"Mm."  He sighs.

"Is there any way I could go out, from here, that doesn't last as long as that?  Maybe I'll... get better, at that, but it was kind of a lot at least for a first time."

"I can take you on little walks. It'll be slightly marked to people who know me well because I don't really go on walks but anyone who doesn't keep much track of me will just figure I'm taking you on short errands."

"Are there any short errands?"

"Yyyyes but usually Yin and Via do them. I guess you could go with them to carry things if you'd like."

"...That might not be better."

"Yeah, I haven't gotten the sense that you're all great friends."

"They think the same things about me as everyone else, and - I'm glad they have enough freedom even as slaves to feel like they can say things.  Or something."  But if he hung out with them more he wouldn't even get being-around-Belmarniss out of being made fun of like that.

"Yeah, Rynaeri generally doesn't punish them for guessing, they'd stop if one of us told them to but -" Shrug.

"It would be wrong to tell them not to."  Probably.  "It just... wears on me."

"Understandable." Sigh.

"...But I do feel pretty useless.  I used to do a lot of stuff to help out around the house.  Like I said so with cooking, but other things too."

"I remember being confused about the paying bills one, yeah."

"...All the things that come to the house in tubes and things like that do still cost money.  But there's a courier system, not with tubes, where people deliver - paper, letters and documents and the news - to everyone's houses.  And some of those papers are records of how much flammable gas and water and lightning you used over the last month, and they tell you how much money it all cost.  Then you can write on a special type of paper that you agree to send that amount of money back to the companies who run the tube stuff, and... for other complicated Earth reasons this causes them to have it, if you courier that paper to them.  I did a lot of that.  Even though it was with my mom's money, it was still - a chore.  Helpful."

"Whoa. That sounds really cool."

"It's a little depressing to think of paying bills as 'really cool', but, yeah.  You're not wrong."