Hello. What can I offer you today? appears a napkin. First drink is free.

Ari is charmed but not terribly surprised at the sentient bar and appearing napkins. "Hi! Sorry for the knock, if it hurt or something. Can I get some mead? Wyld Centaur brew, if you've got it." He'd get a coffee, since it's two in the afternoon, but "magic bar" implies a fairly wide selection, and he hasn't had Wyld Centaur in ages.

Of course. Some appears.

He sips it tentatively, deems it proper Wyld mead, and carries on drinking in a more appropriate fashion (quaffing, specifically). This is an excellent day!

"A what? I'm not a faerie. I'm R- I'm Claribel."

"It magically...?" Claribel touches the wood of the wall. "Huh. I... understand almost none of what you just said but I'm not sure what I ought to ask about first."

Time for the "explaining things to aliens" game! Ari's played this before, though not with actual apparent aliens. "So, bars are these places where you drink alcohol and sometimes eat food and sometimes hit people. Magic is when something impossible happens because someone else used their willpower and energy to make it happen, such as the door to my favorite coffee shop turning into the door to this bar. Faeries magic critters that aren't important right now, the Nevernever is the place where the faeries live, fashion is when the way people dress changes, 2007 is the year it is now, wizards do magic which I explained earlier, and the bar is a bar!" He beams at Claribel, who may or may not have caught any significant portion of that. "Basically you're in a place that has things to drink. The drinks are good. It's weird."

"I... am, sort of, a plant-woman, actually," says Claribel. "But most of the magic stays in the plants. I'm unusual. Er, if you're from somewhere totally other than where I'm from there's no point to going by my more recognizable name. Please call me Rapunzel if it comes up. What's your name?"

"Not exactly? It's kind of complicated. I'm used to going by it, though."

Complicated names. That's nothing new. "Well, no harm to me to go by it. So, how are you "sort of" a plant-woman? Do you feed on sunlight? Leaves in ticklish places? Does your enormous hair conceal a system of roots, I'm going to assume it's related to the magic somehow."

"The hair is, uh, related, although it is all in fact hair. I don't - want to go into too much detail... But the way it happened is that my mother ate a magic plant while she was pregnant with me."

"Magic plant results in great hair. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. How do you keep it from, like, breaking your neck, though? Because with all due respect to your spine, it kind of looks like it's working overtime."

"It just never bothers me. It's very well-behaved. I don't think it's actually lighter than it looks per se but it doesn't give my neck any trouble."

"I'm a princess, actually. But I only recently found out."

A princess! Today just gets more and more exciting. Ari sketches a quick half-bow to her, in case she's a stickler about that once she's introduced herself. "Sounds like a nice gig," he says cheerily. "I thought that was the kind of thing you knew in advance, though. There a story to that?"

"I was kidnapped as a baby and kept in a doorless tower until someone stumbled across me, talked me out of the window, and brought me to my parents."

"Bricked up once my hair was long enough to climb."

"There was a hook, or I'd have been pulled right out the window, and the hair doesn't break. And it was only one person. She was - well, she had me calling me Mother, but she wasn't, actually. I didn't think she was evil at the time. But yes. I think she is."

"I'm sorry about your parents. I'm not exactly - I'm angry, more than anything, about what she did. You don't need to worry about stirring up memories. What she did isn't going to be any worse if I think about it than if I don't."

Ari lets out a startled chuckle. "Oh, not my parents. They were... I don't remember much about them, but Belinda always said they must have been idiots to go out in a blizzard like that. She didn't really know them. It's her, I never expected to... outlive her, I guess. She was a faerie, they don't die. Unless someone kills them. Which someone did." He grits his teeth a bit. "That, I'm angry about. One day I'll find whatever killed her and make it pay. But not right now. Right now I'm just... trying to get by, I guess. Helping people, punching demons, doing what I can."

"A faerie, like you thought I was? One of them adopted you?"

"Yeah. She was called Belinda the Kind, because ordinarily they don't really... do that? I mean, they can be nice, but usually it's because they want something out of you. Usually more than you can give. But she wasn't like that, she was just... nice, because I needed it. I mean, she wasn't doing it for free, she got my baby teeth and a good amount of my blood out of it and that's some serious magic, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. Especially not eighteen years' worth of it. And she taught me magic and how to avoid getting trapped in bargains and... she was just a really good mom."

