"Well, yes, but I think we're mixing up our definitions of power. It's not the - 'bwuahahaha, you are my vassal I have you now you will do this' kind of power. It's the - 'we are going to only do things that I like, and if you don't like them, too bad, you can always leave,' when in relationships there's a give and a take kind of thing."

"...So in the normal course of things people have to do things that they don't both like? Routinely? Or it is some kind of mistreatment?"

"I mean - sometimes? Like, okay, take picking places to go eat. One person wants to go out for tacos, the other wants sushi. But, they both want to sit down and eat them where they got them, and not just go by and pick them up and eat them in their car or something. So, they both can't get what they want. So evenly distributed power means it doesn't automatically go to one person to pick where they go, they can both get a say in it. It's not an upsetting thing, it's seriously just food, it doesn't matter a large amount, but if one person never got to eat tacos because of their relationship, that's - kind of a hint at something bad in the relationship."

"I guess that makes sense. In the kind of relationship where they can go together to eat things like that, anyway. What's a car? I'm assuming tacos and sushi are mortal foods of some kind."

"Yeah, those are foods of some kind. A car's a - large device with room for seating various people, and it's used to travel places very quickly. Uh, not like a gate, more like - a thing that carries people."

"Yyyyes. A self-powered, steerable sled that can go very fast."

"There are some sleds in the Forever Snows. I went once. It was fun."

"Sleds are pretty fun," he agrees with a smile. "Cars are less so, more orderly, more risk involved if you screw up, but they're very convenient."

"I guess they must be important to have if you can't fly."

"Yeah, pretty much."

"Poor mortal." She pats him on the back where wings would be if he had any. "Pity you're too big for me to carry around."

"That would be so fun. But, oh well. I've survived not having wings for this long, I'll get by."

"Maybe there's sorcery for it. But then you could only go out and about on Halloween."

"That'd be bad. I mean, I still have to go to college, and also I'd need to buy food and things on days that weren't Halloween."

Snuggle! "Hey now. I have the internet, you don't have that."

"It's true. But... still. And you were going to try to bring me some technological things, weren't you?"

"Yes, but getting you permanent internet access would be difficult, even if it works perfectly. Unless you make a little tiny gate that no one will notice so I can string a cable through it, or something."

"It'd be hard to resize one. Maybe not impossible."

"And then it has to be up all the time and be nice and out of the way where it won't get rained on or something so you can look at cat videos to your heart's content."

"...cat... videos?"

"It's - that's a joke. Um. The internet has a surprising number of captured moments of cats. Cats being a pet that mortals like to keep, if you don't have them here."

"We might have cats. There aren't a lot of animals here and a great many of those are cursed fairies, but we might have cats somewhere."

"Cursed fairies?"