"If somebody said that it was because they don't want to watch slaves being treated like slaves," says the shopkeeper. "So if you want to be polite, you'll lay off him. I have not barred that entity from my shop."

The person doing the manhandling freezes, unsure if it's a good idea to be impolite to the fair folk. The slave takes advantage of the opportunity to slip free and run for the shop.

"Welcome!" says the proprietor, waving him in.

"If I stay in your shop, are you going to protect me?" the slave asks.

Someone else in the shop gives them a dirty look but doesn't say anything yet.

"It's not really meant for long term guests but I certainly won't tolerate anyone attacking you in here," says the proprietor.

"Great! What's for dinner?"

"Gotta tell me a story first," he remarks, amused. "It doesn't have to be a good one. What you had for dinner yesterday'll do."

"I didn't!"

"You know what, I'm going to go ahead and count that," says the proprietory, and he unseals a hunk of salmon. "You want this raw? I bet you're in a hurry."

"Maybe you'll sell me something to cook it with if I tell you Elu who works at the palace has one kid with her husband and one with her tailor."

"Yup." Here is one of the little cookers. He drops the salmon in and demonstrates how to close it up and turn it on.

Awesome. She'll sit there and babysit the incredibly tempting magical thing while it cooks her food that she really kind of wants to eat right now. This is kind of hard. She takes her mind off it by telling the shopkeep more gossip about other people's close relationships.

That will net her spices for the salmon and a pair of shoes and a nice sweater and a ring that will prevent her from having babies!

"Anyone who'd have sex with me would also take the ring off me, you know. I don't suppose I could get it in a tattoo or something that wouldn't come off?"

"Hrm," he says. "Let's see what I've got." He digs around. "Under the skin good enough?"

"Sounds good. Hey, speaking of tattoos, can I stop having these ones?"

"I don't have that on hand. If you can get on a bus, for sure." He gets a birth control implant inserter loaded up. "What kind of bits am I rendering barren, here?"

"The attractive and popular kind - I'm a woman, I guess."

He adjusts the inserter, runs down a checklist to make sure he's done it all correctly, and says, "It'll sting. Where d'you want it?"

"Does it matter? I don't know, maybe somewhere people won't notice."

"Armpit?" he suggests.

"Sure." She raises an arm. "What about makeup, do you sell really good makeup?"

Implant goes in the armpit. It stings for a sec and then there's a weird buzzing feeling and it stops stinging; it doesn't bleed. "I don't think I have any makeup, no. This is for the tats?"

"Well, yeah."

"So the thing is we're trying to convince Sesat to let Vanda Nossëo buy you all up and free you, but before we can do that, we gotta convince them to stop making more people slaves. Elsewise they could, like, make money by saying 'that guy killed his dad' when his dad actually choked on a chicken bone or something, and make money that way. But they think it'll be loads harder to convince them about that if we just kind of let you escape on purpose all the time. ...who owns you?"