severe discomfort

[alicornucopia]

Jensal has a lot of work to do. Her house is going to collapse; nobody had better be inside when it does. She is briskly bundling adult miracles into groups who have at least one decent job between them, she is writing to agencies that handle adoption for the ultimate disposition of kids who don't get picked up because she's reasonably sure that they will not all get picked up, and when parents do drop by to collect their little ones she is signing papers for every set of them with slightly gritted teeth. Lots to do. Her hand is cramping from paperwork and she doesn't care.

Comments

[thisvorlunatic]

"The rules of a game are sort of what makes it itself instead of some other thing," Mial explains. "So if you aren't following the rules you are either not playing the game at all, or you're doing a thing called cheating which is not only not playing the game properly but also tends to annoy other players."

(He has been given tips on what sorts of explanations the jet girl seems to grasp best.)

[alicornucopia]

Finnah flutters off of Mial's head and shifts; she may as well play if she's going to hang out.

[thisbrokenworld]

"You're still pretty but now you are a human!" declares the jet girl.

[alicornucopia]

"Thanks," says Finnah dryly.

[thisbrokenworld]

The jet girl giggles.

She plays the game. She's not very good at it at first, but she learns fast.

[thisvorlunatic]

Particularly when Mial gives her helpful strategy tips.

[alicornucopia]

Finnah plays with a certain indifference to winning that seems reasonable when engaging Mial, a novice, or both.

[thisvorlunatic]

Mial, naturally, wins.

[thisbrokenworld]

The jet girl comes in third, but it's a close third.

"That was fun!" she says. "Games are fun! I wanna do another one."

[thisvorlunatic]

"A different one, or a second go at the same one?"

[thisbrokenworld]

"Different one!"

[thisvorlunatic]

So he cleans up game number one and gets out a second, slightly more complicated one, and explains that.

[thisbrokenworld]

The jet girl is very attentive to his explanation. Games are fun! This has now been established!

Since Mial spends so much time teaching her how to win, it occurs to her to ask after a few turns, "Why is winning better than not winning?"

[alicornucopia]

"It's usually more fun if you're at least pretending you want to," says Finnah.

[thisbrokenworld]

"Is it?" she asks with interest. "Why?"

[alicornucopia]

"Otherwise you won't be very creative about how you play or very invested in the game, so you'll just sort of listlessly sit there hopping pawns around. Which doesn't matter a lot for really simple games, but it matters more for ones where you make lots of choices."

[thisbrokenworld]

"I guess that makes sense," she says. "Okay."

She continues to blossom under Mial's instruction. She's not going to be as good as he is, but she's going to be astonishingly good for someone who didn't know how to move or talk a week ago.

[alicornucopia]

Good for her.

A larger than usual rain of letters drops onto the coffee table. Finnah goes to look through it. Most of it's for Mial; she dumps those in his lap. She has one with a Pra Verian flag on it. She opens it.

She shreds it to the best of her ability with her fingernails. "Mial I want you to pull a miracle out of your ear or wherever they come from and make my parents stop sending me letters I'm sick of it!"

[thisvorlunatic]

"...I can, actually, miracle it so that letters from your parents are destroyed before ever reaching you," he says thoughtfully. "That wouldn't be hard at all. There, done. Have I not told you where miracles come from? I think I can tell you where miracles come from. It's actually kind of hilarious where miracles come from."

[alicornucopia]

"I could use something hilarious," she says, flinging the shreds of letter at the nearest wastebasket and getting about a third of them into it and then flumphing to the floor and putting her chin in her hands.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Miracles," says Mial, "are made out of pain. The size of miracle that can fix a shren or resurrect a dead person comes from about the equivalent of twenty-year esu. Before the miracle workers found shrens they hadn't even ever seen that big of a miracle before because they were all ordinary otherworldly humans who had serious trouble with even a tenth of that."

[alicornucopia]

Finnah sporfles.

And then she laughs and laughs.

[thisvorlunatic]

"And I, of course, have no problem with it at all," Mial continues, "because I'm fucking shrennaki."

[thisbrokenworld]

The jet girl perks up, pleased and alarmed and intrigued and confused all at once.

"I like that word! I like that word a lot! Why don't I like that word? I like that word!" she says.

[alicornucopia]

"Draconic has opinions about what words you should like," says Finnah, wiping giggle-induced tears from one of her eyes.