"I WANT it," she says, lurching forward.

Her dad has a grip on her tail and his own tail and rear legs wrapped around a floor-to-ceiling pole but he is having a hard time hanging on. "Kessamun, your mother'll be upset if you attack it."

"I just want the THING."

"She's all right. Here," he holds it out.

She takes it and steps back to admire it, turning it this way and that.

It'll go through the whole rainbow, if she plays with it enough. "Do you want one too?" Raafi asks the boy.

"NO," says the boy who said he was a monster.

"Me, me!" says the other boy.

He fishes two more out of his belt, one a sunny yellow and the other a bright teal, and holds them out.

The second boy takes both of them and offers the yellow one to the other boy, who is dubious but eventually accepts it.

Raafi seems satisfied with that, and sits crosslegged on the floor, still moving slowly.

"You fold up!" cries the girl.

"I do! It's harder to stand on two legs than on four, I'd get tired if I tried to stand all the way to town, so I do this instead."

She pulls her tail out of her dad's grip and lumbers forward to investigate how he folds. She tries to imitate it to no success at all.

He is maybe very slightly nervous about this but doesn't flinch or anything, and shows her how his hips and knees work. "It's really fine," he tells her father when she's distracted contorting herself. "Most of my magic is healing magic, I'll be all right even if she does take a chunk out of me."

"I do not want to have to explain that to my mate," he says. "And it wouldn't clean the train afterward, now, would it, even if you regenerate by magic."

"Fair enough, I do have cleaning magic but if she really tried to hurt me I might not stay to cast it. I still don't personally mind the risk, it's good when children are curious."

"What do your other doodads do," she wants to know.

Well his clothes and boots help protect his skin, since it's all soft, see, and help him stay warm, too, and his belt pouches work a lot like the pouches people here wear except that they're magical so they can hold more than they look like they do - he takes a series of little notebooks out of one of the pouches that are individually small enough to fit but all together are easily three times its volume - and then this other wooden pendant that he's wearing helps him with his magic and lets people in his world know what kind of magic-user he is and that he can help them with travel problems, and this ring has magic on it that makes him better at climbing, he put it on earlier to climb a tree and see where he was and didn't bother to take it off afterward.

"Why are you soft??" she says. "That's silly!"

"What is a travel problem?" asks the bolder little boy.

"It is a little silly! But there's not very much I can do about it, it's just how humans are. And at home I'd help solve problems like someone not knowing where to go to get what they wanted, or it not being safe to travel between where they were and where they wanted to go, or them needing something they didn't have in order to get there, or if someone was trying to stop them from leaving where they were I'd help with that, or sometimes I'd do things like hire people to go cut a better pass in a mountain range so it was easier for the caravans to get through, or negotiate with a monarch to get them to charge less to let people travel on their roads."

"And you're, what, going to protest train fare?" asks the girl's dad.

"No - well, not yet, anyway, if you think it's too much I'd want to know about it. But I just got here and don't know anything yet, and it doesn't seem like I'll figure much of it out hanging around in the woods."

"What do you want to know? I go to school so I know lots," says Kessamun.

"Sort of everything! The most important things are going to be what kind of work I can do if I want money and whether there's someplace I can stay for a while, but I want to know how you live and what kinds of things you make and how you take care of things without magic that we do with magic, and if there's anyone that I want to make friends with or work with or learn from, and what other places there are that I can go see."

"People can be FARMERS or work in FACTORIES or BUILD things or INVENT things," says Kessamun. "You can stay in a hotel nest. People make toys! And ovens! And books! And lightbulbs! You can be MY friend and we can go to the SOUTH POLE."

"Going to the south pole is the sort of thing I'd do! I'd use magic for the cold, though, do people do it here without magic?"

"Yeah! You have to wear stuff, to keep warm."