No One Here Would Understand As Well As Me

[here_together]

It's probably harder for most people to stay off the grid than you would think, but when you have unusual enough (and useful enough) talents, there's always someone willing to help you out, in exchange for something only you can give them. (Incentives. Supply and demand. The carrot is so much more useful than the stick--and so much less likely to get you hurt in return.) And their magic (it has to be their magic, even when they're a her instead of a they, otherwise the investiture would just fall apart) is uncommonly useful.

Right now they (definitely a they, right now) are kicking back and relaxing in a little no-tell motel. There's free wifi, at least, and the employee who discretely got them a room in exchange for clearing up a few issues also snuck them some decently filling snacks, so they're pretty much good to go until they decide to do something else. Or something interesting happens.

Comments

[inourhead]

'We don't want to sleep. Even if it weren't a terrifying idea! What a waste of time!'

[here_together]

'Just checking. Anyway, timetable on the mice?'

[inourhead]

'We can probably stay awake another five or six suns easily, ten if we have to, without any. But sooner's better.'

[here_together]

'Given that our sun works differently here, I'm not sure how long that means, exactly. Um...' She unstraps the digital watch on their wrist, and hands it over. '{Those} are seconds, {those} are minutes, and {those} are hours. Sixty seconds is a minute and sixty minutes is an hour,' she adds, since the seconds are the only ones actively changing. 'Do any of those seem familiar?'

[inourhead]

'I think a sun is about an hour and a half? Probably?' says Crystal after observing this for a bit.

[here_together]

'Okay. That gives us a general idea; we don't need to know the exact amount of time. How long will the mice you have last you?'

[inourhead]

'They're sleeping off a lot of tiredness already, the live ones... if Holly transfers instead of swaps we'll be fine for maybe thirty or forty suns, but they'll die, you can't fit that much tiredness in a mouse and have it just wake up later. So we'd need more.'

[here_together]

'Well, we don't mind sleeping, so you could use us in a pinch, but we'd better get started looking around for odd jobs. Come to think of it I'm not sure a town this small would have a pet store; how do you feel about us flying and carrying you?'

[inourhead]

'That sounds cool,' says Holly.

[here_together]

'Awesome. Just let us pack up and we can get going.'

[inourhead]

'Thanks!'

[here_together]

Packing up doesn't take very long; everything they own fits in a large, somewhat tattered, wire-reinforced duffel bag. When they're grabbing what's left of the packaged food the concierge left them, it occurs to at least one of them to ask, 'How are you two doing food-wise?'

[inourhead]

'Uh, it's been a while but we're not hungry enough yet to eat troported food, which is what we have. If we're not going to hike anyway.'

[here_together]

'Is troported food worse than regular?'

[inourhead]

'It'll keep your soul in your body but it doesn't taste so great.'

[here_together]

'Why not? Can't you just move the taste around too?'

[inourhead]

"Eh. Kinda. It loses a little bit every time."

[here_together]

'Can you import flavor from things that taste good but would be bad to actually eat? Like poisonous berries or mushrooms?'

[inourhead]

'I guess, yeah. As long as I can touch it without getting poisoned, or I don't mind losing a mouse for it. Did you develop a taste for a poisonous thing?'

[here_together]

'No, just brainstorming ways to make troported food less tasteless in the future. Oh, one thing you might be able to do, I don't know if you have maple trees but we boil the sap to make sweet syrups and candies, if you had anything like that you could probably get the sweet flavor just from the sap.'

[inourhead]

"I can't count on running across anything tasty in the woods, though."

[here_together]

'Fair enough. You said you could put all the heat in a tree into one leaf; could you stockpile a large amount of flavor in a very small thing and dole it out later?'

[inourhead]

'Flavor only swaps, doesn't transfer. Some things only do one or the other.'

[here_together]

'Weird.'

pause.

'If you're going to be here for a while, we should probably work on learning each other's languages. This has been pretty pure-meaning but you can layer the actual words on top of what you just want to say' [like this.]

[inourhead]

[...Okay. This might be hard especially if I can't write things down.]