"That's right," says the man on the other end of the line, sounding relieved. "Her name is Wednesday Addams and we think she's about eleven. Speaks mostly English. She turned up out of nowhere a few months ago, and..." There is the pause of someone searching for a path around a difficult topic. "...we think she'd do better in a place with fewer other children. She doesn't get along with them. Can you take her?" The question has an edge of desperation to it.

"English? Where in the world did you get a - mostly? - English-speaking child?? ...Right, out of nowhere, you said." He shakes his head and puts his confusion off to deal with later. Either the man doesn't know, or doesn't want to say anything about it for any of a wide variety of reasons, and either way there's no point in pushing when there's not much he could do with the information. "Well, we're in luck, I know enough English to get by with an eleven-year-old." He's not sure if they even knew that, or if they were just going to try dumping her on him regardless.

With a girl who'd 'do better in a place with fewer other children' he'd normally figure she'd gotten hurt and was too terrified to keep dealing with it, but something about the man's tone is making him second-guess that assumption. "Doesn't get along with them how? And yes, I'll take her," he adds preemptively before the man can start on the version of the story tailored to be convincing rather than useful, "just please tell me what I should be prepared for."

"...she... gets in a lot of fights," the orphanage director says evasively. "We can have her on the train tomorrow morning."

"Gets in a lot of fights," he repeats a touch helplessly, trying to imagine an eleven-year-old girl who manages to do enough of that to distress the personnel of an orphanage full of badly-behaved teenage boys, and mostly failing. "Do you know what about?"

"Not really," he admits. "She's... confusing."

"I get that impression." He sighs, sympathizing with the director's obvious discomfort, but in all honesty he's curious to meet this child more than worried about whatever trouble she might try making with nobody but him around. "Anything else you can tell me?"

After a pause, he just says, "Good luck."

That gets a laugh out of him. "Thank you, I think. So, the early train tomorrow, you said? I'll be there." He ends the conversation, to the man's clear relief, and turns to Henryk, who's been half-listening from his desk.

"He makes her sound like she's going to stab me in my sleep." He shakes his head, amused more than anything. Of course there's some chance she really will try to stab him in his sleep - none of the kids have yet, but there's a first time for everything - but you can't live your life worrying about that sort of thing. "Come by in a few days to check if I've gotten murdered, would you?"

"Mm, I suppose I can find the time."

The next morning he's waiting on the platform ten minutes before the scheduled arrival time, although of course the train is more likely to be an hour late than ten minutes early. He brought a crossword book.

The child who gets off the train is small and slight, but walks with an upright posture and steady step, and looks on the world with an impassive expression; all together, the effect is that at first glance she looks younger than her alleged age of eleven, and at second glance she looks like an inexplicably miniaturized adult, and then the viewer is left to average out those impressions on their own time. Her hair hangs in two neat braids on either side of her head, and the immaculate black dress she's wearing looks much nicer than an orphanage could probably afford. She sweeps her gaze carefully up and down the platform, being sure not to miss anything, though there aren't terribly many people waiting for the train and in short order she has identified Marek as the likeliest candidate for her new host and is striding calmly toward him.

The platform is indeed rather empty, and the sign Bobowa Miasto* looks odd surrounded by a landscape containing more fields than houses.

There's only one man standing and waiting rather than getting on the train himself. He's in his late thirties, tall, brown-haired and bearded. He looks relaxed, but even relaxed he stands up straight and moves a little like a soldier. His clothes are neat, but worn, and much less nice than the girl's presumably Western dress.

He walks up to meet her. "Wednesday, yes? I'm Mark** Dąbrowski." He nods to her nearly like he would to an adult, looking curious but not smiling in the face of the terribly serious-looking child. His English is a bit slow, and strongly accented, but she's probably had enough time to get used to that. "Did you have anything else?"

