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.
The kids think this is excellent. Even Tyr and Sigrun are impressed, and this time they seem to be having something somewhere in the neighborhood of fun with it. Zana helps Frey memorize the names of every single animal they come across.
"Oh. Uh. I have no idea how fairy stuff interacts with getting a salary, do you?"
"If you can do it without making the whole population of Colorado Springs endangered should any of them lie or swear falsely or whatever, the way it works is that we manufacture a qualifying job history for you and you learn English and then you go convince them you'll be suitable and they pay you to clean up after the animals."
"No one owns you. You spend the money on food, and rent, and clothes and excursions like this one."
"Will you feel better if I'm like, yes, you work all day and give me your money?"
"Where I'm from it's considered polite to cut out any intermediate steps that entangle other people."
"Sure. Fine. Whatever. You can become a zookeeper and give Cassie your money and she'll use it to pay for your rent and groceries."
...Cassie is okay with this but kind of confused about the thought process here?
"Did you, like, tell him that if he has his own money and isn't living off the charity of strangers then he gets to, like, decide what kinds of clothes and food and whatever else he has without having to ask anyone else whether he deserves to have them? Because I find that this is an important feature of having one's own money."
"I mean we're already pretty willing to accommodate food and clothing preferences if they've got them? But I can try to sell him harder on keeping his money. I wasn't really sure what he was trying to get at by claiming it was ours."
"Maybe he's in magical debt to us and wants to get even. I guess it would be kind of weird if he hadn't incurred any."
"Obviously? - I know you can't see it but you've been giving me things, if you'd missed that."
"Well, that's one fewer thing that can go wrong, I guess. Are you trying to work out whether you have the right to beat me? You do."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
