He'll enter the saloon and check time again.

Oliver and Emily enter the saloon and approach the bar. It is now 1:10pm and counting.

"It does seem like the basic plan to teleport-by-conversation worked, though I guess if there's no calendar time running out on me, it's not that important to teleport... the thing is, you don't always know when a calendar is running out on you, in worlds like Pelican Town used to be."

"Gus, what's today's special and price?"

"Howdy! Glad to see you back! Emily, you're very early for your shift, but glad to see you too."

"The special today is baked fish. It costs 200G."

"Blech. What is it with all these fish dishes? Poor little fishies."

"Darn.  Well, what's the most expensive thing you sell that I can put in the crate?  --Actually also, what's the most expensive thing you sell that I can sell to Pierre?"

"The most expensive thing I sell that you can put in either the crate or sell to Pierre is pizza for 600G, though when you sell it you'll get 300G for it."

"Emily, is there a limit on how many stacks you can carry?"

"Jeepers, I never thought about that before. Let's see."

She unfocuses her eyes for a moment.

"I think I can carry twelve stacks of things."

"Actually... is Pierre's shop open now?  And how far is Pierre's shop from here?"

"Yeah, Pierre is open today. He's really close, on the north side of the square."

"So, Emily, there's a fast unsafe way and a slower safer way to do this."

"The fast unsafe way is you order one pizza to make sure everything seems to work the same way, and then you order a stack of 998 pizzas and we check that, and then you order eleven more stacks of 999 pizza, and then we head over to Pierre and I sell it to him."

"The slower safer way is that you order seven pizzas, which if something went wrong, is an amount I could pay back at 4200 G, and we sell those to Pierre, and then we come back and order 1.5 times as much pizza, and so on until we get up to twelve stacks of pizza.  Takes time, though, like... maybe fifteen trips or a bit less."

"I am not sure why it's safer to start with seven pizzas than one. Let's just start with one and then figure everything else out after that?"

"Oh, sure, I meant going one, then seven, then eleven, then fifteen, and so on until we get to 1,200.  The other way is going one, 1200.  Either way, yes, let's start with one."

"Okay!"

"Gus, I'd like to buy a pizza please!"

Gus smiles and starts to make a motion as if to conjure a pizza out of nowhere, but then stops abruptly.

"Golly, Emily, I'd sure like to sell you a pizza, but..."

"I think you don't have enough G!"

"Oh no!"

Oh no! indeed.

"Gus, you sold Emily a salad yesterday.  Can you retrieve that state of mind, remember what it was like to not know how many G Emily had or how many G you or your saloon had, and try to--do things over again without the spark?"

Gus closes his eyes for a moment and then blinks, dully.

He fiddles with the cash register a little bit.

He again tries to make the "Tada, a pizza!" motion, but again jerks to a halt.

"I just can't seem to do it. She can't afford it."

"It is very odd that I can't afford it given that I work here every single day except festival days!"

"It certainly is odd if you thought the Pelican Town economy was supposed to make sense in the first place.  Emily, Gus, I think the entire world works by different rules than the one you thought it followed, even before we started changing it.  At some point we should probably all have a long conversation about that."

"The next question we have to consider is whether this transaction is failing because Gus has come awake, or because Emily has come awake, or because the world has noticed what we're doing and changed the rules in general."

"I think the most obvious pathway to follow for testing that is to see whether Emily can buy things from Pierre, preferably without saying anything that an unawake Pelican Town character wouldn't say."

"Golly, can I come along and watch?"

"Good question, Gus.  The answer is no, and by asking it, you've reminded me that ideally I should not watch Emily go into Pierre's store.  We would like things to look more normal to Pelican Town."

"Actually, before then, simpler test.  Emily, you clearly think it'd be extremely reasonable if Gus could afford a pizza... no, a baguette, that's a cheaper test if something goes wrong.  How about if you go behind the counter and try to sell a baguette to Gus?"

"All right."

Emily is still wondering why Gus can't just pay her for all of the hard work that she undoubtedly did, day in and day out, in the foggy mists of the before-Oliver time, and then she could buy a pizza with that. 

But this experiment seems interesting too.

She goes behind the bar, changing places with Gus.

"All right, Emily, I'd like to buy a baguette."