"Probably terrible," she concludes. "Okay, I would share my lava monster billions. If you would do good things with them."

Darren giggles. "I would!"

"Like what?"

"Like - okay, first of all the social services system and adoption in general is kind of terrible and I would throw money at that to make it - less so. Also, starving children in Africa, but only if I were sure that I was fixing the problem causing it and not just alleviating some of its effects."

"I don't know much about how social services work. What's wrong with them exactly that money would fix?"

"Throwing money at it wouldn't actually fix it, but using money kind of like a - scalpel would certainly help. Basically? It lets kids float around in their system for years and buries the people trying to adopt them in paperwork and various - checks on everything about them. Not a bad thing, in itself, except meanwhile while they are dealing with the bureaucracy kids are getting shuffled from place to place with no real permanent home. Then, people who don't get the system are putting funky misshapen band-aids on it and it just makes the problem a little bit worse."

"I assume the defenders of this system would say it's to prevent kids from being placed in unacceptable homes without hair-trigger escape ropes."

"Yeah, and I'm not saying they should hand kids off to random people on the streets, but... If you're in the system for a long time, usually longer than a year, and you will be in multiple homes, and get shuffled around. It's - kind of counterproductive, to make potential parents jump through so many hoops while the bureaucracy itself is botching it."

"So how does money help?"

"Um. To put it nicely? Bribe people to reorganize the system and get the correct people hired to do certain jobs. It would be a lot of work."

"Ah, you want to hire lobbyists."

"Heh. Pretty much."

"Three years. Or so, anyway. Not fun. Not the worst thing ever, better than when we were with our mom, but still not good."

Bella nods. She's not sure how to verbally invite elaboration.

"... Um. What would you like me to expand on? My mom, or what it was like in the adoption system?"

"Whatever you're comfy with, I'm sort of generically curious but don't want to pry."

"Er, all right. Well. Our mom's... You know that she's in an asylum, right?"

"Savannah mentioned that in the executive summary on day one, yes."

"Making sure you remembered. Well, we lived with her, until we were eleven. When we were younger it was okay because she wasn't as - decayed, I should say, but as we got older... It wasn't as okay. Our birth-father was nonexistent, and it was just us and her. Which uh - was... Bad. I'm not sure how much you'd like me to expand on the bad?"

"Generic curiosity and not wanting to pry stands."

"Okay. Well, dad called social services and they got us out from that, but wouldn't give dad custody. So he had to wade through bureaucratic stuff while we were shuffled around. Um - the first home we were in there were lots of other kids and it was really, really crowded. It was hard for me to find a moment of peace, Savannah eventually got fed up with someone in the house, got into a fight, and we got moved."

"Oh dear."

"They actually also tried to split us up. I threatened to start getting into fights and run away or something if they did, they reconsidered, I got moved with her. I mean like - we only had about four different homes during that time, but it was still... Not the best. We kept getting moved, for one reason or another."