"Yeah. I guess we should head outside and jump off something, then."

The tallest tree around!

Okay! Then she can learn the spell and from now on should be impervious to fall damage.

Magic is great. (He wants some.)

Well, tonight they can do more telepathy practice?

It does feel kind of ridiculously unfair that she's the only person who has magic. Like, there's no way she's in the top 10% of most useful people to have magic, if only one person around is going to have it it feels weird for it to be her. It's not like she did anything to get it, really, besides explore the catacombs with him, but maybe that's something? Maybe someday it'll give her a spell that lets her make other people kind of magic?

It's possible lots of people have magic, how would they know? His family doesn't but maybe fairies are different. 

She did in addition to exploring the catacombs die and come back, that might be relevant.

Oh, yeah, maybe. But that wasn't something she did, really, it doesn't say anything about her, it's not like she earned this really.

She feels like if lots of people had magic it would be kind of an open secret by now? But you would also expect this to be true of zombies and werewolves and fairies so really what does she know.

- yeah it's actually kind of weird all those things are secret, what with how not very secret they are.

Maybe there's like, a magical conspiracy or something? Used to be common knowledge but were discarded as superstition during the age of science? She's really not sure, it's honestly pretty weird. This is neat, they're having something resembling a normal conversation that doesn't involve randomly blurting out a bunch of things they would normally never say. Oh no now her brain is trying to think of examples of things she would never say. Stop it brain.

The dog's name is dog. Honestly none of the things Karen has been unwilling to ever say have actually been - things she shouldn't say? They have mostly been that she likes him and wishes that he'd stay? He shouldn't pressure her. He shouldn't be able to pressure her the slavery thing should be working so that it's impossible for him to pressure her but it doesn't in fact seem to work that way.

Well, yeah, because she likes him. That's how liking people works, right, you care about what they think about you and if they stop liking or respecting you it makes you sad, so you wanna be someone they like and not someone who's a perpetual tangled mess.

He thinks it's probably the being smart. Smart people always have a million things going on in their head, that's how they're smart, but also it means that nothing's ever simple. If you're kind of stupid then there's only one thing going on in your head and no elaborate systems of checks and balances via wordless screaming and he doesn't actually spend that much time caring what she thinks of him even though he would be sad if she didn't like him? He spends more time thinking about dog is named dog.

Well okay that also makes sense as a thing to think about. (Gosh she wonders what he thinks about specifi STOP IT BRAIN.) Maybe his brain is less determined to repeatedly throw out all of the evidence that she likes him. She's not really sure she's smarter than him? She can read but that doesn't have a lot to do with thinking more, and she knows more stuff but that's because she can read. He doesn't really seem like he's worse than her at, like, planning or coming up with solutions to problems or following what she's saying?

She's also better at words and she has lots more going on in his head though he admits that's some circular logic there. She did better than him in classes like math that didn't even involve much reading. He doesn't...throw out the evidence that she likes him...because that'd be dumb - not, like, in a way where he's saying that she's dumb just if he imagines consciously deciding to ignore his reasons to think she likes him then that'd be a dumb thing to do and probably the thing she does is different than that.

Yeah she just sort of, like, repeatedly forgets all of it? Or assumes that it's way weaker evidence than it is and that just because he liked her a couple weeks ago doesn't mean he still likes her now? Which seems like maybe a kind of being dumb but maybe like it's happening on another level than the other kind of being dumb.

He likes her a lot. He thinks she's really nice and really pretty and generous to people and has good ideas like Christmas and is ridiculously good to her slaves and to her kids - kids are kind of like slaves really, everyone agrees that they belong to you and that you can do whatever you want with them but you're an asshole if you use that to hurt them but lots of people do anyway - and you can tell a lot about people by how they treat their kids and their slaves. And she's so pretty and once she wore a swimsuit and she knows a lot of interesting stories and she likes him and took him to a dance and to a funeral and likes him better than his brothers not that he should care about that but he does.

