'It's pretty great. What can you do with your thing besides not sleep and change the colors on stuff?'

'I'm pretty good at magic! If we weren't stranded on a round thing I'd be going to do it professionally one day moving souls into cohabiting bodies and stuff. Uh, sleepiness isn't the only thing you can put in a mouse? I killed a different demon by putting all the heat in an entire tree into a leaf so the leaf would catch fire because that kind of demon dies to fire.'

'All of it?'

'Yeah, I kind of hurt ourselves doing that and killed some of the mice. I'm going to need more mice, can I get them here?'

'Oh, probably. I'm sure we can figure something out. ...Do you need a doctor or did you take care of that, I imagine being in the vicinity of a tree at absolute zero would be, um, really not fun.'

"I didn't kill all the mice. They're dealing with it."

'Okay. We think you can get mice at pet stores, but you probably shouldn't tell whoever's working there what you plan to do with them.'

'...What else do you do with mice?'

'Some people think they're cute and fuzzy enough to keep as pets.'

"Huh. We try not to get attached to them. But I can pretend, I guess. Also this is a travel cage and they shouldn't have to live a dozen in this space if I'm not hiking through the woods, if they get sick or they're always asleep I can't use them."

'They shouldn't expect you to gush over the fuzziness, just don't overtly mention planning to make them sick or anything.'

"Okay."

'When do you need the new mice by? I usually trade in favors these days so I don't have a lot of cash on me, and finding a pet store with an employee that needed something I could give them could take a bit of time--finding someone willing to pay me for something like that would probably take less time, actually. Anyway there aren't any soul-stealing sleep-demons here so if you want to sleep out of childhood nostalgia or wanting to ration the mice or something that wouldn't be problematic.'

'We don't want to sleep. Even if it weren't a terrifying idea! What a waste of time!'

'Just checking. Anyway, timetable on the mice?'

'We can probably stay awake another five or six suns easily, ten if we have to, without any. But sooner's better.'

'Given that our sun works differently here, I'm not sure how long that means, exactly. Um...' She unstraps the digital watch on their wrist, and hands it over. '{Those} are seconds, {those} are minutes, and {those} are hours. Sixty seconds is a minute and sixty minutes is an hour,' she adds, since the seconds are the only ones actively changing. 'Do any of those seem familiar?'

'Okay. That gives us a general idea; we don't need to know the exact amount of time. How long will the mice you have last you?'

'They're sleeping off a lot of tiredness already, the live ones... if Holly transfers instead of swaps we'll be fine for maybe thirty or forty suns, but they'll die, you can't fit that much tiredness in a mouse and have it just wake up later. So we'd need more.'

'Well, we don't mind sleeping, so you could use us in a pinch, but we'd better get started looking around for odd jobs. Come to think of it I'm not sure a town this small would have a pet store; how do you feel about us flying and carrying you?'

'That sounds cool,' says Holly.

'Awesome. Just let us pack up and we can get going.'

'Thanks!'

Packing up doesn't take very long; everything they own fits in a large, somewhat tattered, wire-reinforced duffel bag. When they're grabbing what's left of the packaged food the concierge left them, it occurs to at least one of them to ask, 'How are you two doing food-wise?'