"Factors?"

"Like - what circumstances would affect how desirable it would be to revise away the artifact effect."

"Um, tell me now if you have a fatal illness or are gay or find me really aversive company."

"I will probably outlive you by a factor of twenty, I don't especially play favourites gender-wise, and you seem all right so far."

"Okay good."

"I'm, uh, not in a position to make guarantees, it's kind of a high-pressure situation and I have not had the time to get to know you all that well - but I definitely haven't seen anything disqualifying. And I'm a hundred seventy, it wouldn't be insane to date a human at this age. A few decades ago would've been a problem."

"I'm sorry to be putting you on the spot like this. I'm like - managing, it's not direly urgent."

"All right."

"- somebody's coming. A bird just turned into a human outside."

"That'll be Finnah or my dad. Probably Finnah."

It's Finnah! "Hi Mial who's this?"

"Hi Finnah! This is Annie, I found her on the bottom of the world."

"What were you doing on the bottom of the world?"

"Appearing involuntarily," says Annie.

"Somebody get pissed off and push you there?"

"No, it was an accident."

"She's from another world," Mial contributes, "they have different magic there - the bite-sized summary is 'she fell in a pile of random magical effects and one of them was one-time interworld travel'."

"Wow, sucks to be you," Finnah says.

"It hasn't been the most fun day," Annie agrees.

"Mom's in her office checking the books for any spells applicable to the situation, unless she's already finished looking and gone out to raid a library."

"Well, I'm useless in this situation unless she wants candy. Do you want candy?"

"Maybe later."

"'Kay." She trots upstairs.

"Finnah makes some pretty excellent candy."

"After lunch I will totally have some."

He smiles at her.

Aww.

"—it occurs to me to ask if there's a painkiller artifact—"

"...I don't have one, or if I do it's doing heroic amounts of work and isn't very good anyway, but there must exist one. For little shrens?"

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking. A lot of them end up pretty thoroughly addicted to their pain potions by the time they learn to shift, and this is considered a good trade, I can imagine drawbacks that I'd hesitate to inflict on a kid even under the circumstances but anything that's just inconvenient as opposed to debilitating..."