Nod. Snuggle. 

Snuggle.

"M'glad you don't - you're okay with - either way, right?"

"I want you to - figure out the questions that're important to you. And not ignore them trying to make me happy or - keep me, or - I don't want that at all."

This is not exactly an answer to her exact question but he's not sure about the exact answer to her exact question.

Nodnod. Snuggle.

"Love you."

"Love you."

He's really very good.

And they can keep snuggling and keep jumping off trees and keep playing with Zana and keep informing the fairies whenever they need to eat. Someday the sun will set. It'll take a long time but it will.

The spellbook gives her flight, eventually. It gives her an eidetic memory for books she's read in the past. 

And eventually they have to go sit in a dark chamber of the fairy court and wait there, in the dark, until they are slow. It takes subjectively a month. 

This is kind of terrible. At least they can talk to each other and she can do telepathy stuff with Connor. It'd be horrible doing it alone. But she teaches Zana to play twenty questions, and a game where she tells Zana to imagine a situation and tell her what she does in it and then Karen tells her how the situation changes, and it's still very hard to get through, really, but they manage.

When they are out, the spellbook helpfully offers a spell to slow down when fast.

...you know what, sure, yes, that sounds useful to have. If Connor is okay with her taking that.

"Sounds super useful. - wish we'd had it a month ago but I guess a month ago your dumb spellbook didn't have any way of knowing we'd want it."

"Yeah." She pats her book. "It's very powerful and a little dumb."

She double-checks the spell wording for whether it lets her slow down other people or just herself.

Spell: Take it slow

If you are fast, and do not want to be, you can slow yourself and people entangled with you down.

To learn the spell, stand as still as you can. Say, peloozoid.

Oh awesome! She is not sure how much closer this gets her to solving the thing where she doesn't want Connor to leave ever and he doesn't want to leave his family forever and his family wants to be fast, but it seems like a really good thing to have in light of that being a problem she expects to have at some point.

She learns the spell.

"I guess now we gotta go get small Connor?"

"Yyyep. And he doesn't have a cell phone to call, so we have to hope he either made it to the hotel or is going to call us at some point from wherever he is. Oh, and we have to set the fairies even."

She closes her eyes and disentangles herself from all of the fairies at court, one by one, quick as she can.

"Okay. I think I did it."

"Cool. Hopefully Connor'll be... in the hotel lobby or something? That's what I'd do. Well I'd spend all night pacing and being panicked but that's what I'd do when the sun came up."

(Aww. Hug.) 

"I gave him the key, if he made it back I'd expect him to be up in the room. Less conspicuous that way. But he shouldn't be hard to find unless he had to go home with one of my many many random family members."

"Okay. I ...think it was this direction?"

She heads off in that direction. "Yeaaah, I last saw the church parking lot something like a year ago. I wonder if I'm technically eighteen now. Not that it matters for anything, everything goes by your date of birth because people aren't supposed to be able to do things like this."

"Whyever shouldn't they?"

"I mean, just, like, the government can't take it into account for anything because they're either unaware that it can be done or being very quiet about it. So if this little misadventure ends with my parents finding out that Azalea is dead I still have to go move back in with them."

Shiver. "You can all's well everything a lot and if the spellbook draws conclusions from that we can just ignore it."

Nod. Hug.

She drives them to the hotel.

Where little Connor is!

He is not immediately sure what to say to them. After some deliberation he goes for, "Are you guys, like, okay?"