"- totally infeasible to make it a member state by force?" suggests Nelen. "- though one time a country did have an internal coup specifically aimed at putting through a vote..."

"Really? It seems as if you could annex Sesat without much trouble, the only problems are that you don't want to and people'd kill themselves or throw themselves at you to make you kill them." And kill their families but he'd rather Vanda Nossëo not be tipped off to worry about that.

"I mean, we could occupy the territory but what we'd have after that would be at most one of 'Sesat' or 'a member state'."

"Well, by that logic, if there's anything you want that it'd be unconscionable to achieve by force, then it's infeasible to achieve your goals here without our willing cooperation."

"It's infeasible to achieve all of them, definitely."

Meanwhile, the shops draw attention. A woman investigates one in Sesat's capital and asks if they have anything that makes spinning easier.

"Sure," says Zanro, "but do you want spinning only easier, or do you just want thread, or even fabric?"

"Begging your pardon, sir, I am sure your fabric is finer than any I've ever made, and I may want it as well, if the price for both is two stories. How long must the stories be, and must they be true?"

"You can tell me a fictional story!" says Zanro cheerily, pulling down a bolt of chambray and grabbing a spinning wheel out of the back room.

"There was once a young woman who married a young man, and at their wedding she fainted, and she became deathly ill. Her husband feared she was dying, and did not touch her, only ordered his maidservants to take her to her room and let her rest and bring her anything she needed. Then he went to ask a wise old woman what was to be done, and she said, 'it is pointless even to try. Only wait and see.'

"The young man was not pleased. He had heard of a beast in a palace several days journey away who had studied healing, who knew all there was to know about the flesh of any creature. So the young man set off to find the beast. He crossed the distance in a great haste, and came to the palace, and begged to speak to its master.

"The beast let him in, and greeted him, and asked what brought him so urgently. 'My wife is deathly ill,' said the young man, 'and I must save her.'

"And the beast said, 'I will trade you. I have in my garden a certain tree, whose fruit is unlike that of any other tree in the world. You may take one fruit from it and bring it home to your wife for her to eat. In exchange, when you reach the gates of your home, whatever creature you see first - be it one of your sheep, or one of your goats, or anything else that lives and walks on the earth and has red blood - you must bring here and give to me to devour.'

"The man agreed, and took the fruit, and set off in haste to reach his wife in time.

"When he got there, he discovered she had recovered, and had waited by the gate to greet him.

"Is that story to your liking, sir?"

"It'll buy you a spinning wheel!" said Zanro, pushing it toward her. "Do you want me to show you how it works now?"

"I might. Will it cost me another story?"

"Nah, comes with the wheel, but if you want the fabric that will and I can demo while you tell it."

"...Sure, I'd like that. Hm. For my next story... once, long ago, humans built a city. This was very long ago, and no one knew yet how to care about anything but whether they were hungry and whether they were tired. A god, Gela, had promised abundant harvests if they would make offerings, so they did, so Gela blessed the city and protected it. But the city was ugly, and the countryside had been beautiful before, and so another god, Laen, hated it and wanted to destroy it.

"So Gela and Laen appointed mortal champions to do battle, Gela a man of the city and Laen a savage wild man of the distant countryside.

"And Laen said, 'Gela, you fool, my champion is far stronger than yours. You can never win supporting those people.'

"Gela only smiled, and whispered secret instructions to his people. And the day came, and the battle was fought, and Laen's champion defeated Gela's. But when Laen looked at the city he meant to destroy, he saw that it had been decorated with flowers, and paintings of flowers, and things that made him no longer hate it. He had said he would destroy it, so he had to destroy it; but he told the people he was going to do that, and that they should take their things away first, and make their cities more beautiful than this one.

"So the people left, some to the south and some to the west, and began to build more cities, and made the buildings beautiful to look upon, and laid the streets out neatly, and planted flowers around them, and moved everything they valued from the old city into the new, until they had more cities, and greater, and were unafraid of anything that might happen to their first home, because it no longer held anything they needed. And thus did Laen destroy the first city of men."

"Aw, my co-worker will like that one." He's demonstrated the spinning wheel's mechanism by now. A bolt of chambray and the wheel are now hers!

Oh, good, she's pleased one of the fairies. She takes her chambray and her spinning wheel home and gets to work - they'll likely both be gone in the morning, that being how fairies work, but perhaps it'll be worth it if the evening's spinning goes well.

A couple of men come by the same shop next. One of them looks around to see what's for sale, while the other asks if there's anything that can be done for the couple of fingers he lost in an accident a few years ago.

"Yup! Let me call in a float healer - okay, two minute wait, you want to tell me a story while we wait?" says Zanro.

There's fruit and meat and spices, lamps and shoes and space heaters and wireless kettles and contraceptive rings and air filters, a sign saying you can get the same kind of translation enchantment the staff use...

"I'm no good at stories, but, um, what kind do you like?"

The other man meanwhile looks lingeringly at the shoes as he palms some spices.

Zanro glances at him buuuut doesn't say anything about it.

"A personal anecdote or a song'll do!" he says. "Doesn't matter if it's good."

He sings a catchy, repetitive, upbeat song about a historical battle and how heroic Sesat's army was.

Zanro nods along. A moment after the song's over, a healer - short, incredibly beardy, lots of chunky metal accessories - appears. "You're the one needs healing?" he asks the man with missing fingers.

"I'm the one that wants healing," he says.

Boop!

"Hey," says Zanro to the healer, "before you go?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you pop that fellow over a foot to the left less what he's filched?"

"Ah, yeah, no problem."

Dwarf and thief both teleport a foot to the left. The spices, left behind, fall in their packets to the floor. Zanro scoops them up and puts them back.

"I was going to pay for those! I know stories!"

"Oh, cool," says Zanro, retrieving the spices he'd chosen and holding them as a batch. "Let's hear 'em."