*City

**Apologies for the multiple spelling variants, but I couldn't help myself. In the narration, any dialogue in Polish, and dialogue that is spoken in Polish but translated into English by the author, I'm using Marek, that being his actual name, according to the modern US translation convention of leaving names as they are - but in the dialogue where he himself is speaking English, he's translating his name to the English equivalent, according to the Polish convention he would've been taught.

"Yes. Nothing else," she says, returning his nod with a very serious one of her own.

"All right. Where are you from? This is a..." he searches for a word for a moment "...surprising dress."  Given the lack of luggage, he hopes she won't mind not all of her clothes being like that.

"There are many answers to that question. I could say 'America', or 'the future', or 'a wealthy family'. The dress must be explained by at least one of them, but as to which, I couldn't say."

"The future, yes." He gives her a wry smile at that. It doesn't occur to him that she could mean it literally, since it's a familiar metaphor, and the West might as well be the future as far as he can tell. "For now I hope it won't be very bad here." He'd like to say he hopes she can go back home soon - but can she? That seems like a painful conversation best left for a later day.

"We'll go to get you something to eat and somewhere to sleep, at least." He smiles and starts walking, since the train finally departed, meaning they can cross the tracks and be on their way home. (Sometimes he wonders who decided right across the road was the best place for a train station, but it's not as if it's busy enough for it to make much difference.) It's a fifteen-minute walk, across the river bridge and then down the road bordered by trees, fields and the occasional house. "You probably have questions?"

"The orphanage sent me to you because they couldn't handle me. You have a military bearing, so maybe they expect you to keep me in line by force—I wouldn't try it, if I were you—or maybe that's a coincidence and they're just hoping I'll lead a quieter life if there are fewer normal children around. They might even be right."

He laughs out loud at the casual threat, surprised and nearly approving. "A very honest child. Yes, let's try not to beat each other. It mostly doesn't do anything good." Not that he's against it in principle, but it really mostly doesn't help, and he's not sure he could bring himself to hit a girl in any case.

It takes him a moment to think about how to explain himself in a foreign language and decide he can't. "I'm... A quiet life and no other children, yes, that's most of it. It's just me, so I don't have to mind so much if you do strange things."

"Well, I do a lot of strange things, you can be sure of that. If you don't mind, then maybe we'll get along just fine."

"What kind of strange things? The director didn't want to talk about it." He sounds a little amused by that.

"Yes, I imagine the director was reluctant to admit that I tied an older boy to a chair and electrocuted him. It turns out that sort of thing really impacts people's willingness to feed and shelter me."

That is rather less amusing - and also absolutely bizarre, but he can think about that after he asks the important questions. "I... can see that. So, why did you do that?"

"Well, most proximally, because he and his friends ambushed me on the back stairs and threw me down them."

She seems remarkably uninjured for having been thrown down the stairs.

Maybe it's been a few weeks since the stairs incident. He's not sure how long it takes for an eleven-year-old girl to arrange an electrocution, since that is not a thing that happens, but if it does happen, maybe it takes long enough for bruises to fade!

In any case, he still has more important questions remaining. "And, just be thorough about it, why did they do that?" Then he checks his train of thought and realizes something else is missing: "And is he alive? I assumed someone would tell me if you killed him, but maybe not." Now is the first time Wednesday can hear restrained worry in his voice, rather than just varying degrees of surprise.

"He's alive." She takes a moment to consider before adding, "I intended for him to recover fully aside from the psychological trauma, but I think he may also have some nerve damage."

There's a relieved but also deeply baffled look as he considers whether that really sounded like she's experienced with the various possible effects of electrical torture or whether it's just the language barrier and her odd way of phrasing things, but again, that seems a conversation for later.  "I think it could be worse."  He should ask about the boy, though, next time he calls.  "So, do you know why they threw you down the stairs?"

"That's another question with a lot of possible answers. I could say 'because I'm a witch', or the more generic 'because they didn't like me', but I think the reason they chose that specific method of attack was probably because they'd already learned that I can beat them all in a fair fight."