"I'm glad you had a good mom. Mine was - well - I thought she was good but it turned out she only wanted me for my hair and was lying to me about everything to keep me from running off."

"Like... lying about being your mom?"

"About being my mom and about what would happen to me if I ever tried to leave and what the world was like and about my birthday - because the princess's birthday was always celebrated with a release of thousands of floating lanterns that I could see from my window, she told me I was born on a different day - and about what people would do if they got ahold of my hair - Of course the only reason she was so good at telling me what she needed to tell me to keep me was because she read my diary."

"She'd tell me I'd be eaten, or that I'd be captured by this or that kind of villain, or that - look, my hair is magical, I don't want to tell you exactly what it does because she wasn't making these warnings completely up out of nothing, but it's magic and I don't have to cooperate for people to use it. She told me people would do that, that even if I wanted to use it to help people it would wind up being twisted around to do bad things, that it was better to just stay holed up and keep it to just the two of us. She kept me as occupied as you can keep somebody in a tower who never leaves. I'm musical and reasonably well-read and crafty and so on."

This girl's hair has an unreasonable number of special properties. Ari approves. "Yeah, "everyone is evil and they will all want to steal your glorious magical hair for evil" is less accurate in my experience. Not that I have glorious magical hair, but I know at least three people including myself who would not particularly care to kidnap and menace you for it." He pauses. "...Four people. Belinda probably wouldn't kidnap you. She might want to perform vaguely sinister experiments, but that was just her way."

Rapunzel hugs her meta-braid nervously. "Well, when I did leave the tower with my friend who talked me out the window it turned out nobody wanted to do me any harm and everyone was very glad to have the missing princess back and I'm working out safe ways to do good things with my hair."

"...Sorry, maybe shouldn't have mentioned the vaguely sinister experiments. I'm not so much about that, that was all Mom. It's good that nobody wanted to do you harm! And you apparently have friends now, that's an important part of not living with... well, the circumstances are different, but it's good to have friends if you're going to be in society. Instead of living with your hermit mom in the middle of nowhere." He looks pensively into his mead.

"She wasn't my mom. She was lying. She stole me and she was using me."

"Shit, sorry, I- slip of the tongue. Hermit captor in the middle of nowhere. Who seemed nice at the time but was actually just using you for her own goals." "Pensive" has now escalated to full-on "brooding".

"Her name is Gothel. Or was. I'm not sure. I haven't seen her recently."

"Nice - I don't know, not exactly, not like my friend or my real parents are nice. I wasn't afraid of her, I liked being around her fine, but it wasn't like she was a kind lovely person except for one thing, she was - competent, more. I loved her but nice isn't the word."

"It's all right. I have basically no concept of what people are and are not supposed to talk about with whom, considering."

"Yeah, there's an adjustment period. But that's what post-hermitage friends are for, I guess. Social graces and explaining what a coffee maker is."

"...What's a coffee maker?"

"Everything?"

"Well, they could theoretically know anything. I don't think they actually care enough to see and hear everything through the mortal realm and the Nevernever, but it's probably safe to assume they can hear any conversation about themselves. I think alternate universes are safe, though. Not that they're petty enough to strike me down for saying that they're "not nice", but it's best not to slight them anyway. They're still faeries."

"Can they know what people are thinking? Or only - see and hear whatever they like?"

"Yeah, of course. I could hear what you're thinking with the right spell, though I'm not because it'd get me beheaded by the White Council and it's awfully rude at any rate. But hearing thoughts isn't quite as much of a- power threshold, in my world, as you seem to want it to be, more of a morality threshold. And there's the aforementioned issues with faerie morality. Might be a good thing you're not from around here."

"Yes. I imagine so."

"I'm guessing there's no mind-reading plants lying around? What kinds of things do the flowers do, anyway, apart from glorious magic hair?"

"There is actually a mind-reading plant, a moss not a flower, but it works the other way. Sometimes my friend holds it so he can think at me without interrupting whatever else we're doing, and tell me things I missed by spending eighteen years in a tower. It wouldn't let anybody read anyone else's mind without permission from the person getting read. There's a tree in the backyard that makes tasty fruit. There's a tuft of grass that will weave things; it does my hair, mostly, but I think it could do fabric. There's a vine that will hold things you give it."

"Huh. I wonder if thought-projection would work with my world's magic? It sounds pretty convenient, and it's not Third Law territory... I kind of want to try this now. Thanks, I needed something to do this weekend. And the plants sound handy, but I'm not sure they measure up to imposing your will on the universe. I think I'll stick to my brand, mind-readers aside."

