And then a week later a guy in his early twenties with pointed ears like an elf appears in Mordred's bedroom.

"...who are you and why are you in my dorm," Mordred says. He's halfway through packing clothes for a month at not-home.

"...okay so I think this is all going to make more sense if I teleport you somewhere first. Do you want to go to the Moon?"

"....yes, but also, quick question, what the fuck." 

Well, now he can be like "what the fuck" on the Moon. 

They're in the middle of a crater with a half-full Earth below. Moon dust drifts onto Mordred's feet.

????????????????????????????????????????????????????

"I," Mordred says, staring at the half-lit Earth, "still have approximately infinity questions." 

"I... thought it would be better if I showed you magic existed first? The last guy thought we were making it up for a really long time."

"I -- guess I'll accept that claim. Who are you and why me and why this." 

"I'm Lev, I'm an elf, you killed Santa Claus and now you are the new Santa Claus."

".......no."

"...um. It's really not that bad once you get used to it?"

"No, I mean, none of that makes any fucking sense. Even if I accept the magic claim."

"I don't know which bit of it to try to explain unless you have a more specific question."

"I haven't killed anyone, ever. Am I supposed to accept that Christianity is true and that I'm going to have to kill God about it. What does being the new Santa Claus even mean." 

"I have no evidence that suggests that Christianity is true other than the evidence humans have, it's just that since St. Nicholas all Santas have been Christian. And you told the previous Santa to make a toy volcano out of vinegar and bleach. Being Santa means you have to spread joy, cheer, and the spirit of Christmas to children around the world."

"...............making an admittedly stupid joke about committing suicide rather than go home for the holidays is not murder, what the fuck."

Christianity not being true is good??? at least??? That bar is very low but it has been cleared.

"I would say it's less murder and more causal entanglement with his death."

"Thanks! I hate it!"

He is on the moon! The moon in the fucking sky! This should be the best day of his entire life! Or, okay, 'most confusing' is also a pretty reasonable thing for it to be, 'most confusing' is fair.

"So what things are... involved. In being Santa. Because apparently my stupid joke about wanting to die instead of seeing my mom got someone killed and now I'm Santa and have I mentioned how bullshit that is." 

"Reality is often kind of bullshit?" he tries. 

"Yeah. It is.

But seriously what do I have to do now because someone took my suicide joke way too literally, you said 'spreading Christmas cheer' but that was really vague."

"At absolute minimum you will have to get on the vehicle of your choice on the late-December day of your choice and bring presents to all the children of the world, exact details up to your specification. And the Christmas spirit will mutate based on your ideas about what it should be, but that happens naturally and you don't so much have to do it deliberately. You command all the elves"-- he touches his ears-- "as slaves but you don't really have to do anything with that if you don't want to, we can organize Christmas on our own."

"How do I stop having slaves. Also what happens if my idea of what Christmas should be is that I am ideologically opposed to Christmas as a concept." 

"You could... tell us we're not slaves anymore?"

"And will that actually change anything or -- actually, no, what I should be asking is 'what exactly do you mean by slavery' -- why does Santa have slaves in the first place --" 

"Uh, we said that we would do whatever would make Santa best able to spread the Christmas spirit and bring joy to children everywhere, and he asked if we would obey him and we said yes, and he said that made us a natural slave race like black people."

"......I probably should regret that my actions led to his death because every human life is precious and all but in fact. You're not slaves and you don't have to obey me if I'm being a dumbass." 

"Oh. Well, I'll be sure to tell you if I think you're being a dumbass."

The first genuine smile he's had all day. "Thank you.

Probably at some point I will have to leave the moon and go to my mom's house but I don't actually want to. Which is really not a sentence I expected to ever say."

"...um I don't want to stop you if you want to go to your mom's house but Santa has a cottage."

"I am in this situation in the first place because I hate that house enough to make suicide jokes when asked what I'll be doing for winter break. Can we come back to the moon?" 

"I will not become miraculously incapable of teleportation."

"Santa's cottage it is, then. I assume it is on the North Pole -- I guess given teleportation I can just go and grab my books and things later if I need them."

