"Hi," says Bell, trying to look like she's still mopping. She isn't sure exactly who decides whether she's earned her room - it isn't Bar, that's all she knows - so maybe they will be fooled by such subterfuge.

"Hello," replies the visitor. "Do you know where I am? I haven't figured it out yet. It's not an illusion, and there are too many people in for it to have been self-containted and done by a wayward mage."

"This is Milliways," says Bell. "It surprises people like that. You can go home whenever you want to pretty much, though, out the same door."

"I've never met a ghost in here," says Bell. I met a demon one time, though."

The woman gives Bell a critical look. "And what was the demon like?" she asks, carefully.

"He was little and had pointy ears and a pointy tail and drank a lot of beer."

"That was not the sort of answer I was expecting," says the woman, surprised. "Little? How little?"

"Shorter than me but not by all that much. He probably wasn't whatever kind of demon you have. There's kinds of most things."

"Kinds of things? I've only ever met one type of demon. If one were here, it would have immediately revealed itself when I did my strange thing earlier, and started to monologue. Fire, brimstone, how I was doomed, and so forth," says Lynn, matter of fact.. "Then I would have killed it."

"You aren't allowed to kill anybody here, you'll get in trouble."

"Who would I be in trouble with?"

"Whoever's on Security. I don't know who it is today, probably not anybody I've met."

"Security. So people work here - do you? You look rather young for that," says Lynn, looking sad.

"I do but I'm not on Security. I just mop and wipe down tables to pay for my room so I don't have to spend shells on it."

"I beg your pardon? The local currency is shells?"

"Bar will take any currency! It's great, I can't spend shells at home but I can bring them here."

"I see. Then why does their value matter to you? I assume you live on a beach, if you have enough to pass as currency," reasons Lynn.

"Well, if I go back for more shells, I lose the door. So I keep bags of them by all the doors in case any one of them turns into Milliways."

"Ah. That's quite a lot of planning for a bar. It seems innocuous enough," says the woman, then her voice softens, a little. "Are you alright in your home? Or is this simply an interesting adventure?"

"I like to be here as long as I can," shrugs Bell. "Home is sort of okay but we have to eat clams all the time and I'm not old enough to take tesserae."

"I can poach some clams without anybody catching me. Tesserae is when you take extra chances for the Hunger Games and they give you grain and oil but I'm not twelve yet."

"The work isn't for shells, the work is for my room. I can finish mopping and eat with you and then do the tables after, though? I'm almost done," says Shell Bell anxiously.

"That would be fine," replies the woman. "I'll still get you something to eat, though. Where can I see to that?"

"Bar knows what I like best!" says Shell Bell with a winning smile. "She's a person even though she is also a bar. You can talk to her and she can talk back by writing on napkins."

Balance is certainly a primary concern in the properness of a meal intended for her, replies a second napkin agreeably.

"They're," (nom nom) "when a bunch of teenagers go on TV" (nom) "twenty-four of them usually and whoever survives longest wins."

"Th'" (nom nom) "Capitol. This year's the sixty-second." (Broccoli is gone now and the chicken-and-dumplings won't take long to follow.)

"One of those years it was forty-seven, for a Quarter Quell," Bell clarifies. "But I live in a Career district so I should be okay. I might get picked but I won't have to go, somebody trained will volunteer for me and she'll have a good shot at winning."

"Well, meals will help me," says Shell Bell. "And maybe my parents a little if there's enough of them to let me go short at home. But Peacekeepers aren't demons. How does your magic work?"

"Guns, bombs. Mutts, all kinds of those, new ones all the time."

"Please explain what each can do," requests the apparent demon-killer.

"Um, guns can shoot people, like a bow but it's a little bit of metal and not an arrow, and from farther away and easier. Bombs explode whatever's near them. Very near if it's little and for miles around if it's not little. Mutts it depends on the kind - they're animals that the Capitol's messed with to do things. Listen in on people and report back like jabberjays, or sting people and make them go all loopy like tracker-jackers, or wreck any boats that go too far away from the coast, like krakens."

"That is an impressive amount of things they can do," muses Lynn. "The animals I doubt I would have much trouble with, they tend to be predictable in how they go about things, if not what they do. Bombs - I am not in the habit of being easy to track, so I doubt they could catch me off guard with one, though in direct combat I would have some trouble. Guns, I would have the most trouble with, I think. By 'easier' - easier to use, or faster?"