"Third Law?"

"Oh, that's the White Council I mentioned who might behead me. Human wizards have to follow seven Laws of Magic or our lives are forfeit, those being do not kill, do not transform another, do not read the thoughts of another, do not alter the mind of another, do not reach beyond the barrier of death, do not travel against the flow of time, and do not seek knowledge of what lies beyond the Outer Gates." Ari was taught these laws more recently than most wizards, but that doesn't mean he hasn't memorized them enough to list them off in sequence any time he's asked. Sally is an aggressive tutor with strong feelings about her friends not getting their heads cut off.

"The first four make sense. Why the other three?"

"Those, ironically, are the worst of the bunch. They sound pretty harmless, but those actions actually weaken the fabric of reality itself. And outside of reality is Bad Stuff. Even the faeries don't mess around with that stuff, except maybe the Mothers; only humans are physically capable of it, and only humans are arrogant enough to do it." He pauses. "Well, arrogance might not be the right word. The Council could work up a better information campaign about that "you could literally end the world" stuff."

"I thought faeries knew everything. They don't seek the knowledge of what lies beyond those Outer Gates?"

"The Mothers know everything. They're probably up on the knowledge itself, but that's less "seeking" and more "having". And it's "seeking knowledge" because that covers more bases than "summoning" or "interacting with" the Outsiders, which is closer to the point. That, even the fae won't touch with a ten-foot pole. But even seeking knowledge is dangerous for humans. Closest estimate I can give you of what the Outsiders are like is "unpleasant" and "tentacled", and that's about as much info as humans can get before we start going off the rails."

"I don't get it."

"Not sure we're supposed to."

Rapunzel seems disgruntled about this, but shakes her head and moves on. "Can anybody learn to be a wizard?"

"Nope!" Ari says cheerfully. "There's this whole inborn potential thing. Mom heard of a woman who'd managed to turn someone into a wizard, but the ritual involved a lot of baby teeth and human sacrifice, and I'm opposed to one of those things on principle and don't have a supply of the other. Unfortunately. I could check you for potential but I doubt you've got any, coming from another world and all."

"Probably not, but I'd like to know."

Ari pokes her hand. "Nope! With potential there would have been a little static shock there. Very tingly, very convenient. It's a pity, you seem nice and teaching you magic would count under my good deed for the day."

"Oh well. There's not - learnable magic, exactly, at home. You can learn to recognize magic plants - if it doesn't look like something that normally grows in a place, it's probably magic, and tasting it will tell you what it does - but that's not the same thing."

"Huh. Tasting strange plants at home usually just gets you sick. Unless you're in the Nevernever, in which case it might turn you into a toad. I'm pretty good at avoiding toadwort, though."

"Well, if you're wrong and you mistake a poisonous plant for a magic one it will make you sick, but you don't have to taste them very much, and you can learn all you like about what plants ought to be there normally first."

"Ah." Ari sits and enjoys his coffee. It's very good coffee. He likes this bar, even though there's nobody to fight.

"The person who was keeping me found and sold magic plants for a living and taught me what could be taught without my leaving the tower. It turned out no one else knew about the tasting thing, even though there were magic plants in the garden at the palace."

"Oh, I thought that'd be common knowledge or something. So you learned magic from your- Gothel. I guess that's... another similarity. Fun."

"Well, but yours wasn't evil. Anyway, she was reading my diary, she knew what I'd find suspicious, if she wouldn't teach me I would have wanted to know why."

"Well, it's still a bit uncomfortable to learn of the many and varied ways in which my mother was like your evil kidnapper witch-lady."

"Sorry. I can stop talking about Gothel if you'd rather?"

"No, it's alright, I'm just being touchy. I guess you were enthusiastic about the magic, then? Enough that it would have been suspicious of your m- Gothel not to teach you, at least."

"Well, I couldn't go find any plants myself, but I could come up with creative ways to use the ones she brought back. And it was something to do. She made very sure I never ran out of things to do to the point where I might go looking for them."

"I'm starting to think that keeping a magical child locked in a tower is more difficult than just raising one like a normal person. Or like a nomadic faerie, though I think that's easier than most ways."

"Well, I was the princess, and my hair is highly recognizable, so she couldn't keep me among other people. She could have left the country, but she'd have had to get very far away before there was no chance I'd be recognized and brought home, or just outright kidnapped again."

