[Notebooks and pens are cheap. In fact--] and they open the drawer beside the bed and pull out a pad of motel stationary and a pen with the motel's name written on the side. [Here. To start with. I can get you real notepaper later.]

[Thanks.] And she starts noting down transliterations of the words she's sure she remembers how they correspond to meanings.

[You're welcome,] she replies, and finishes packing their bag and zips it shut. [Alright, we'll make a brief circuit of the town to see if anyone needs something metal dealt with or help remembering something or something, and then off to a larger town.]

[Okay. We can help too, if you find anything we can - well, mostly Holly - can do, the mice are for us.]

[I'll let you know if either of us see anything obvious; we're not as familiar with the practical applications for your abilities as our own.]

[Basically she can move properties between things she's touching. Either make it so they have each other's, or so all of the property goes from one into the other, but like she said not all properties do both versions.]

[We still don't have years of habit looking out for stuff like that], Edie points out, [but noted.]

[You're being really helpful. We really appreciate it.]

[We've never met anyone like us before. And we're a bit lonely, truth be told. We appreciate your company while it lasts.]

[We've never met anybody like us before either! Even at home where everybody's got cohabitors it's one at a time.]

[No?]

[Sometimes we sort of--melt together, so we're functionally one person for a while.]

[We're always two people...]

[Yeah, we don't know why we do it. It just sort of happens sometimes.]

[We can hear each other thinking and we're always a little awake, especially Holly, so we can switch off for each other pretty well. But it's always been that we were separate. We got mad at our parents calling all three of us Holly when we were little.]

[Even when we're one person we don't like the name we were born with for casual use. We didn't really mind when our parents called us that, though,] she says, a little sadly.

[Book picked himself a name and Holly picked one for me. She was awake most often so we all thought of her as having the name they gave us.]

[Neither of us can really imagine using the name we were born with. I mean, the aesthetics aren't great, but it would feel like--like one of us was the "real" Elaine Xavier and the other was just a voice in her head. Or like we were inviting other people to think that, anyway.]

[Maybe it was different for us because it's usual to have people sharing bodies.]

[That seems likely.]

[How'd you pick your names?]

[Edie was our grandmother's name. Emily thought that name was pretty, and she liked that it started with an E to match. My name and our birth name and our mother's name. It was Erika.]

[Cute.]

[Cuteness is often what happens when small children name things!]