...

"Yes," he says, "yes you can. Any kid who wants to can go to the North Pole, whenever they want to, and stay as long as they like. If you would rather go to the North Pole right now than stay and have Christmas with your family you can absolutely do that." 

"Oh." She thinks about it. "In the Polar Express they go away and come back right the same minute they left so their family doesn't miss them."

"It doesn't actually work like that, although it would be very convenient if it did." 

This is a very difficult decision. Laura wants to meet an elf but she also doesn't want to scare her mom.

"...Can I go for a few hours and come back before my parents wake up?"

"Sure!" 

And so Mordred will pick Laura up and put her in the sleigh and make sure she has a seatbelt and it's fastened (there weren't seatbelts before he needed there to be, but what does that matter) and then they are FLYING.

GOSH.

This is the COOLEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO LAURA.

Yeah it's really cool isn't it. Mordred is still not totally sure how small children work, but as long as you can make them happy by showing them cool things he figures he is set; elves like children enough that it will probably be fine even when he manages to spread the word about the exit rights he's creating. 

When they get to the North Pole Lev says, "Cool! Another one."

"-- right because there's several hundred of me and I am probably not the only one of me to come up with this idea when asked. The English language was super not built for this. Kiddo, this is Lev, he's an elf; Lev, this is" what was the name on the present again "Laura, she's just staying for a few hours and then going back home before her parents wake up." 

He looks extremely happy and slightly worried about fucking up.

"Hi, Laura. We're not quite set up for the, uh, influx of children, but we have movies and crafts and candy and hot chocolate and tours of the North Pole and people are sledding and having snowball fights and building snowmen outside."

Laura is going to go on a TOUR of the NORTH POLE.

'Sorry,' Mordred mouths to Lev, and then it is back to delivering presents. 

Once Mordred has finished delivering presents and returning children and resolved into a single person with a representative sample of memories, there are still several hundred human children of assorted ethnicities wandering around the North Pole in variously weather-appropriate clothing. 

Ooooookay. First order of business is to get them more weather-appropriate clothing. Second order of business is to apologize properly to the elves who now have to deal with this for not realizing before literally the minute it happened that when an opportunity to provide exit rights to every child in the world made itself known he was going to take it. 

He calls Lev. 

"Hi! Some of those children aren't familiar because as soon as we knew what you were doing we scooped up all the kids who wrote 'I want to live in the North Pole with Santa forever' in their Christmas letters."

"You are very good. Actually I called for two reasons, the first was to ask if there is a magic thing being done about the cold and if not how quickly can we get the assorted children who don't have them already actual snow clothes, and the second was to apologize for not managing to give you more warning that I was going to do that." 

"It's fine, we're basically cool with spontaneously helping children. --We can give them all weather tolerance for a bit while we make or steal appropriately sized clothes, do you have a preference for that?"

"Weather tolerance sounds good, uh, making clothes is probably better in the long term but you know better than I do how long it'll take?" 

"A week at least, we... are not really set up for winter clothes manufacture. And we've also got to make some sort of housing for all of them, and arrange for food, and give them something to do..."

Just plain stealing a ton of winter clothes sounds like not the best way to do public relations and god fuck dammit he is seventeen he is so unqualified for this. "Weather protection for a week is probably fine? I don't -- can you grab the kids' clothes easily so they can have a change of clothes during that week, I don't actually know how much I'm asking you for --" 

Literally what possessed me to think I was qualified to steal hundreds of children, he thinks, and then thinks oh, right, because nobody else was going to and my one single solitary qualification is that I can't just say no to a kid who wants to never see their awful parents again. Why couldn't he have thought about this two weeks ago and realized he was going to do it.

"We can grab the kids' clothes, we can do weather protection on the ones from tropical climates until we have clothes made, we can probably do magic on them for a while so they don't suffer from a diet of primarily candy canes, right now we have them staying in elves' houses which is kind of cramped. Uh. We kind of need to figure out a plan for the long term so we know what we should be doing."

"Yeah. This is why I was sorry for not warning you earlier -- long-term plan is to have exit rights for every child in the world, so that if they want to leave they have somewhere to go. Short term plan I am seventeen and wildly unqualified and have no fucking clue what I'm doing." 

"That's a good plan, I like it, very much the spirit of Christmas. --What happens if they want to leave us."

"Then we bring them wherever it is they want to go instead? The extent to which we can get legal documents for them if they want to go to a country that isn't the one they started out in is probably extremely limited but we can put them physically in locations easily enough. And -- one could argue that there might not be infrastructure in the place they want to be but frankly if someone would rather be homeless than living with me I am inclined to let them." 

"Okay, cool, I'm glad we have a plan that isn't 'make the North Pole so utopian no one wants to leave.' --How do we want to house the kids? Have them stay with elf families, their own rooms, dorms?"