"Oh, yeah, I'm sure she had her reasons, but- just seems like a lot of trouble. Much rather just raise any children I somehow end up with as perfectly ordinary Canadian wizards. Easier that way."

"Canadia is your country?"

He laughs. "It's Canada, I pronounced it the same way when I first arrived there. Nice place, very polite people. Usually cold, which is a taste of home. How about you? Where do you reign over in Magic Plant World?"

"The country's called Corona, but my parents are still alive and I'm very much behind in general education so I'm not in charge of anything yet."

"Ah, general education, the bane of us hermit-children. When I arrived in Vancouver I could tell you the proper form of address for anything from a shelleycobb to the royal triumvirate together, but I punched a taxi in the face because I thought it was going to eat me. Taxis," he adds belatedly, "being large metal carriages that move very fast with people inside of them for complicated reasons that I don't really understand." He grins. "I won the fight."

"Carriages in Canada have faces?"

"Nah, just the general front area. Faces are an abstract concept. Anyway, I punched it and it broke and my natively Canadian friend Sally was very embarrassed on my behalf."

"Most of the things I'm having to learn are more social. I had enough books to learn about - carriages and the like. My friend helps, with the telepathy moss."

"Social stuff is hard! It's still kind of weird to talk to people without an underlying context of social hierarchy, I can only guess how weird it is to talk to people who aren't the one and only person you had ever met. And friends are good for helping like that! What's your friend like, apparently he helped you out a window?"

"He was being chased in the forest where the tower is, and he climbed up because he figured a doorless tower couldn't be inhabited and it would be a safe place to rest, but I was there. And he was too tired to climb back down right away. I gave him a muffin and then made him leave and promise not to tell anyone where I was, because I was scared - Gothel was out at the time - and he climbed most of the way but then he fell and -" Skip skip - "couldn't leave right then, and then he had the idea that I might be the lost princess, so I climbed my hair down and went with him to the capital."

"Aw, adventures! And that's how you learned about your illustrious parentage, I guess."

"Yes. And my more recognizable name. Everybody except my friend and my parents and the ones of the palace staff I've introduced myself to already knows me as Claribel."

"That sounds... stressful? If you'd rather be called Rapunzel, I mean, since you asked me to call you that."

"I'm used to Rapunzel. Claribel's a fine name. I'm learning to answer to it. But when it doesn't matter I might as well be Rapunzel."

"Ah, alright then. I'm glad you have a good friend and that you got out of your tower and that you're a princess. All of those are good things."

"Yeah. I'm really lucky in my parents and my friend."

Ari smiles and turns back to his coffee. It's one of those ridiculous confectionary drinks, because Ari is secure enough in his masculinity not to pretend that he likes coffee black.

"What made your mother different from all the other faeries, anyway?"

His brow furrows. "Not sure I catch your meaning."

"You said faeries are never nice."

"Oh." He considers this. "Well, she was, actually, the one who told me that, but she- well, there's a difference between being nice because it's the right thing to do and being nice because it's... there as an option, I guess. I mean, she'd taken me in, so I suppose it was easier to keep me happy than not. Locking me in a tower being more trouble than it's worth, as I think we agreed."

"And the baby teeth and the - blood? They were just that useful? What were they for?"

"Oh, you can do a million things with milkteeth. Long as you're not squeamish, at least. They're a power source, something to do with the essential magic of children's innocence. They go bad when the kid comes of age, it messes up the thaumaturgical connection, but for seventeen years you're golden. And blood, well, blood's the table salt of ritual, you can put it anywhere. She made sure the draw was all safe, too, and gave me lots of soup and red meat for the week after. Very decent of her. She said she'd been doing it for centuries, so she had the practice."

"Oh, she does this a lot. So you have brothers and sisters?"

"No, it was one at a time, she said it was neater that way. I guess there must be some others running around, but I've never met any."

"They don't even visit her? Or is she just too hard to keep track of what with moving around all the time...?"

"I'd... guess the latter. She taught me to navigate the Nevernever, but I- don't know that I could've found her if she was carting a kid around. She never seemed to hide herself, really, but... maybe it's harder to actually track someone down in the wilds than it is to find your way to the nearest nymph pool? I don't know, I would have tried to visit, maybe she just didn't want anyone showing up while she was paying attention to childrearing. She did tell me about them, sometimes. They all had magic, that's why she picked them."

