names on the actual internet as it is on books—although if she expresses interest in it nonetheless, he trusts her with random mortals' names and is pretty sure she wouldn't misuse them.

Well, she's spending a lot of time reading and having fun with it and asking him all kinds of cultural questions like "the people in this story seem to disagree on how important an aunt's relationship to her nephew should be" and "what is a Nazi" and "why do mortals make so many puns".

Promise is adorable. She is so adorable. He may not directly tell her so, but it might be clear enough from the way he answers the questions while looking at her in a way that wouldn't be unfairly described as 'gazing,' though he sometimes catches himself doing it and tries to tone it down. And he doesn't always have answers, but is excited to figure them out for her.

"How'd you pick out this set of books?"

"I tried to be very varied. Some of these are historically or culturally interesting—this one guy invented lots of words and names, that book is widely considered very good, et cetera—but I also tried to get at least one book from each genre and to vary time period and location and stuff. I didn't know what kinds of books you'd like, so I tried to be thorough."

"They're all so different from fairy books."

(Happy Promise eeeeee)

"Our societies are very different, and the way we're all very mortal and don't have magic and reproduce the same way changes a lot in lots of ways."

"Do you want to read some fairy literature?"

"Yeah, actually. I have read a very small sample and it was weird and scary when I was a kid and then I only read bits and pieces in between studying sorcery."

"I don't have a lot but there's a few in my first tree."

She gets them.

"Any recommendations on where to start?"

"I'm not sure... Well, not with this one, it's a sequel. I've got, let's see, fictionalized travelogue, three in the 'somebody goes to the mortal world' genre by people who had probably never been there, one breeder court drama, two courtbuilding dramas, and three romances."

"I think I'm gonna get one of the 'somebody goes to the mortal world' variety, that sounds like it has the potential to be pretty good."

She hands him one of those. It is about a fairy who is sent to the mortal world as a dubious reward by her master (she'd been complaining about wanting something new to do) and her adventures there. It has unrealistic depictions of animals and a mortal culture that seems to resemble fairy culture except that sometimes it occurs to the "vassals" that they can actually just disobey their "masters", to the recurrent and complete surprise of the "masters".