"All right. I am going to tell your care team the results of this survey, but they are mostly that you seem to have been through many stresses, but you are not angry and not too sad and not very scared, and that is good. If that changes, those are all things that we can help with, all right?"

"All right."

And she'll send Alfirin to the waiting room and write up her report and ask for Evelyn to be sent in once she has a moment.

...Sure. Evelyn smiles reassuringly at Alfirin too, and heads in to find out what disaster just happened over there because she wasn't present Evelyn's brain can stop borrowing trouble and chill out.

"Hey," says Jessie. "So Alfirin actually seems to be coping very well - she is stressed, of course, but she emphasized to me that she is mostly scared of the kinds of things that have been happening to her, like being taken into foster care. That's totally normal. If you think she should see a therapist, all of us should really see a therapist, but she didn't show worrying levels of depression or anxiety or anger or anything else.

She did disclose to me that her parents beat her with sticks, when she was 'happy angry not obedient'. I tried to get a little more detail, and didn't really get anywhere, and maybe the care team already knows more?" She tries not to sound too hopeful that this is already Handled and not something she needs to handle herself.

It's bizarre how Evelyn is pretty sure she knows exactly what "happy angry not obedient" means and also cannot even slightly think of the right English word for it. 

Sigh. "I wasn't specifically aware of that, but I'm not at all surprised, she - seems to come from a culture where that's considered more or less normal parenting. We also don't have any leads on finding her family - we haven't even been able to identify the language, let alone the region, it's almost certainly outside the US - so I haven't been pressing her to talk about it. I expect she'll eventually tell us more once she feels safer here. ...I'm glad she seems to be coping well overall, that matches my impression."

And makes it sound like Alfirin's interview went very differently from Iomedae's. Evelyn is bizarrely proud of Alfirin for that. 

"She seems very bright. I guess I'll - write up the report for the police even if they probably won't have anything to do with it. You have a good day."

"Thank you, I appreciate it. It sounds like you - did really well communicating with her, given the language barrier." What she means is BETTER THAN THE OTHER NURSE. She's not going to say that, obviously, but Jessie seems young and unsure of herself and could probably benefit from some praise to boost her confidence. 

And she'll go back out to the waiting room, and see if the receptionist has prescriptions for her; they should have ones for the bloodwork and urine test and whatever the first round of vaccines is going to be for the girls' vaccination schedule. 

They have those!! And an appointment for birth control, if it's approved by the social worker.

That's awesome! Evelyn is distracted and would totally have forgotten to ask if they had dropped it, and then felt terrible about it later.

(She's already thinking over her script for emailing Diel to get signoff on it. Maybe emphasize that the girls were clearly both raised in a fairly patriarchal purity culture, and she thinks they're especially scared of maybe being raped because their parents told them they could end up pregnant and it would ruin their lives; she doesn't think either of them is planning to be sexually active, at all, but she's in favor of giving them as many ways as possible to feel secure and in control.) 

Prescriptions tucked away in her handbag, she'll lead the girls out to the car. It's...oof, past noon somehow, they'll have time for lunch before heading to the food bank, but probably not time to explain the tests and vaccines and then also get them done, especially because that's two stops - the local Walgreens does vaccines onsite and there's a Labcorp she uses, but they're not that close together. 

"I don't mind if you talk to each other in Taldane," she tells Iomedae and Alfirin as they get into the car. "I'm curious how you found that - I know it was probably a lot, and I'm happy to answer questions - but I can imagine you might want some time to discuss it with each other first." 

"It was what I expect. Which is good, means I getting better at expect things, be right."

"...That's good, yeah." Hopefully Iomedae will also continue to get better at - gracefully interacting with the system and its various professionals, feeling in control of conversations, not finding it as agonizing - but Evelyn doesn't know how to express that helpfully or in a way that won't just make Iomedae more upse and angry.

She drives. 

She says that she doesn't mind, but Alfirin thinks she kind of minds sometimes.

And it's not like there's anything to urgently convey. Just gossiping isn't a good enough to reason to spend resources that are hard to measure. And Evelyn's tolerance is one of their most important resources as her slaves. She smiles distantly at Alfirin and looks out the window. She always liked looking out the window when the farm workers moved to a new place but now she kind of dislikes America instead of being delighted with it and so it's not as good.

Evelyn doesn't feel like making small talk, even for vocabulary practice. She puts on the radio. 

