"Hi, yeah, my fault," she says, when Cecelia doesn't immediately answer. "Um, don't tell us your names because he's a fairy and you'll be entangled with him forever if you do. Your mom asked me to help her get you and now you're in Milliways. You're safe here. We have snacks."

"You're kidnapping us," says the girl, to Cecelia. "You can't just kidnap people, mom."

"It's safer here. You don't have to - your father doesn't control it, there's plenty of food - "

"Take us back immediately, or my father will have you killed," says the boy.

"I'd like to see him try. Look, you don't know where you are, you don't know what this is, making threats here is stupid, kid."

"My father is the most powerful man in the world. If you kidnap his children he will set his armies on you, and he will find you, and he will see you dead. - maybe not the Chinese woman, I suppose he might want to keep you."

Well, she's not super eager to send this very unpleasant eight-year-old back to whoever made him so unpleasant.

" - okay. If you want to go back I can talk to some people about it, but I think that you think this situation is a lot more alarming than it actually is, so I think you should calm down and eat something and stay a while. Time is frozen where you came from, you won't be missing anything if you take a day off classes or whatever and hang out with your mom."

"I hope my father has you all tortured to death," says the boy, before turning sullenly away.

The girl frowns at him and sighs. "I want to know what government you represent."

"My court's called Istime. Your human king could not find us if he marched his armies across the whole planet."

The girl is fairly distressed by the fact that she doesn't recognize that name.

"I want to go home," she says.

Um, Alex, can you hear me from here - 

Yes. Everything okay?

I feel like I am not doing the greatest job of calming these kids down. So far they have threatened me with torturous death and I think implicitly whatever happened to Catherine. I'm not, like, worried about this, but they seem super unenthusiastic about being here.

How old are they?

Maybe eight? Can't tell which one's older.

Wow. Okay. 

Do you think they'll calm down once they know more?

Kind of hard to get a read on them so far? I feel like threatening their mother with death says, like, bad things about the overall situation, though.

Yeah. 

Uh, I don't super know what to do about that. But if they want to be away from her they're entitled to their own space? 

Yeah.

"Uh - do you want us to leave you here with the food for a bit and then you can come hang out downstairs and talk to people about what you want later, when you're done sleeping?"

The girl nods. The boy is ignoring them.

"Okay. I think we should give them some space."

Nod.

"I'm fine with giving them some space," he says once they've stepped outside, "but they're Cecelia's, and if your people want to interfere with that we're going to have a very difficult time."

"I - feel like wherever they were was obviously not great for them. I also feel like making them feel like they're prisoners here is just gonna make everything worse. Do you know why they're - like that, about you?"

"Their father took them away to be raised by other guardians when they were six. Everyone in their lives is trying to - teach them that I'm an embarrassment, that they should want nothing to do with me. They weren't like this before."