"Good luck."

Thanks.

"Coming up on dinnertime," May says a long while later.

Yeah.

She's not picky; whatever May wants is fine. (She glides down.)

"Lasagna special it is." May rolls down the street; she mostly propels her chair with her feet rather than grabbing the wheels.

Dusk walks nearby; she's switched back to her moth wings. She gawks at the architecture a little.

There is a place with a lasagna special, which May orders, but Dusk has her choice of generic American or Americanized foods.

"The restaurants here are cheap," May says. "I asked and apparently most Avalons don't make restaurants pay rent as long as you can get a square meal there for little enough money, because it'd be so space inefficient for everyone to have kitchens and they want it to work for most people to not have to have kitchens, or to be able to share one kitchen for a whole block."

(Third entree is.... grilled cheese. She gets that.)

That's clever. And convenient.

"Also more money flows into the Avalon if people who don't live here spend at the restaurants and we're more likely to do that if it's cheap as well as convenient. Some of the houses have kitchens anyway but they go to people who actually like cooking. The whole thing's very planned economy, but the Avalons are small enough it basically works?"

What's wrong with that kind of thing usually? Just that it's too hard to make a plan for something too complicated?

"Something like that. I think I need to read more economics than I've gotten around to so far to explain it but it's something like that."

Okay. She hasn't learned about economics at all yet, maybe she'll see if the library has anything on it.

"My to-read list has some books on it but since I haven't read it yet I don't know if any of it's good, you might as well just start with Wikipedia."

Yeah, that too. Books are easier to learn from, though, it's hard to find Wikipedia articles that don't assume you already know what they're talking about when it's a complicated subject.

"Yeah, but if you want something broad like 'economics' it's a good place to start."

Yeah, that's true.

"So tonight when I get home I'm going to plug the meanings I need into my big rune spreadsheet, and see what it spits out, and tomorrow I'll do lots of math on it and might not come in to the Avalon at all because it's much easier with my computer, and once I have a list all hammered out I try to fit it all nicely into a rectangle and then I quintuple-check everything, and then I come up with a few sentences in French and tell my teacher they're for a story I'm writing, and then I find a really big space to draw on and copy it out there, maybe at night so nobody's like 'what the heck are you doing' if I can get a big light to see what I'm drawing."

She can make a big light.

"That works then."

Cool.

And if it is dangerous it's the kind of dangerous where she ends up in the wrong world or something, not the kind of dangerous where it blows up the Avalon, right? She's fine with the first thing.

"I am sure for secret reasons that I will not blow up the Avalon, and less sure but still pretty confident that I won't even send you to yet a third world."

All right. She'd take her chances on a third one anyway, at this point, if that was the only choice. Not that May hasn't been pretty great.

"Thank you."

May orders a slice of pie for dessert. Banana cream.