(She's pretty sure that Alfirin and Iomedae are not taking her at face value when she says they're allowed to have private conversations and she won't get mad at them for it? Which - they're inconveniently perceptive kids, they can probably tell that it's often frustrating for Evelyn. She'll have to work on that, because apparently her poker face is not up to the job and so not being frustrated is the only solution here.) 

They get home. She puts a casserole in the oven to reheat, and reminds Iomedae and Alfirin that they're planning to head to the food bank for 2:30 pm today and will spend three hours there. Hopefully it'll be good vocabulary practice! Evelyn is planning to stay for a little while until they're definitely comfortable, but after that will probably use the time to do errands, if they're okay with it. 

See, that sounds like a good time to gossip about the healers and their feelings questions. "Yes, ma'am."

Evelyn is kind of running low on easily-findable-on-Google and half-decent vocabulary worksheets, so before and after lunch they can look at more picture books from her rather large selection! She doesn't expect either of the girls to be able to make much headway on reading them yet, but she'll try to get them to read out specific words she knows they've encountered before, and generally use it as a source of inspiration for vocabulary they should learn. 

(The stories in the picture books involve a lot of families and children having adventures and children doing day-to-day things like going to the grocery store. Also a weirdly high frequency of families consisting of talking animals.) 

Iomedae was not laboring under the impression that the only talking species were humanoid. She will diligently try to learn how to read English words until it's time to go to the food bank.

Alfirin is worried that America is going to try to find her family and steal her siblings because her parents hit her a normal amount and America hates that. Probably it will not work because America is on a different world-ball than Absalom, and Sarkoris is on the same world-ball as Absalom, but maybe a lunar module can go to the world-ball that Iomedae and Alfirin are from. Or maybe a powerful wizard can do that without a lunar module and America is a big empire with many powerful wizards.

She is not going to let this show at all. Instead she's going to learn more English and more reading.

She is successfully hiding it! Evelyn has a vague sense that something is wrong, but that's neither new, nor based on anything in particular about Alfirin's (or Iomedae's) manner right now. She's pretty sure that she's doing the correct thing for the moment, which is helping them learn English as fast as possible and being minimally pushy on other things. 

(She is slightly worried that she's being pushy about the food bank volunteering? Which feels like a weird thing to worry about because Iomedae was the one who asked about it in the first place, but Iomedae has clearly done a lot of re-evaluating things since then, and - well, Evelyn has a lot of experience, and she can recognize the sense of a child being very careful and trying to make her happy because they aren't certain where the lines are, what would make her unhappy, or what she would do to them then. It's less exhausting than the other way of handling uncertainty about where the lines are, which is "pushing them relentlessly", but it's not, actually, less concerning. 

It's probably still a good idea to bring them, though. When they start school will be a good time to suggest-by-default that they stop, and leave them the option of asking to volunteer at a different time. In the meantime, Evelyn is pretty sure that they'll benefit from any additional exposure to normal Americans, and not just for the language practice.) 

At 2:10 they can head out, to be absolutely sure they'll be on time. Evelyn packs a lunchbox with a healthy snack for both of them, since she doesn't know if the food bank provides food for its staff and volunteers, or whether any of the food they have is, like, edible without cooking. She suggests that Iomedae watch the route carefully, so she can start learning how to bike there on her own once she's more comfortable on her bike. 

Iomedae is strongly in favor of knowing her way around Reno on her own even if it'll be nervewracking to go out on a four hundred dollar piece of equipment and without a real weapon. She will stare intently and memorize landmarks. Reno is so big. 

She's still glad they're doing the food bank work, even though she no longer has any particular hope for directly fixing the things that seem bad about America before she understands it as a place and, as much as she hates this, probably until she's free. 

They arrive without incident several minutes early, and Evelyn parks and goes in with the girls. She's not sure if Tyler will be on shift again or if it's someone else. 

Someone else, an elderly woman whose name tag identifies her as Margaret. There's a truck being unloaded by two men at one end of the warehouse, and half a dozen volunteers packing individual boxes to be dropped off to elderly community members. 

"Here to volunteer?" she says. "It's so good to see young people serving their community."

"Yep!" There's something weirdly reassuring-feeling about having the girls interact with someone older? Huh. Evelyn isn't sure why that feels important or healthy for them but maybe she should introduce them to more of the neighbors, it's almost certainly also good for them to just meet more people, people who do not particularly have power over their lives, and have normal interactions with them. "This is Iomedae and Alfirin, you should have the signup forms for them from yesterday. They're still learning English but they're picking it up really well." 

"Great. You girls can go right over there and the other volunteers will show you what we put in each box."