"But it's important to you."

"Kinda. Yeah. But - I'll understand if it's - either way."

"I don't want to - decide to ignore something that matters to you a lot when I don't even really understand it. And I don't understand this."

Nod.

Snuggle.

Snuggle.

She moves her stuff into her and Azalea's room and then flops on her bed (she has a bed!) and bounces a bouncy ball off the ceiling.

Well. I said they had to give us a week. What do we do with it.

Are we promising to send them back after a week? That sounds really soon. 

Uh.

They could fly a plane. Kids like flying planes, right?

We are promising to take any of their concerns at all seriously if they still have them at the end of a week. We don't have to send them home, but I think we have to make a good-faith effort to address stuff after that point.

Flying a plane is probably super cool but I am not actually sure that eight-year-olds are capable of flying planes.

Oh, maybe not. Well, we could take them to the air force base and they could ride around in planes.

Maybe. I do wanna get them playing video games, I said I would, they can do a decent amount of that without any English. I really wanna get them talking to Connor, Connor'll be good for this, but they don't have any languages in common.

Can they make meaningful progress on English in a week or not really?

Not really. At least nowhere near enough to have the conversations it'll be useful for Connor to have with them.

Then maybe we can work on that as the medium-term plan and try to make the place intriguing enough to stay in in the short term. 

Yeah, maybe. Wish I had a good idea what to give them with no language that indicated that anything we have is - meaningful, more than just entertainment. The plane idea's good.

Entertainment and a very powerful military, kiddos, that's what we've got for you!

Well, that's at least half of the advantages they've listed of where they came from. I dunno whether "America would totally destroy medieval Scandinavia in a fight" gets us anywhere, but it seems worth a shot.

There's a museum on the Air Force base too.

Maybe that'll be good, too.

The little kids are easy. I guess then we just have to convince Cecelia and Rána that it's worth hanging around here.

I think that just requires persuading either one of them. She always looks to him but he usually looks to her, too. 

He should meet horses, and dogs, and go hiking. I don't have much of a sense of her as a person.

She wants her kids to be happy, and to love her. She... also wants him to be happy and to love her. And then... safety. Security. Respect.

I dunno what she wants that isn't stuck inside of other people.

Well. I'm not entirely sure slaveowning fairies are capable of love but maybe we can pull off the rest of it.

Yeah.

I kinda expect she wants him to marry her, given that she was from medieval England before her entire life got destroyed a couple times over. I am not super sure whether this would be a good outcome or not.

Huh.

 I don't know much recent Earth history, sorry, what was marriage in medieval England like? 

's kind of slavery in a cheerier coat of paint. Wife promises to obey her husband, husband makes no such promise to his wife, wife legally becomes something between a dependent and an important piece of property. Also America outlawed marital rape in, let's see, sometime after 1970, so there's that, too.

But they do both promise to, y'know, love and honor and look after each other. And cheery coats of paint are still something.

That's kind of what I suspected. - on the one hand, cheerier coat of paint, on the other hand, currently not a sex thing, I think on the whole that makes me lean no?