He's not sure what he expects Santa's cottage to look like but he steels himself for 'a Thomas Kinkade painting but somehow even cutesier'. 

Lev teleports them into the bedroom.

It's painted dark blue. The bed is just a mattress on the floor. There is an enormous skylight, clear enough and clean enough to see the stars.

...huh. 

"It's -- nice," he says, instead of putting his foot directly into his mouth and explaining that he'd expected it to suck, because since middle school he has learned two thirds of a social skill. 

"It adjusts itself to be what you would ideally like in a house."

"Well, that'd do it. -- Sorry, I'm trying to figure out what questions to ask first, there are a lot of them. Why doesn't everyone already know Santa exists, you'd think adults would notice they hadn't bought those presents." 

"We mind control them to make them think they bought it."

"Why." 

"Last Santa thought that the Christmas spirit should be about childlike faith in things for which there is absolutely no evidence."

"Wow. I hate that even more than I already hated Christmas, which is a lot." Maybe if he hates Christmas enough it'll stop being a thing entirely. He's not totally sure what to do with that thought?

"...can you come up with positive feelings about Yule? Hanukkah? Kwanzaa? New Year's? Omisoka? Yalda? Pancha Ganapati? Bodhi's Day? Saturnalia? Isaac Newton's birthday? Zamenhof Day? Human Rights Day? Uh, Hogswatch? Life Day? Festivus?"

"...I can try but the entire season kind of got -- infected, I guess. Human Rights Day is good, I didn't know that was a thing." 

"Um, we're kind of-- we are the elves of spreading joy and cheer especially to children in the winter when everyone is miserable because the sun has gone away, that's the thing that we are, it doesn't have to be Christmas but--"

"And you got someone whose hatred for Christmas, much like Christmas itself, has expanded to fill the entire month of December, significant portions of November, and is encroaching on January. I'm really sorry. In my defense I feel like 'whoever killed the previous Santa' is among the stupidest selection mechanisms possible but in not my defense it's not like you picked it out.

I don't, uh, know what some of those things you listed are, what's Zamenhof day?" 

"The birthday of the creator of Esperanto, traditionally celebrated by hosting information sessions and cultural gatherings to promote the Esperanto language."

"....okay, that's cute. I can get behind that. That and Human Rights Day and -- I can read up on the rest and there'll be something worth liking, probably." 

"Kids need to get presents. That's important. They can get-- Human Rights Day presents, probably. A better choice than Zamenhof Day. More flexible present choices."

"Human Rights Day presents works. As long as we don't keep mind controlling parents, that's so horrifying and pointless." 

"I really, really, really do not like lying to children."

"I am fine with lying to children to basically the same extent I'm fine with lying to everyone else but this is -- not the kind of lying I'm fine with." Also he feels like it's really more centrally a lie to adults but that's not something he wants to figure out how to say right now. 

"Well, it's not-- instead of having kids reason things out and figure out what's happening based on evidence we protect their childhood innocence and faith which is all just a nice word for adults lying to you because they think it's cute when you're wrong. And then you get bribed with presents for believing things that as far as you can tell aren't true, and--"

"....did he really have the policy that you stop giving presents when the kid stops believing -- yeah the timing matches up, he totally did, I shouldn't be surprised but I still am somehow -- sorry, you did not sign up for 'man who thought he had thrown away all faith loses additional bit of faith he didn't even know he still had,' you're right that this is lying to everybody." 

That is a Face. It is a face of someone who just got stabbed in the heart with something.

"We should probably try to figure out how to roll out the existence of magic in the least disruptive way possible. We'll also have to do diplomacy with the other fairytale beings. --Oh, by the way, I'm your personal assistant, that's my job, in case you're wondering how exactly I fit into this whole business. I interface between you and the elfin government."

Maybe I want to be disruptive actually, Mordred does not say, because Lev is almost certainly right. 

"What other fairytale beings, is the Great Pumpkin also real?" 

This is a much better topic.

"No, but Jack O'Lantern is."

"...nice."