Ahhh he likes her!! You cannot actually do anything you want to kids these days, if you like beat them up or refuse to feed them the government will take them away actually. Although they will also take them away if they find out they're being raised by seventeen-year-olds with no adults so maybe the government is not very good at noticing these things. (Ahhhh he likes her and thinks she's pretty, she already knew this so it's probably silly to be this happy about it but she is happy.)

The government doesn't seem at all good at anything actually. Also his parents hit him sometimes and when they were new in town and didn't have a lot of money didn't feed them and nothing happened so, yeah, doesn't seem like the government is very on top of that. 

Of course he likes her. He thinks he liked her even before she saved his life because she was a hard worker and had interesting thoughts and wasn't a jerk but it's hard to remember because becoming her slave was kind of enough of a change and he tried to go into it without any expectations and stuff. 

Okay but he's a fairy, he's fine either way. If Zana were starving people would be able to see it because she would be really thin and have malnutrition symptoms. Also that's kind of concerning that his parents hit him, she's kind of surprised his mom went along with that, but maybe he's just not clear on the difference between, like, normal spanking and hitting someone hard enough to leave marks.

She is not very used to people really liking her. Probably Azalea and Connor and Zana all like her? It is not really the most salient aspect of their relationship but she thinks they all do. Somehow it is way more exciting to think about the fact that he likes her. 

He is in fact not at all clear on the distinction between spanking and hitting but little kids, like, lie a lot and you have to get them to not do that if they're fairy children, and parents do not hurt as much as the universe so if they can interrupt you by slapping you they'll do that.

It makes sense that people who aren't your family liking you is more exciting. Also it makes sense that having a slave who likes you is exciting because you can do stuff with that if you want. Unspecified stuff. 

Can't you theoretically do unspecified stuff with people who like you and are not your slaves? Probably should not be poking that. It actually does seem like it's more exciting this way though. She is kind of concerned about what this says about her but they've been over the thing about how this is probably a normal emotion and - she feels like maybe it is but maybe when people did it to humans it was really bad and they built a lot of fences around it and made sure people would feel terrible about it and now it is weird and surprising that it feels nice when it's happening and she has a lot of guilt about it because she doesn't want it to be the thing that humans did to each other a long time ago? But maybe since he's a fairy it's not really the thing that humans made a lot of rules to avoid? Possibly? And maybe this thing is okay and therefore it's okay to like it?

So it seems like humans would need a lot of rules because like...if a human has power over another human there's absolutely nothing holding them back? They can lie, they can make promises they mean to break, they can hurt the person as much as they want. And fairies aren't like that. ...it kind of is like that in her case since she can manipulate debt but forgetting that for a moment, fairies paid for whatever they got and if they want to keep someone in their debt they need to be doing, on balance, as many favors as they're demanding. So it makes sense that human slavery would've mostly been something that humans were now very determined to ensure never happened. But fairies are different, and fairy slavery is different, and there is something telling her if she's asked too much, and so there kind of only needs to be one rule? Not using the debt thing to keep him stuck?

Okay. That kind of makes sense. Like, humans didn't enslave each other by giving each other things, mostly, they mostly chained each other up and then hit their slaves for disobeying orders, and maybe fairy slavery is more like indentured servitude, and indentured servitude is also illegal now but is at least it's like, you can see what the people who took the deal were getting out of it? Of course the fairies here used nets and songs, and she's not sure how much better that is than how humans used to do things, really, not if trying to fight back will get the universe to slap you down for them -

Yeah the nets and songs seem....really bad the way human slavery was bad. It's cheating, it's not about having a deal with someone. It's a betrayal of what being a fairy is supposed to be at least the way he thinks about it. But she hasn't cheated. She got the debt by saving his life and by reading him stories and sometimes by kissing him.

Sometimes she wants to do lots of nice things for him, partly so he'll be happy and partly so that he'll be hers forever. She could probably keep the debt stuck about where it is for the rest of her life without cheating, if nothing else weird happens, and honestly probably more weird things are going to happen, but she could still try it, and she's not sure whether wanting to says bad things about her or not. Like, she would still let him go if he really wanted, but -