This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
When she thinks she can see him without crying again, she holds her baby close and walks silently back to Rana's.
The room has been replaced with - something else. She has no idea what this means. She has nobody to ask but Rana. Everything she asks places her further in his debt, of course, but it hardly matters now.
She steps inside.
"I like where I am. If you can help us improve on it then I want to talk it over when he's here."
He doesn't pay Catherine much attention. Walks in, looks around at everyone else, looks back at his brother, smiles slightly.
"You can close the door."
This looks likely to be interesting and he does not want Catherine to be in the crossfire so he will pull her away towards a corner.
"I think I'll pass, all the same. We were - going through your brother's slave - to avoid the payments thing."
"Humans need a lot of food to survive a night. She and her son wanted to spend the night in our court, with that food provided by emergency expeditions organized by us. This is very expensive. She can't afford it. She wanted to do it anyway, because she was having trouble feeding her baby. He hates spending the night in our court, but he agreed, and he's spent more than half his time paying for it rather than have us take it out of her."
"I recognize there's a baseline relative to which that's reassuring but where I'm from you just take in starving mothers and give them whatever they need and no one takes it out of anyone."
"That sounds impossible. Resources come from places, and require effort to extract and store and make available. If you feed all the starving mothers that wander by, someone's taking it out of someone."
"In some places food is, like sunlight, too plentiful to bother accounting for; in others, everyone pays their society to provide a set of things that includes policing and firefighting and food for starving mothers; in this place, the bar will gladly make food for anyone who asks for it, and seems to think that that girl is still starving."
"What interesting systems. I suppose if she'd landed in one of them she'd have been provided for some other way. Here, it costs something, and he's paying it."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
