"What kind of magic? If it's different enough..."

"I think it's pretty different. I can ask Overbite's brother to come down, he's a magic user. And a huge nerd. You two can compare magic systems."

"That sounds fun. And maybe if it's different enough it could get around Thorn's sorcerers."

"That was my thought too. I think Jawbreaker knows a little, he's not anywhere near as good as--ooh I'm going to have to come up with something to call him, if I try to keep saying 'Overbite's Brother' I'm going to slip--anyway he's not as good, he pretty much couldn't be, but it's probably enough to tell if they're very different or not."

"Underbite," suggests Promise.

"That would be...pretty insulting actually. Oh, Overbite and her brother are vampires. 'Overbite' is a reference to her fangs, but vampires only have top fangs and not also bottom ones like some animals do, so calling him 'Underbite' would imply that his fangs were so small even his humanish lower canines were larger than his fangs."

"Oh. Not that then, I suppose. Usually fairies pick our own nicknames, you could ask him what he wants to be called."

"Yeah. I'll email him when we get back to my room. And then I'll go fetch Jawbreaker."

"Does Jawbreaker actually break jaws?"

"No. There's a kind of candy called a jawbreaker because you're supposed to suck on it instead of chewing and it's supposed to be so hard that if you try to bite it anyway it'll break your jaw, and they're one of his favorite things."

"Oh."

"You are not the first person to ask that question."

"The candy isn't very popular?"

"It's fairly popular, but before he got his act together he used to be a member of a particular cultural group known for violence."

"Oh."

"Yeah. Plus the story of how I had to break a chainsaw murderer's face with a baseball bat to keep him from murdering me with a chainsaw didn't help much."

"I... see."

"Getting dropped in Fairyland was pretty far from the first perilous thing to happen to me."

"I didn't realize the mortal world was so dangerous for mortals apart from the whole mortality thing."

"I have a worse time of it than most. Most people go through their lives never encountering situations like I deal with on a regular basis."

"Why does it always happen to you?"

"We're not sure, exactly...we think it might have to do with something I found out about myself a little less than a year ago, but that's pretty private and I'm not really interested in sharing it with as many people as it would take to make serious headway on figuring it out."

"Okay."

Promise sitting somewhere out of the way, thoughtfully staring into space!