The girl turns to behold her, looks her up and down, and smiles impishly. Her teeth might be a little extra pointy, too.

"Well, you see, frogs are traditionally a very lunar animal - heavy in yin, the frog in the moon, you know? And so when I look upon the face of my dear friend Wang Qinwu, I always think of the moon."

"We are exercising the poetry of our hearts," her compatriot explains. "A practical game."

"The frog in the--I thought it was a rabbit." 

"Oh, this mouse Stuart Little drives a car and has a human family? But I thought the mouse was Mickey!"

"That's fair and I apologize. Although I'm dubious that Mickey actually qualifies as a mouse at this point."

"Oh, don't apologize, you let me sharpen my tongue. And, no, he is an abomination."

"I wonder sometimes if your Disney was a maleficer. His cult of personality, his uncanny ability to make strange and disturbing creatures."

"If you had to be a maleficer to create mals the world would be a safer place."

"There would certainly be fewer maleficers... ironically enough."

The girl squints a little closer at Lucy's clothes. "I rather like this design," she comments. "Silk?"

"Yeah! Spidersilk!" 

Her familiar scuttles across her face. 

"Oh, delightful," the obvious maleficer coos apparently earnestly. "From this little friend?"

"Yeah! And my brother's." She gestures at the bigger spider on her brother's shoulder. "Mum and Dad got us a breeding pair for familiars so we could sell baby spiders as well as silk."

"Now who in the world would want baby spiders," she asks, tapping her fingernails against her belt.

"Jian, I think we might be circling ever-closer to the reason this nice girl approached us."

"-also, hi," he says in moderately accented English to Wilbur.

"Hello. --Lucy's better at people. So she talks for us, mostly."

"Even though he's the artificer with the thread affinity," she says, elbowing him good-naturedly. "There's plenty of reasons someone might want to buy baby spiders, having a familiar at all is nice...but I did have some guesses about your fingernails."

"They are a bold choice," the boy agrees airily.

"They're a series of bold choices. Hmm... how much malia can you get out of a spider, do you know or are you just being unusually open-minded?"

"Mum did a couple of experiments, it's not a lot but you can feed them on mal grubs instead of anything you were going to eat, and they're a renewable resource. If your nails are already like that and you're smart and not going to die immediately you brought a box of something small with you but even so I bet it's herbivorous, even just a little extra that doesn't cost you food can be useful."

"Huh." (The little noise of an uptick in estimation.) "Yeah, supposing I did want to buy some, and maybe a change of clothes - we've got some crystals and some potions and the means to make cooler shit once Lao's in a workshop, mostly, apart from the obvious. Help me help you?"

"We're mostly not selling actual goods, yet, since the spiders haven't had time to really start production. We've got some potions too, mostly healing. What kinds of cool shit? Familiar-silk can be a useful raw material even without a thread affinity."

"I mostly do - hmm. My affinity is shadow, but it isn't a very strong one for the track, so I work with it when I can and get by on actual skill when I can't. So, we've got some darkvision shades, and with familiar-silk I could probably let you hide in the shadows pretty straightforwardly. And I can make a knife, but anyone can make a knife. You know?"

"That is true. We'd pay a lot for a shadow-hiding cloak or something depending on how good it was."

"If I were making a knife, personally, the hilt would be wrapped in something."

"I could make a knife that had shadows inside it. It would still be a shitty knife."

"A cloak probably would work best, for hiding. And we could get... I don't know how valuable the raw silk is to you, but we could get some of that, and if it's too dear to you to offer a worthwhile amount we could maybe make up the difference in arcana, you know? What are your languages?"

"Mum married a mundane linguistics professor, I have twenty-three."

"Fuck!" Jian says appreciatively. "Mandarin, English, Mongolian, Latin, and Basque for me. So if you run across anything really cool in those, you know." Grabby hands.

"Oh, cool, I have all of those except Mongolian."

"Oh, fuck you, you have Basque? Basque is supposed to be my thing. I learned it specifically to piss people off!"

She giggles. "Sorry, you'll just have to settle for pissing off people who aren't me. I have a bunch of obscure stuff, Dad didn't select for practicality at all when he was learning languages."

"Now I have absolutely no way of repelling you if you turn out to be an asshole, anyone else I can start explaining vocabulary terms and bits of grammar until they run away."

"--I mean, I still don't speak Mongolian, and I super don't want the school to decide I speak Mongolian."

"Well, fair enough. I don't have a lesson plan prepared for Mongolian, but I can whip one up if I really have to. Not that I expect to, honestly, you seem perfectly capable of taking a hint in less potentially lethal terms."

"I have been known to miss actual hints but I promise you if you say the actual words 'fuck off' I will comprehend them."

"Jian will remember this."

"Just don't say it in Mongolian and we're swell."