"Both."

"Maybe you could go on a boat with some people and kill a kraken and they could sail off to Atlantis," says Shell Bell. "But that might not work. I don't know."

"Perhaps I could," says Lynn. "Do you know what a kraken is capable of? Or where this 'Atlantis' is?"

"Atlantis is just anywhere that isn't Panem. That's the country I live in. A kraken is a big, big squid mutt. I think that's all it does is be big and attack boats that go too far though."

"I live in District Four and there are some very big boats but I'm not sure how hard it would be to get away with a boat or how many people you could put on it with all of the stuff they would need. And I'm not sure the Capitol couldn't bomb our Atlantis, either."

"I haven't found anybody in here who can help, yet," says Shell Bell, sighing.

"What did you do?" asks Shell Bell. She is going slowly on her brownie. It's for savoring.

"Tried to get her to show up, nothing came of it," informs Lynn. "I might have to summon her outside of this place, but it was worth a shot here."

"If she didn't come through the door with you she probably isn't here. You can hold your door, but only while you're close enough to actually hold it," says Shell Bell. "If that would let you get her."

"Hm. Unlikely that she would help anyway, and I ran out of good insults trying to get her to show up here," sighs Lynn. "Perhaps I'll try again later, when I think of new ones."

"You have to insult her with new insults even if she didn't hear the old ones?"

Lynn grins. "No, but usually it's easier to summon her if I can put any sort of weight behind the ones I'm saying. Redoing ones I used would just get boring."

"Huh. I don't know any very good insults or I would try to help."

"That's very kind of you, thank you. I am quite sure I can handle it on my own, though. It's why I went outside."

Bell's brownie is all gone now.

"Well. Do you have any ideas for what to do? My offer to help still stands, but I'd hate to make the situation worse, and that's likely with how little I know about the subject."

"What's magic about your weapons? I can tell they're magic, but not what they do."

"They steal strength from things they draw blood from, and use that to enhance the edge and give strength to the wielder. It's not a substitute for sleep or eating, but it's quite useful for a fight, especially when I'm fighting long-term or against something that is bigger than I am," she explains. "If I'm desperate, I can feed them myself, so they can become sharper and stronger."

"Well, that would be useful if I was going to be in the Hunger Games and if they let you bring outside weapons but I'm not because of the Careers and they don't. Also I'd probably just hurt myself, I'm really clumsy."

"Ah, I see. Then none of them would be very useful to you. I'm not sure I can teach grace, but I could help with self-defense?"

"That doesn't rely on me being able to run, carry heavy objects, or turn around fast without wobbling?" asks Bell skeptically.

"It would be more of a way to think, than what to do in this case, I believe. In normal situations I would say do something unexpected and run, but for you," she pauses, to consider Bell. "You're a smart girl, I can tell. It would be summarized as, 'Do not be predictable. Do not hesitate.' You can be afraid, that's perfectly natural, but I would help you with what to do when you were afraid."

"I can't run. I fall if I try."

"Here, or at home?"

"At home," says Lynn, softly.

"A Peacekeeper or just some person?"

"Give what you would do in both cases."

"If it's a Peacekeeper I tell them my last name and ask them if my daddy knows what they're doing. He used to be one and he has some friends who still are. If it's somebody else I scream at the top of my lungs."

"Fall over on purpose before he can make me do it by accident. Roll under something, if there's something."

"Also use the environment to slow him down. You are at a disadvantage, understand that from the start. Do not try anything fancy like stabbing him or throwing and hoping your aim is true. Chances are, it won't be. Bring him to your level, if you think you can, and don't overestimate what you can do. Once you're under the something, what do you do?"

"See if I can trip him?" suggests Bell. "And then if I can try to take his gun."

"Something that is that much bigger than you is hard to trip from where you are. Try something else."

"I don't know where I am," Bell points out. "If there's anything to grab or anything."

Lynn grins. "Smart girl. You're under a small table, in a - where's a common place you go to?"

"I'm mostly at home or at work or at school."

"I see. You're at work. What's usually around there? What would be within reach from under a table?"

"Nets, buckets, maybe a hose. I've seen people in the Hunger Games net each other but I don't know if I could do it. I never saw anybody use a hose though."

