"There are a lot of different markets and schools, Reno isn't that big a city but it is a city. Lily's primary school is about five miles away - it was closer to her old house, we wanted to keep her in the same school, there's a special school bus route that picks her up from here so I don't need to take her every day. Safeway - that's one of the grocery stores - is also about five miles but in a different direction. The closer Walmart is about four miles, but sometimes I go to the further one, it has a better household appliances section. Costco is six miles. The farmer's market I like is also about five miles. ...Raley's is kind of walkable, it's less than a mile, if you ever wanted to go buy food for yourself that would be where to go. It's more expensive so I only go there for one-off things, if I'm out of milk or something, I do most of my bulk shopping somewhere else." 

That is not, in objective terms, far away, but it is absurdly far away given that Evelyn's land is not very big and there are houses all on this street. 

Doing errands with those distances involved is going to be quite annoying. She will get stronger, she supposes. "You are distant from your market. I was wrong because many buildings nearby. 

...I still want carry knife. That is a long way to walk alone."

"....I wasn't expecting you to walk to Costco?" Evelyn says blankly. "Though we should maybe get you a bicycle, the hills are too nasty for me but you're so fit, and you won't be old enough to start learning to drive on your own until you're sixteen. I know it's difficult to be a teenager and trapped in a suburb in the middle of nowhere. - suburbs are neighborhoods like this one, houses far away from the part of the city with all the skyscrapers and big offices where people work, I live here because it means I can afford a big house with lots of bedrooms and a backyard but there are certainly downsides. But - no, don't worry about it. There are buses, and for groceries I'll take us in the car, we buy a lot so it's not practical to walk home with it anyway." 

"I not trapped. I will go places. Just want be safe when I out late."

"I am...not super comfortable sending you out on your own with a -" Lily is looking pretty stressed at all the knife-related discussion, aaaaah, maybe Evelyn will scoop her for a hug. "With a weapon to defend yourself." Lily's limited vocabulary comes to the rescue. "At least until you speak more English and - have more options for getting out of situations by talking instead of fighting." Is it even allowed within the fostering regulations to give a kid a fucking knife, assuming it's not disallowed because they're taking it to school or it's above the maximum allowed knife size or one of the specifically banned kinds of knife. 

"...I can probably give you a Swiss Army multitool." That must be allowed, Evelyn currently keeps it in her backpack, and keeping one on her is totally the sort of thing her mother would have told her to do if her mother had been the sort of person who owned a multitool (instead she was told to walk with her keys in her hand at all times). "It's a clever little thing with several useful tools and it comes with a - blade." Lily's limited vocabulary will again come to the rescue although it's just occurred to her that given Iomedae's limited vocabulary this might be a doomed strategy. "And a bicycle. On a bicycle you can move very fast and nobody on foot could catch you. And you can have a cell phone so if someone in a car tries to bother you, you can call the police or you can call me. That's what most girls do to be safe when they go out alone." 

" - of course I run instead of fight, if no other person in danger, and talk instead of fight, if any time for talking. I a holy warrior! I not hurt anyone if any other option! If you are four miles away and a thing try to eat me calling you not help. And what will you do, anyway?"

What???? Aughhhhh. Has Iomedae not noticed that they're in a city and there aren't...wild animals, or whatever she thinks will go after her in a fucking suburb– Evelyn needs to calm down and not be frustrated, this isn't helping.

"Iomedae, I - think we're miscommunicating about something. Nothing is going to eat you in Reno. Someone might try to -" dear god she cannot talk about that in front of Lily, "- bother you, like happened yesterday - but that happens really rarely and most people don't have weapons and–" 

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH Mummy is ANGRY and bigsister is SCARED and Lily is trying to make it go away by closing her eyes and going someplace else in her head, but now her head is just full of noise and badness and no Mummy and - 

- Lily flails her way off Evelyn's lap, sweeps Evelyn's plate of spaghetti onto the floor, and starts shrieking like a banshee. 

"Should I get help?" she asks Evelyn. She is not herself equipped to handle curses or demonic possession or whatever this is.

Evelyn had been really hoping that Lily's lack of tantrums with Iomedae around would stick but, in hindsight, that conversation was exactly the sort of thing that would set her off. 

"It's okay. She's okay, she's just upset, the things we were talking about made her scared." It's kind of hard to be audible over Lily shrieking and knocking everything off the counter island, though fortunately Evelyn learned a while back not to keep anything breakable at Lily-reachable heights. Her plate was plastic and it's fine. There's a lot of pasta sauce on the floor and some of it splattered her pants, but that was also in a nonbreakable plastic bowl. 

Evelyn does not really feel like tackling three and a half feet of mid-meltdown seven-year-old with her bare hands. Lily can be a lot stronger than she looks. "- Can you go upstairs and get her duvet off her bed for me, please." 

"Yes." She doesn't know what a duvet is but worse case she can bring everything on Lily's bed down.