Mordred is going to have an existential crisis and a half probably when he tries to sleep but for now he just appreciates the existence of a Halloween spirit. It is nice to feel uncomplicatedly positive about something. 

"Are you going to need anything as regards your servants? Your house has a kitchen stocked with your favorite foods already but I don't know what your preference is about the cook, or cleaning schedules-- I guess you'll probably want to pick out your own bedwarmer but that's not, like, urgent--"

"-- if I am supposed to have a bedwarmer I am going to -- okay realistically what I am going to do is bite myself and scream but that's not very dramatic as an expression of how much I disapprove of that idea. I can cook for myself and pick up my own house." 

"I mean you're not supposed to do anything, it's just. Most Santas want one?"

"Well I don't." 

"Okay! Okay. No bedwarmer."

"-- sorry. Not your fault." 

"It's... fine? Our job is to make sure you're happy so you can be Santa."

'That doesn't make it okay for me to take out being mad at everyone else who has ever held my job on you,' Mordred does not say, because he does not trust himself not to just make things worse, because he is a dumbass with maybe two thirds of a social skill. 

"I should probably get this over with since I keep being surprised by things, can you just. List off all the things the previous Santa did that sucked." 

"It... would not occur to me to put 'bedwarmers' as a thing that sucked."

"...that is very fair. I still want to know about the things you thought sucked just on the basis that it's probably a faster way to fix the things that urgently need fixing than going through the whole list of every policy that exists?" 

"We only give presents to nice children and not naughty children. 'Niceness' is defined in a way that makes it harder for kids who are abused or poor or have ADHD or autism to be nice. Obeying your parents is nice even if they suck. No presents for kids who don't believe in Santa Claus. Worse presents for poor kids than for rich kids."

"...sounds about typical."

If this were about anything more important than Christmas presents he'd probably be pissed off. As it is he's mostly just really tired.

"I think we should give better presents to poor kids than to rich ones and give presents to all children everywhere. We should also stop tracking naughtiness versus niceness and use the elfpower that frees up to give more generous presents and to work on solutions to common but difficult requests."

"How much ability do we have to fix things other than 'the wrong people get nice Christmas presents'." 

"We can fix anything you can fix by either giving children appropriate presents in December or nudge-based mind control."

"So can I give someone the gift of basic bodily autonomy."

"Depending... on what you mean by that? We can only give people presents that are concrete physical items already invented by humans. The Spirit of Christmas-- uh, Human Rights Day, I guess-- can do more but, well, the last Spirit of Christmas was about enjoying spending time with your family and you see how well that went."

"Yeah. I do."

"But we can give kids vaccines and medicine and vitamins and food if there's a famine-- if we stretch the definition of "child" a bit we can get birth control to all teenagers and maybe to their adults, if the kids feel strongly about their parents not having more kids--"

"Vaccines and food and medicine and birth control for all teenagers and some of their adults and -- I guess that's more than I ever expected to be able to do with my life."

"We can try to figure out more things. If we're clever. I can only do so much research if everything we know about humans comes from watching children to see whether they're naughty or not."

There is some part of Mordred which he does not like very much that wants to say 'I think we should reward the poor kids and the autistic and ADHD and crazy kids and the kids with awful parents.'

What he actually says is "Yeah, that just seems like a terrible use of resources and the concept of nice and naughty lists feels like Baby's First Surveillance State, let's not."

"...Oh, I forgot to mention that you're immortal."

"....Unless killed, presumably. And I assume not in a way that scales or lets me take loved ones along."

"Most Santas wind up befriending elves because we're also immortal unless killed."

"It is probably not a surprise that I hate that." 

"...no, it is surprising. Why do you hate that?"

".................is it seriously a surprise to you that there are people I hate that I can't bring along and will instead outlive potentially by centuries. Have none of the previous Santas had siblings or friends."

"...oh, sorry, thought you meant the friends with elves thing. Um. I have only known the one Santa, I'm only a hundred and thirty years old."

"Guess that makes sense. And it's --" he cuts off whatever he was going to say and instead says "It's not your fault. I should figure out what I'm telling my brothers. I guess that can come after we decide what we're telling everyone else." 

