"The plan is to make myself as angry about human rights abuses in general as I already am about psychiatric abuse of children." 

"...is stealing morally wrong?"

Blink blink. 

"Uh, sometimes?" 

He shrugs and summons up a pile of three dozen books. 

...Lev is extremely endearing. Mordred gets to reading. 

A few days go by with much reading. It's too late to roll out vaccines and food for presents this year but Mordred draws up very loose lists of what he wants to do next year. 

He doesn't figure out how to tell his brothers what the hell is going on and so he just kind of doesn't. It's fine, it can wait. 

Mordred is cute and it is very problematic.

And with one thing and another it is Christmas Eve, and Mordred has to get on a sleigh pulled by nine reindeer one of which has a red-glowing nose.

He does indeed have to do that. It goes -- fine, pretty much. He doesn't bother with chimneys and uses back doors instead, starts in Northern Canada and makes his way southward. Stops regularly for breaks while time is paused. Discovers that in fact hanging out with reindeer is kind of fun. 

There's some timey wimey bullshit with how delivering presents works. Mordred has been split into two hundred different Mordreds, and will keep a representative fraction of his memories afterward so that he doesn't go mad from most of his memories being memories of delivering presents.

(Apparently the elves had that problem the first time.)

Laura's best friend in the WHOLE wide world, Samantha, says that there is no such thing as Santa Claus and only LITTLE BABIES believe in Santa. Laura thinks her parents wouldn't lie to her. Her parents tell her the truth about everything, they promised.

So she stays up past her bedtime, pinching herself so she doesn't fall asleep, and then once her parents have gone to bed she takes her blanket into the living room to wait for Santa Claus and prove to Samantha that he's real.

She is very good and does not eat any of Santa's cookies. Well. She eats one of them. But probably Santa won't miss it.

Which means she will be awake to see it when a seventeen-year-old goth kid (who probably looks to Laura like a REAL WHOLE ADULT) comes in through her back door.

"If you are a burglar," Laura announces, "I am going to scream SO LOUD and wake up the WHOLE ENTIRE HOUSE."

...somehow he has not encountered an awake kid until this point. 

"I'm not," he says. "See? I'm not taking anything, I'm leaving things." This is in fact true; he puts two medium-sized boxes under the lit-up tree, one for Laura and one for her sister, which gives him enough time to try to decide what else he's going to say. How do children work?

"I'm Santa. Nice to meet you." 

"No, you're not. Santa has white hair and a beard and a big fat belly and he goes HO HO HO and has a red suit."

Yeah that is a totally reasonable opinion for her to have. 

"That was the old Santa. I'm the new Santa." 

"Oh." She critically examines him. "You look like one of the posters my big sister has on her wall."

"...thank you I think?" 

"Why is there a new Santa?"

Mordred is broadly against lying to children but also he should probably not inform the world of the Santa murder setup. 

"Sometimes people leave their jobs, or die, or get fired, and the job still has to get done, so someone else takes over doing it." 

"Oh." This makes sense to Laura. "Are you going to eat the cookies? What's it like in the North Pole? Can I pet the reindeer? Are you really jolly all the time like my mom says? Why don't you visit Jewish kids? Why didn't I get the Moana doll I wanted last year?"

"I will eat some of the cookies but you can also have some if you want them. The North Pole is very pretty and it snows a lot and there are auroras sometimes. You can pet the reindeer if you want, they're very friendly, but they are not very soft. I am not even jolly most of the time. The old Santa didn't visit Jewish kids for reasons that don't make very much sense to me but I'm going to. You didn't get the Moana doll last year because it was out of stock." 

"I think Santa should be able to get me a Moana doll." Laura takes a cookie and leaves the house to go pet the reindeer. "Why aren't you jolly?  I thought Santa was supposed to be jolly."

"Santa should be able to do all sorts of things," Mordred agrees, "but you see, there are a lot of children, and a lot of them want Moana dolls, because Moana is very good, and even given all of the things that Santa can do there might not be enough Moana dolls to go around, and so the most mature and grown-up children who can handle not getting a Moana doll might not get one. I'm not jolly because almost no real person is jolly all the time and unlike the old Santa I don't like pretending." 

"Oh." Laura is very pleased to be mature and grown-up. She pets the reindeer and it is not soft at ALL but it is cool to see Rudolph's nose glow like in the song. 

"Can I go to the North Pole?"