"She doesn't visit them either?"

"Well- she didn't while she was raising me. She never really left me alone and unsupervised, the Nevernever is pretty dangerous. Maybe she visited them while I was sleeping and she could ward me properly, magically protecting a sleeping child from a distance is easier than doing it for one who's running around trying to punch trees."

"If she adopted them too wouldn't they be your brothers and sisters who you could visit too, even if they were a lot older? I mean, I don't know how this works except from books, I don't have any siblings, but I think usually when people have them they... meet."

"...I don't know. Maybe they were all killed in the vampire war. Maybe they broke the Laws. Maybe I'm a test run for Parenting Mode Belinda and she just kept them all locked in a tower until unceremoniously dropping them off in Eastern Europe when they turned seventeen, maybe she-" He freezes. "We don't know. I don't know."

"We?"

He breathes in and out. "If she... did something. That made them not want to visit. Or... not able to visit. She was always so nice, but- like I said, she never had any reason not to be nice. And it... would have made sense, that if she was just in it for power, she wouldn't just. Let them go. Or let us go, I guess. There's... a lot you can do, to get power out of someone, if you don't need them anymore."

"Oh, they don't get used up when they're - used? They're the sort of thing you'd want to, uh, preserve, if you were a bad faerie?"

"Well, they won't last forever, but if you leave the kid alive then the power all just drains away on their seventeenth birthday. When the child is full-grown, by the- the weird mystical standards of these things, that's it, no more magic of innocence to draw on. That's the cutoff point. She always said she'd paced herself so she'd use up my teeth before I passed it, that- lying, wicked grig."

"You seem awfully sure all of a sudden. Did a bunch of stuff just add up in retrospect?"

"Yeah. It's... there's no way it wasn't this, now I see it. She never lied, that's the thing, faeries can't lie, she just- , she'd never talk about a child from less than a few hundred years ago. She'd say they "died a long time ago," that was how she said it every time. And even with the teeth, she never- she never said something like "I've got a schedule that'll use them up in time," she made it into a little game, like "don't you think I can do enough magic in ten years to eat up one little tooth?" and "oh, I've got it all planned out, you'll see." I just... ugh. It just makes sense. Faeries aren't nice. She said it herself."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault." He thinks for a moment, sniffling slightly, then amends, "Well, it's kind of your fault, but not your fault she was- like that. And I'd... probably rather know than not. So. No need to apologize."

"You're all set up to do without her already, right?"

He gives a slightly watery smile. "Oh, yeah, I'm set up. My friends and I kill evil things, I live with one of them. She's rich and nice, it's all good."

"You kill evil things? What kind of evil things?"

"Oh, you know. Demons. Vampires, the ones that aren't just whiny little pissants. Particularly nasty faeries. The occasional warlock, that's someone who breaks the Laws. That general sort."

"I don't know," she reminds him. "Where I'm from it's humans and magic plants."

"Ah. No evil plants, I suppose. Well, my world has a number of things that are really quite sincerely evil, and don't come in any other flavors, and for the most part we kill those. Sometimes we kill things that are only incidentally evil, but we try to make very sure that they are. Sally'd be awfully upset if we accidentally killed someone we didn't have to."

"Well, yes, you shouldn't go around killing people if they don't really, really need it. What do the evil things do? I guess you explained warlocks, but the others."

"Weeeeell, let's see. Demons are these things that you can summon to ask questions or have them do things for you. All well and good, but they're also very, very mean. So people will have them do things like kill their enemies, which is where we come in; I punch the demon until it dies, Sally tracks it back to the summoner, Peter has his ghosts scare the pants off him and we induce him to change his ways. Vampires actually come in three sorts, but the relevant ones are horrible monsters who drink people's blood and keep a lot of human slaves. Usually fatal, always nasty. We kill them. And, what else... Faeries, we've covered. There's a lot of other things. Most of them eat people. That's usually why we kill them."

"Do they have to eat people?" wonders Rapunzel.

"There are... several ways in which that doesn't make sense. The evil things just- don't have souls. You can check, with magic. No soul means no free will. These things are ruled by their essential nature, they have to do what they do; if I were to ask a troll to stop eating children lost under bridges, it would look at me like you would if I asked if you'd considered moving to the moon."