"Everyone else like... your school?"

"What? No. -- I mean I guess maybe some of them but I meant the 'let's instead not hide that Santa is a real person who actually exists' thing." 

"...I don't really have siblings but I think probably you should tell your brothers first instead of waiting until we've sorted everything out with all the other fairytale beings and also you have to explain there being a pretty dark-haired Spirit of Zamenhof Day who constantly looks like he's about to commit a murder giving children everywhere vaccines and copies of the Language Construction Kit."

"That is... probably not wrong. I am kind of a dumbass sometimes, sorry."

It is going to be such a conversation, though. How do you even have that conversation. ...the entire goal here is to figure out how to have that conversation, Mordred is being a dumbass again isn't he. 

"You seem like a real improvement on the last guy to me."

"Kinda seems like it would be hard not to be. Like, I could manage it, but I'd have to try."

"Do you have anything else you need from me or should I head out?"

"Do I have a way to contact you?"

"Press the button on the wall and it'll alert me." 

"Cool, thank you."

Mordred's phone is in his pocket; he texts Agravaine to say that something came up and he will not be going to Morgause's over winter break after all but say hi for him. Then he pokes around the house, which is weirdly big for a house to live alone in (why does it think he needs multiple bedrooms) but has as many books as he could ask for.

Then he sits down at the desk, and starts making a list of all the things he wants to do with himself now that he has infinite time -- learn every language, read all the books he possibly can, get better at coding. Then he makes another list of things he should do but hasn't thought to yet, which is mostly just "ask Lev what elf magic can and cannot do, since they can teleport and stop time and magically rearrange houses." 

Settling in with a book takes enough time that when he emerges it's noticeably weird that he isn't hungry and also enough time that it's kind of late. (Agravaine has texted back to say, essentially, I will do that and also explain for you but you owe me one, which is not a surprise because Mordred usually owes Agravaine at least one and often more than one.) He debates calling Lev, decides that if something urgent comes up Lev will find him, and instead does his best to go to sleep.

It doesn't... really work. But there's a skylight and the North Pole is far away from significant sources of light pollution, and there are worse things to spend a couple hours doing at night.

In the morning he can have breakfast!

Breakfast options include, apparently, candy canes and hot chocolate and gingerbread and fudge and cookies and fruit cake and fruit salad with marshmallows and turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and sweet potato casserole and various sorts of pie and ham and hot buttered rum.

Most of this is not breakfast food but pie for breakfast is more breakfast-y than the rest. (How long does he have to hold this job before nobody thinks candy canes or turkey are good ideas.)

Then he calls Lev.

Lev has a big pile of papers.

It turns out his hobby for the past fifty years has been coming up with ways to use Santa's gift-giving powers to improve the lives of children as much as possible. He has incidentally reinvented a large amount of economics in this process.

Lev is very good and charming. Mordred does not know nearly enough economics for this but he can ask lots of questions. 

Lev seems to have no idea that the thing he's doing is called "economics", but it turns out you can reinvent a lot of it with fifty years of work and access to the ability to spy on any child you like at any time.

He likes explaining! He bounces!

Mordred largely follows along with the explanations, and then,

"...wait, did you independently reinvent the concept of random sampling?" 

"...the humans know it?"

"It's what you're supposed to aim for in most kinds of empirical research, it's important for making sure you don't get biased data -- that's really cool." 

Blush blush blush.

"Oh. Thank you. I-- it's easier if we don't have to watch every Santa-believing kid all the time for naughtiness and niceness, right, and it was just-- obvious--"

"You say it's obvious but social science studies keep being done on populations of entirely college students! I guess if you have the ability to look at literally anyone you want and aren't constrained by physical distance there's less temptation to take shortcuts but still." 

"We can't look at anyone we want. Only kids who believe in Santa. I had to do a lot of guesswork. And, um, blatantly abuse my position on the central planning committee."

"So your results are primarily applicable in -- what, Christian-dominant cultures with a Santa tradition? That's still better than most of the studies I've read the methodology section for.

Also I think this is a perfectly fair use of a position on a central planning committee. For whatever that's worth." 

