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.
"Yes. Also he hadn't put any thought into how his magic system could be put to use to enable people to suicide when they wish to and now he has. - though maybe fairies go to hell when they die. They were pretty sure not but I don't know that that means anything."
They should take some tasty hot food up to the kids, probably, and tell them the plan, which means settling on it.
Yeah.
She heads over to Cassie's table.
"Earlier - someone said that if you did the wrong things, in Kansas, that you would get in trouble. We wanted to know what that meant."
"There's, like, law enforcement. If you break the law then you might have to pay money or go to prison. Or - I guess if you're really terrible to your kids you could lose custody. It doesn't happen often but it does happen sometimes, if you do something really bad."
"Beat them, have sex with them, refuse to provide for them, do anything that threatens their safety, I dunno, duct tape them to a chair, lock them in a dog cage? Maybe you just run all your discipline by by me and I tell you whether it's wildly out of line?"
"And do they - what - ask everybody every week whether they've done any forbidden things?"
"Nah, they investigate you if they have a reason to believe you broke the rules. So like, for child abuse, if your kid is going around school with bruises on them all the time, people are gonna get suspicious and look into how they got them."
"Probably somewhere? But there are a lot of them. You mostly do not accidentally run afoul of any that people are going to prosecute you for if you have, like, common sense and cultural awareness, but since I'm not super sure you have either I guess I will have to write up a list of the major ones. Uh, no attacking people, no stealing things, no sexually assaulting people and if you need that unpacked please ask the other you because I'm really not up for it, no trespassing on other people's property without permission, no buying or possessing certain kinds of drugs, uh, some practical stuff about how to interact with cars and streets that I will explain once you have seen cars and streets, I think you can probably get in trouble for threatening to hurt people so don't do that to be safe, children have to go to school unless you're officially homeschooling them, more stuff if you for some reason mean to start a business I guess...? - I think this is part of why they want me to babysit you a little."
"You can tell us the rules before we break them, and if we decide we don't like them we can come back here?"
"I am mostly but not literally a hundred percent sure I can, yes. And yeah, I think - they're not trying to give you fewer options."
"If we get into trouble for breaking the rules I guess we can just come back to Milliways then."
"...I don't know if you guys get an absolute get out of jail free card? But - just don't rape or murder anybody. Probably it'll be fine."
It's really odd to say 'rape and murder' like that as if these are comparable things but he decides not to get into that right now.
"All right. Let's get your other son and bring the kids breakfast and tell them we're moving to Kansas."
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