Emily makes the same sort of jerky, interrupted motion as Gus, but does not materialize a baguette.

"I'm so sorry, Gus, you can't seem to afford it either."

That makes her feel a little bit better, actually.

"I realize this probably seems pretty disturbing.  Two things to remember:  You will not die without money.  People in Zuzu City die if they don't have money.  You are not in their situation."

"And, the way you were living before, probably wasn't really being alive at all.  This is the price you pay for being alive, it looks like.  I can't promise you it will be worth it, but at least you got something in exchange.  You got a pretty good deal, from some viewpoints, at least the parts we know about so far.  You get to be alive and with a spark of awareness the same as luckier people in Zuzu City, and you don't die without food the way that they do."

Emily was not previously worried about dying at all, and now feels like maybe she should worry about it, since Oliver thought she might be worried about it!

She is not at all dismayed that the rules have changed. She likes being alive, she likes things changing, and she wants to see what will happen next.

She still wants Gus to try paying her. And maybe she wants a cut of the fish taco profits (though she feels bad benefitting from the suffering of fish, and wants to find a better way next time.)

And the way Oliver's eyes look so intense when he's explaining complicated things... she wants to dress him in royal blue. He'll look incredible.

Gus is less sure what kind of a deal he's gotten, here. He was worried about the bar, before, and now he's worried about the bar and confused. Still, he's intrigued, and he's not interested in going back to the way things were before.

"People die without food in Zuzu City? That's horrible."

"It really is, and there's a lot of other awful facts downstream of that one."

"But I think the next step is to see if Emily can buy things from Pierre.  Emily bought things from you last night, and my read then was that Emily had come more alive than Gus, at that point.  So maybe it's just the shopkeeper who needs to be asleep."

"All right. So... just go into the shop and try to buy anything at all? And you're staying here?"

"I'll follow you so we can talk instead of time passing.  Also I'm going to try leaving the shop door open and listening to what happens inside."  This probably violates the laws of physics, but there's no way of knowing what isn't physically possible until you try!

"All right, let's go!"

She leads the way out of the saloon.

"I told you about my destiny, before. What's your destiny?"

"My old destiny, or the new one?  My old destiny was the same as the fate of all other organic life, to age and die and be in time forgotten.  That destiny, I hope, has already been averted by coming to Pelican Town.  If I'm trading away my organic body for anything, it better be that.  If I was a better person, I'd be thinking about how to run everyone on Earth through here, once the bugs are worked out.  But actually that sounds like a lot of work and I'm just going to leave that whole line of thinking for when I've got the bugs worked out of my own personal life."

"But, like, what are your hopes and dreams and fears? What are you into?"

"At least the way it worked in Zuzu City, what I want and hope and dream is a completely different question from what's my slowly grinding inevitable fate!  But if I get any control here... I think I want to not be beholden to anyone for my life and prosperity, which is, now that I think about it, something that might well be on offer in Pelican Town.  I want to not live in fear of sudden changes upsetting whatever new life I can get here.  I want my kind of strangeness to be something that the people around me look upon with admiration instead of thinly disguised fear any time I'm not reciting the usual script for NPC interactions back in Zuzu City."

"What's an NPC interaction?" asks Emily earnestly.

"There's plenty of people in Zuzu City who are asleep the way you used to be, only with much less excuse, because they did it to themselves.  When you say something they weren't expecting, they don't wake up and realize the inherent absurdity of the world around them and start asking more questions of their own.  They yell at you and go back to sleep."

"I think we've talked long enough that we can stop here and be at Pierre's instead of this creepy undefined state of existence in between, and we should save some conversation for the way back or wherever we're going next."

As the pair comes to a halt outside the general store and Oliver takes stock of his surroundings, he sees that a young woman with long purple hair is walking away from them to the east. A few moments later, an older woman with green hair comes out of the general store, nods a friendly hello, and starts walking in the direction of the west side of the town square.

He also notices that an older lady with her gray hair up in a bun is tending to the plants on the west side of the square.

Can he know their names by staring at them hard?

No, that doesn't seem to work.

"Emily, can you identify to me the names and Pelican Town roles of the purple-haired woman, the green-haired woman, and the gray-haired woman who's gardening?"

"Oh, sure!"

"The girl with the purple hair is Abigail, and the woman with the green hair is her mom, Caroline. Caroline and Pierre are Abigail's parents, and they all live here at Pierre's store. Caroline runs an aerobics class on Tuesdays. The nice lady watering the plants is Evelyn. She's kind of like a grandmother to everyone in town."

"Huh.  Thinking slightly ahead of the story, now that I think of thinking about it, is there anyone in town who's an obvious evil villain?"

"Evil villain? Huh. Noooooo? I think?"

"I mean, a lot of people are a little confused about the Wizard who lives in the tower west of town."

"Why are people confused about him?"

"Well, let's see. He's pretty reclusive. He doesn't even come to a lot of the town festivals, and we never see him around. There have been rumors about him for as long as I can remember, about his love life. But I guess I sort of doubt that he's actually evil, because I think he's on the same side as the junimos!"

Emily still seems a little embarrassed about the junimos.

"Oh! I know who's an evil villain! Why did I not think of him right away! Morris, at JojaMart!"

Emily seems relieved to be changing the subject.

"What makes him evil?  I mean, I'm not asking what his childhood was like, I'm asking what's the substance of his deeds by which he was judged villainous."

"Oh, he's always pressuring people to buy memberships at JojaMart. It's a dead, soulless place. They're trying to drive Pierre out of business!"

"Huh."

"I wonder how that works with the G never actually flowing around. I'm confused."

"On my present model of how it works, that layer of reality doesn't make that kind of sense.  Everyone inside it thinks that Pelican Town has the same sort of economy that Zuzu City does, where money actually does flow around, but the people inside it don't really buy things.  It's all waiting for a special kind of person--me, but maybe you and Gus also count now, and Marnie was also in the process of waking up though I don't know if she's finished--to change it, in some way, or make decisions.  And without that, the people in that layer of reality won't really make decisions for themselves.  They won't go out of business, unless that layer of reality has a milestone written into fate where Pierre goes out of business on Day 40, and then it wouldn't matter if we tried to give G to Pierre before then..."

"It's complicated and I don't think we should try to change it all at once."

"Anyways.  I think the next step, Emily, is for you to head in to Pierre's place and try to buy 1 of the most expensive thing he has that he'll buy back, if that works 999 of the thing, if that works 11 more stacks of 999 of the thing.  Try to sound very normal and like you're completely supposed to be there and don't expect any problems... actually, why don't you rehearse to me what you'll say to Pierre, just to check that?"