"The blanket!" Evelyn belatedly shouts after her, trying to dodge out of Lily's kicking range. She no longer particularly tries to talk to Lily when she's this thoroughly - whatever state she gets into - it doesn't work, she just stops processing anything. 

Blanket! Got it!

Then Lily can be gently tackled and blanket-burrito'd on the floor in a puddle of spaghetti sauce. This is honestly not even a particularly stressful situation for Evelyn, there are no bodily fluids involved at all. Evelyn is taking a lot of kicks to the shins and Lily somehow manages to elbow her in the gut, which actually hurts a lot, but she has a pretty good poker face when she wants to. 

"Shhh," she says to Lily over and over again, and doesn't try to say any words, this is not the Words Lily yet. At least the blanket strategy means she can get the calming-down period to, like, less than ten minutes, which is a huge improvement over Lily's first week here. 

Lily stops screaming and just whimpers. "- I'm going to take her upstairs for a bath," Evelyn says to Iomedae. "If you don't mind wiping up some of the floor, that would be really helpful." Iomedae already cleaned the entire kitchen with a seven-year-old present and avoided causing any disasters; Evelyn is confident she can manage this, and having a way to help will probably help her calm down too. 

Iomedae is mostly standing there wary and confused, detecting Evil (there isn't any). She is happy to clean up the floor, wash the plates and the pots from cooking lunch, and get the kitchen tidy again while Evelyn takes Lily upstairs for a bath.

Lily is floppy and teary in the bath, and eventually remembers how words work and tells Evelyn several times that "NO 'ife. GONE", and then wants her pink sparkly princess shirt, and by the time she's dressed and her hair is combed, is back to her usual sunny self. 

And will stare at them blankly if they try to ask what upset her, that's always how it goes. 'It's like she's bipolar' one of her former foster carers said at the placement meeting, and Evelyn haaaaaaaaaaaates it when people misuse actual medical terms - can kids Lily's age even have bipolar? - but it's definitely true that it sometimes seems like there are two Lily's that never talk to each other. 

(Lily is terrified of knives and Evelyn has learned to reorder all of her cooking so that the chopping happens when there is zero chance of Lily wandering in, and the rest of the time the knife block lives in the cupboard over the fridge. She ends up doing a lot of bake-in-a-dish meals that she can prep during the daytime and stick in the oven once Lily is home from school, and spending more than is really ideal on pre-chopping fruit and veggies for snacks because she kept forgetting to cut up whole vegetables in advance.) 

She takes Lily down. "Thank you, Iomedae, that was very helpful." 

Weren't they supposed to go to COSTCO??? 

She is willing to go to Costco unarmed as there will probably be guards in a busy market.

(Evelyn is technically armed. Very technically. She has her Swiss Army multitool in the side pouch of her handbag and her car keys in her pants pocket. She always does, but now she's additionally weirdly aware that they could technically be weapons if someone tries to rape Iomedae in the soft drinks aisle. This is honestly a pretty annoying kind of awareness to have, but - helpful for trying to understand Iomedae, probably, who must have grown up feeling like this all the time.) 

She drives them there. Lily is "bing M'ssr Bill" from the video and cheerfully narrating words for all the objects they pass.  

Costco is ENORMOUS. The parking lot must fit hundreds of cars, and on a Saturday afternoon it's mostly full. The shopping carts look practically big enough to drive down the street themselves. They go in through the huge automatic glass doors into a high-ceilinged, concrete-floored, vast echoing room with shelves and shelves and shelves of food. And a lot of things that aren't food, too, clothes and toys and bicycles and electronics and even furniture. 

(Costco does have a security guard at the door, with a bulky uniform and a walky-talky and maybe a weapon in his belt pouch though it's hard to tell at a glance.) 

Lily will try to explain Costco to Iomedae with as much pride as though she personally invented it. 

...Having Iomedae around is great. Lily must have already said ten times as many words today so far than she used to on the average day. Evelyn suspects that Iomedae being "practicing her English" is - helping in some way? Making Lily less self-conscious, or just giving her more of a framing where talking is something you get better at? 

She is definitely watching Iomedae's face for first-time-at-Costco reactions. 

It's wonderful. She is not totally flabbergasted, she's been inside a small-for-this-world ethnic grocery store in California, but this is a glorious height of human achievement that belongs among the wonders of the world, and she loves it, and she bounces on her heels and squeals and praises God who made civilization and all who made this bit of it with His hand guiding.

"Everyone should live to see Costco, and Heaven and Hell should have it," she concludes this praise.

...she will go look at the beans and then frown, apparently completely stuck. "We usually get this one. Probably it is best. It is not cheapest, but it is bigger than the cheapest. I needs paper."

Evelyn is now additionally distracted by the pointless intrusive imaginary story of fixing Hell by staging a takeover by big box stores. Iomedae is also getting a bit of an audience, though mostly people seem to think it's adorable. 

- they don't really need to worry about the exact cost per 100g of beans but she can give Iomedae a mini spiral notebook and a pen from her handbag. "After this I want to go to the frozen meats section, okay?"