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.
"Yeah, that's... kind of weird. Given everything.
"I guess she has trauma and stuff."
"Yeah. Could be they don't want more. Or could be she has a lot of stuff there and he actually does care enough not to do things that make things obviously worse for her. Or could be she has religious objections to sex outside of marriage and has convinced him to respect them.
"...could also be they're not doing anything that eleventh century peasants consider sex, which is, like, plausibly different than not doing anything?"
" - yeah." Sigh.
"Asked him if we could settle the debt by asking him to stay away from her sometimes and he said yes but it'd upset her - which seems accurate - and also I don't want to use the magic debt system to do things, it's - incredibly coercive and I don't fully understand it."
"Yeah. Are there other ways, besides - I feel like garnishing a hundred percent of his wages won't actually solve the problem if we turn around and use it all to buy stuff for him and the others."
"Asking questions, which is what we ended up doing. Physical violence, which, no. I don't know how much the wages help but he seemed to think it would."
"Well, we can see if we can finagle something. At least it'll keep him from sinking much deeper."
"I guess someone should get on teaching him English. Zana seems willing, if dubiously competent, although I am not sure if we should be expecting any terrible consequences from being in debt to a seven-year-old half-demon. Just - I should really be finding a job, too."
"If you wanted to teach then English full time for a while that'd be fine, though it might actually be better for you to get a job."
"...I should be finding a job. I am not actually immune to the living off charity thing."
"... should I be telling Zana to get on that? She'll be very excited that we have a job she can plausibly make progress on. Unless you wanted to do it yourself. It's just that that sounds, like, really annoying for both of you."
"Tell Zana. I think it'll go better with someone who isn't me."
So she tells Zana that she has a mission for her. She gets her some books on teaching English and prints out a bunch of picture sheets. She also tells her that she must come up with a superhero name and a fake secret identity name, and make sure that everyone knows the superhero name and that anyone who goes looking for the real name can only find the fake one.
Zana immediately declares that her new name is Nova Girl. She then scribbles out the name on her diary, decides this is insufficiently secure, hides the diary, and starts a new one labeled "property of Summer Knight", because she's pretty sure Summer and Knight are both real names that people have sometimes.
She tells Alex to tell his fairy self that English classes will begin in her house in ten minutes as soon as she has cleared off the couch.
The first words that Nova Girl teaches them are "hello" and "goodbye". The third word that she teaches them is "star".
She is not entirely qualified to teach English, but she does have lots of determination and a book that explained to her how to introduce the word "is".
Being entangled with a tiny child is not great but learning English is pretty important.
Nova Girl has already been given a solution to this. She thinks they should teach her to speak fairy, too.
That's a pretty satisfactory solution. Sure, they can teach her to speak fairy. Though if she ever meets fairies she'd best not speak with them.
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