"Well, now that you've mentioned it I'm wondering how I'd get there if I wanted to and what it's like," says Rapunzel reasonably. "What does it even mean to say they have no free will? I don't know anything about souls, but if they can understand you when you talk the same way I can understand the moon question, they must be somewhat intelligent."

"They are intelligent. But no free will means that- they could think about what it would be like not to eat people, yes, in the same way that you could think about moving to the moon. You could think "well, if I had a rocket" - that's a thing that takes you to the moon - "and some way to breathe and maybe a little garden then I could have a tidy little cottage up there" and it's a fun way to spend half an hour when you're very bored, thinking about your life on the moon. And then you probably continue living in an apartment in Canada, or in your case the royal palace I'm assuming, and think no more of it."

"Generally, they don't want to. Your tower wasn't the worst place you could possibly have been, but "what if I left" was a fantasy, as far as I can tell, rather than "what if there was this wacky alternate universe where I didn't even want to live in this nice tower?" Which is how it would be for a bridge troll to imagine eating a side of beef, plus a healthy dose of disgust at the idea."

"That's really strange, though, why are they like that?"

"Well, the reason why they're like that at all is due to the whole soul thing. Most of the stuff in my world is like that; humans and their soulful cousins are seriously weird by universal standards. And without a soul, logic will always take a backseat to essential nature if there's a conflict between the two. Why are some of them devoted to eating people in particular? Couldn't say. Some people think it's because people think monsters will eat them, so they do. Not sure how much stock I put in that, but I don't have a competing theory."

"I'm not asking why they don't have souls, I don't understand enough about souls to understand an answer - I want to know why they have that 'essential nature'. Why would they care if people thought monsters would eat them?"

"So enough wizards could change the monsters so they didn't have to be monsters anymore."

"That's the wonder of an outside perspective, I guess. As for normal, what about this situation would you classify as normal? You come in with seventy feet of unbreakable magic hair, I interrogate you about whether or not you're a faerie and about your relationship with your evil hermit not-mom, you accidentally informed me that my evil hermit not-mom had planned to ritually murder me, you had strange and impractical but kind of brilliant ideas about how to turn my universe into less of a cesspool of evil. Also, the attraction is one part legit to two parts rhetorical to three parts mead for lunch. Not necessarily a proposition, though I wouldn't actually object. Sorry, advanced social maneuver, I should have warned you."

"You are the fifth person I've ever had more than a few back-and-forths worth of conversation with," Rapunzel points out. "I am not ready for advanced social maneuvers without my friend helping with the telepathy plant. I don't know anything about normal social situations, which is why I asked. What is the purpose of 'rhetorical' attraction?"

"Right, right. Sorry, no, it's not particularly normal except in a somewhat different kind of bar setting, the kind where you go specifically to tell strangers they're attractive and possibly take them home to sleep with. I say rhetorical because me saying I'm attracted to you was mostly to punctuate how amazing you are by adding on another layer of it. And I felt like being cheeky, and I don't get nearly enough chances to hit on foreign royalty. Some degree of all of those."

"My friend is a lot better at explaining these things," observes Rapunzel absently. "Even without the telepathy moss."

"I have absolutely no doubt of that," Ari says cheerfully. "I'm somewhat drunk and I'm not great at making sense in the first place."

"I have not yet gotten him to explain alcohol."

"It makes you less smart, but in a fun way! It makes you happier, unless you have a reason to be sad, in which case it makes you miserable. For some reason we drink it when we're sad anyway, possibly in the hopes that it'll turn out we aren't really sad, which never happens. I'm going to guess you'd hate it."

"I think I'd hate it, yep."

"Not for everybody, yeah." He wields his drumstick in the direction of his face. It is a pleasing drumstick.

Rapunzel finishes her orange drink. The glass vanishes. "You don't seem to be trying to do anything about being rhetorically attracted to me; can I expect you to continue to not try to do anything about it?"

"If you don't want me to, sure. It's a big world and there are many pretty blonde ladies with cool ideas, though maybe not so pretty or so blonde or with such a cool idea. And of course, I'm not limited to clones of you, which is good because the dating pool would be pretty small."

"Okay, good, because I have no idea what to do about it if you do, and it would be very awkward and it might involve me leaving this interesting magic bar sooner than I really want to."

"That'd be a shame. If I suddenly fall in all-consuming love with you such that I can't set it aside for a moment, I promise I'll go before it gets awkward so you can get more orange drinks and appreciate the exploding stars to your heart's content."

"Um... okay."