"Well, see, I was working on--" And here Lev starts explaining how he tried to make his results generalizable to non-Christians and developing countries.

Bouncebouncebounce that's so cool. 

Meanwhile--

"Look, in this age of diversity--"

"--political correctness--"

"Diversity," the advertising executive says firmly, "we can't keep using Santa Claus to advertise products. It's limiting ourselves to only Christians and cultural Christians. Muslims, Jews, Hindus, atheists-- there are a lot of people who might buy our products who are alienated by Santa Claus. We need a religiously neutral symbol of winter itself."

"And your concept for the religiously neutral symbol of winter itself is... an angry goth kid?"

"No, I can see it," says their coworker. She's already drawing sketches on a napkin. "Someone younger audiences can see themselves in. It's--"

"Have you heard of the concept of a 'Tumblr sexyman'?"

"...no, and I am not sure I want to."

"The kids these days love pale skinny ambiguously evil people with a good fashion sense. They adore it. We will have so much"-- the executive pronounces this as if an unfamiliar word--"slash fiction."

An intern makes a fascinating face. Everyone ignores him.

"We can get them to promote our products for us," the executive says. "And branding opportunities-- merchandising-- perhaps even tie-in novels and movies-- Star Wars is worth seventy billion dollars and it all runs on fan energy."

"By 'fan energy' you mean horny teenage girls."

"Whatever."

Meanwhile -- 

Planetariums set out signs for Solstice events, to watch the stars on the longest night of the year. Netflix runs an ad, proclaiming in large block letters, Why hang out with people you hate when you could stay in this holiday season? Across North America, ABA therapists suffer sudden attacks of conscience and quit their jobs. 

And Lev shows Mordred what's happening.

"I haven't had enough time to really do the reading for Human Rights Day but this is -- a good start. A really good start." 

"It all works on your subconscious anyway, I don't know-- how easily you could get it to do things that aren't your subconscious understanding of how winter holidays should be."

"...I'm still going to try." 

He can't just — leave things the way they are because he can't make himself care enough. 

"I mean, the things you care about are neat."

"They're neat but I can't just not even try to fix more things than this about the world, not if the only barrier is caring enough."

"...Wonder how we can get you to care more."

"I'm hoping just learning more will help." 

"What do you want to learn about?"

"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?"

...

"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?"

"...oh god I do not know enough about what's good for kids to decide that. Dorms are probably easier to build and offering a choice between dorms or an elf family is probably better than not offering a choice at all?" 

"--But you just were a human kid! Very recently!"

"By some definitions I still am a human kid actually. But, one, children are very different from one another on many, many axes, and two, generalizing from my own experience mostly just gets you 'exit rights are important, don't trust doctors, and treat weird people better than that,' which I already knew." 

"So, uh, not so much for the plan where we can just ask you whether human children actually need school and if so what characteristics should it have?"

"At least not so much for the plan where I can give you an easy answer without having to do a bunch of thinking and research about it. Uh, I will probably arrive at the conclusion that some amount of school is a good idea but I don't know yet what it will look like other than 'not typical American public school' and it's way lower priority than most other things that need to happen." 

"OK, so, dorms, human-friendly food-- uh, do you know anything about what nutrients humans need or is that also something you don't really know enough about-- weather-appropriate clothes, and the things the kids request?"

"That sounds great. Water, protein, fat, iron, calcium, fiber, most vitamins but especially C -- and D since it's the North Pole in winter -- uh, and calories are the most important nutrient but I don't think you're likely to be short on that." 

"Right, okay, I think we can figure something out. --Thank you."

Tired but genuine smile. "Thank you." 

"I mean. For saving the kids."

"And thank you for giving me somewhere I could save them to? You will notice that I have never saved several hundred children without somewhere to bring them and people who can magically create food and make ludicrous amounts of clothing and give them weather protection and -- probably a dozen other things I'm not even thinking of -- and are endlessly willing to help." 

"Well, we didn't do anything without you either."

Mysterious sad face.

"Right. So we can both thank each other for making it possible to do anything at all." 

Pause. 

"...also do you want a hug or something I'm bad at feelings."