"From the ground, I don't believe you could. A bucket would be more reliable - it has weight to it. A hose could be used to trip him, if you can find a way to set it up," informs Lynn. "But, understand that the point of the exercise isn't to put you in a situation you can't get out of. It's to make you think about what to do if your normal methods fail."

"What do you mean?"

"You tackle problems every day. Your first two methods of handling this specific one would often work - they were good. But do you think about what you would do if they didn't work?"

"If somebody bigger than me tried to kill me I would probably die," points out Shell Bell. "I could run away through here to some world where it's less dangerous but I couldn't bring my parents. I keep a lookout for people who want to help me, like you, in case I ever get something I could bring home that would be useful, but so far I don't have anything. So if somebody bigger than me tried to kill me now I would probably die."

"I don't want to die, so what I'm doing about it is staying here until I can't buy food anymore, every time I find a door, and talking to nice people from other worlds, in case they can give me something I can use. My problem if I was under a table on my clam boat wouldn't be that I would be too scared to do anything. I'm pretty good at concentrating. It would be that I would be eight and under a table on my clam boat without any tricks to pull out."

"I'm still pretty sure I'd hurt myself more than anybody else with it. Can you magic things besides weapons? Bar can make other things than food, and you have money."

"I'm not good at 'magicking' things. I was not the one to make these weapons - the one who did was the ghost I tried to summon, though I did help. The best I could maybe make is something for finding objects. I'm good at finding spells," explains Lynn. "But if there's something else specific, I can pay for it."

"She pretty much only does things that aren't magic all by themselves. A finding spell would be great, though, it would make it easier to find clams - unless it can't do live things? Maybe it could find their shells, anyway - and lost coins and things."

"Then I will try," she says, gravely. "I don't think I could get it to do living creatures - but lost coins and shells would do. What would be something no one would bother to take from you or notice, something they would let you keep?"

"Anything that doesn't look valuable or like it was made on purpose is probably safe. A stick, a rock. They let me have clamshells but if you can do something else I can keep the clamshells to buy food here."

"Hm. A rock would do - a stick would rot or fall apart, eventually. A pebble, perhaps? Something easy to keep in a pocket, like it was an accident to be there."

"A pebble's fine, we don't even have to ask Bar, there are rocks outside."

Bell goes rock-hunting along the edge of the lake and finally picks up an unremarkable gray stone. "This one is good."

Bell takes it. "How do I use it?"

"How far away can it look? How much do I have to know about what I'm trying to find?"

"It'll work for about a hundred feet. I couldn't make it very strong, but I think for something like this too powerful would be bad. You could be walking for days. You don't need to know too much about it - but you do need to describe something specific. It will find a lost coin, if you search for lost coins and one is nearby, but if you try and ask it to find you the key to overthrowing the Capitol, well. I'm afraid it can't do that."

"But I can find money, or - can it do plants? Can it do things that aren't alive that are still attached to live things, like live clams' shells, or pearls?"

"Plants, no. Attached to live things, yes, if it's a separate object," she says, smiling.

"How separate? What about the things I said, what about - fruits?"

"A fruit, only once it's off of the vine. A clam shell would be the same, once it wasn't attached to a clam anymore. A pearl would not be," explains Lynn. "Those would always be find-able, though they're rare."

"But I do live near a beach."

Lynn grins. "Indeed you do. I hope it helps."

"It will! Can you do any other things?"

"Right now? No, I'm sorry," she apologizes. "I wouldn't have enough magic for the spell. I have little to work with. Even when I've recovered, I doubt I could do much else, though I can try - finding spells are what I'm good at. I was never talented at magical attacks or protections."

"Yes," says Lynn. "I can pay some, but I do occasionally need to use it, so I wouldn't be able to pay everything I had."

Bell nods. "I don't run up a debt because I'm worried the door won't come back if I do, but some people do it," she adds, "and I never heard of anybody having anything worse than not getting doors happen, if they do run up tabs and not pay them."

"That makes sense. I'll give you money to put on your tab, since it's usually of little use to me, and then I'll pay off my own. If I never get a door again," Lynn points out, "I would hardly be able to help you in the future if you find other allies."

Bell nods again. "Thank you very much."

Lynn smiles. "You're very welcome. I hope it helps."

"It will," Bell assures her.