"...........a hug is nice."

Then Mordred will hug him. Mordred is... not great at hugs but he's doing his best. 

"Sorry, I-- you were my kid."

Mordred's first parse of that sentence makes no sense at all, 

And then he realizes. 

"...ah."

"We-- we don't watch every kid, we randomly sample, but all the elves adopt a kid and watch them because... because children matter and it's important to remember why we're doing what we're doing and it helps calibrate our systems, right, to have a fuller sense of some children, and you were mine--"

"And I was an unbelievably worrying child and -- I'm sorry for the very graphic lesson in what razor blades do to human skin, if it helps I got significantly less concerning a few years after I stopped believing in Santa."

"No, it was just-- you didn't ever know that there was someone who cared about you."

Mordred can't think of anything to say to that so instead he just hugs Lev tighter. 

"And then one day you stopped believing and-- I never got to know what happened to you or if you were okay or--"

"I was -- very much not okay but a couple years after that I figured out I was trans and also stopped believing in God and was more okay, and then when I was fifteen I got a GED early so I could go to college and then I was a lot more okay." 

"You don't have to be sorry that I was worried that's-- not what it was about at all-- it wasn't your fault."

"No, I know it wasn't." (On one level this is true and on another level it is not.) "But -- I can still want to tell you, right, the things you were sad and scared because you didn't get to know them, and I can still -- wish it hadn't been like that for your sake as well as my own, because I already wish it hadn't been like that for my own sake --" 

"Yeah. --You deserved better."

(On one level: yes, of course, everyone deserves better. On another: did I, though?)

"And we're going to give people better." 

Lev has this entire enormous ball of feelings in his chest that are partially about watching Mordred suffer every day for years and being totally powerless and unable to help him and then being torn away from him and never knowing what would happen to him, and partially about the discovery that he grew up okay and is smart and funny and curious and extremely pretty, and all of these are way too intense to dump on Mordred who has known him for less than a month.

"Yeah. We are."

Mordred doesn't actually interact that much with the kids; elves love children, he is mostly bewildered by them and scared of getting it wrong. After a few weeks some of them want to go back home, and are brought back home; most don't. 

He works with Lev on plans for vaccine programs and is very snarly about the CIA. It turns out that Lev can make him magically able to speak every existing language, which Mordred bounces about for almost half an hour after he finds out about and immediately puts "write in endangered languages" on his long-term to-do list. Deliberately cultivating a fondness for Esperanto goes quickly; deliberately making himself angry about every form of human rights abuse that exists goes slowly because he keeps stopping because it's upsetting. 

He loses track of what day it is thoroughly enough that when winter break ends he doesn't notice for a week, and then he looks at the date on his phone, goes 'oh shit' for approximately two seconds, and then shrugs and gets back to reading about vaccine rollouts. There'll be time enough for college in five years, in ten, if he still wants to go. (If nobody murders him first, but apparently the last Santa made it a hundred and fifty years while being the sort of person who takes suicide jokes as sincere advice, so Mordred's cautiously optimistic on that front.) 

He... continues to put off telling his family things. There's a lot to tell them and all of it is incredibly weird and he's not exactly in the habit. 

"I, uh. Think we've gotten to the point where you have to start doing politics."

Ugh. "You're probably not wrong as much as I hate it. 

So how do politics work around here." 

"Probably you should talk to Jack O'Lantern first? Try to get him on your side? And then once you have some allies you can work on trying to persuade the leprechauns and Mother Nature and other members of the Council who will be hard to persuade."

"Sure, I can do that. -- but like, am I trying to get votes, is there some particular person who gets the ultimate say who I have to convince, does everyone have to be unanimously in favor of ending the masquerade, what is my goal here." 

"Oh. Sorry. Majority wins."

Oh, good, that's better than most of the alternatives he can think of. 

The concept of a spirit of Halloween is still, honestly, pretty great. 

"Jack O'Lantern lives in Halloweentown, I can take you there anytime you want. --You'd like him, I think."

"You're probably right, I always did like Halloween. Give me -- five minutes to grab my notes and things?" 

Mordred is teleported to the outside of Halloweentown, which looks like someone gave twelve different horror movie designers a billion dollars each to make the spookiest setting possible but did not let any of them talk to each other. It does not have aesthetic coherence. It does have a decrepit haunted house right next to a gothic castle that would do Dracula proud, both shrouded in night even though it is 11am.

A song begins to play with no apparent source:

BOYS AND GIRLS OF EVERY AGE

WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO HEAR SOMETHING STRANGE

COME WITH US AND YOU WILL SEE

THIS OUR TOWN OF HALLOWEEN!

Mordred may recognize that it is the Marilyn Manson cover.

Mordred hates The Nightmare Before Christmas on ideological grounds (why do goths and art kids universally love a movie whose central thesis is 'stay in your place and do as you're told, you have an assigned societal role and it will be a disaster if you try to do anything else') but he is, he thinks, very fond of the real-world Halloweentown. 

The iron gate creaks ominously when he opens it, because of course it does. It is like the Platonic ideal of a creaky iron gate in front of a creepy town. Mordred walks up to the building that looks like it might be the main one, ignores the enormous cast-iron door knocker in the shape of an eagle, and knocks on the door with his hand instead. 

The door opens and a handful of chocolate bars is pressed into Mordred's hands. "Hello, hello, hello! What are you dressed up as?"

Jack O'Lantern is tall and lean and has apparently taken advantage of the morphological freedom associated with his holiday to have hair a color not found in nature and solid black eyes and an inhuman tongue length. His fashion style is like he fell into a pile of pastel makeup. 

Oh man Mordred loves that. What a good. 

"Either 'extremely technically, Santa' or 'there is no such thing as a true self, it's masks all the way down,' whichever you prefer." 

"Oh, I like you. Real improvement on the last guy. --I'm new too, I've only been in charge of Halloween for a couple decades. The guy before me thought Halloween should be scary."

Bats fly out of the belfry of Jack's castle. 

"I like what you've done with the place! That feels like a very suburban-mom-ish thing to say but also it's true, Halloween's my favorite holiday. And I kind of feel like I'd have to actively try not to be an improvement on the last guy." 

"Not going to give extra presents to rich kids, are you? --I try my best for equality but, you know, it is difficult when all you can do is influence people to give children candy. Anyway! You should come in!"

Unlike its ominous outside, the inside of Jack's house is brightly colored. The walls are covered floor to ceiling with bookshelves, so he has taped his band and movie posters on the ceiling. Jack flops dramatically on a beanbag chair and gestures to Mordred to sit.

Mordred sits crosslegged on a beanbag chair. (He likes Jack. He likes Jack's house and he likes Jack's fashion sense and he likes Jack's opinions, or what he's heard of them so far.) 

"Not planning on extra presents for rich kids, am planning on a vaccine program in developing countries and giving anyone who asks for it a place to run away from their shitty parents." 

"Oh man. Cool. Great. Not my thing at all but I fully support you. --How are you going to do that with magic being a secret?"

"Thaaaaaaaaaat is a very good question. And what I am here to talk about, actually.

I think it is bullshit that we are hiding magic from people and double bullshit that this means" vague gesture "literally everything about the previous person who held my job, and I am hoping to convince people to Instead, Not." 

"Hm. If it were the last guy he'd be all, like, 'Halloween is about being SCARED, the unknown is terrifying' but personally I think Halloween should be about sluttiness and children eating too much candy and schlocky horror movies and I think knowing about magic doesn't affect that one way or the other."

Mordred is immensely fond of Jack.

"Oh good! I -- definitely should not expect it to be this easy every time but also thank you." 

"You're going to need to do something about the fact that people can murder us and gain phenomenal magical power. Maybe we could get a Secret Service or something."

"My original idea was to not tell people that part but it only takes one person with a grudge to make that plan fall apart, I have not actually come up with a plan I trust because I've had this job for like a month and have spent most of it learning development economics. It's been a really weird month." 

"We could have a Secret Service. I mean, we all have extremely magical followers. I would like to see someone try to shoot me when I am protected by werewolves."