"...Are wings a common sort of thing for mutants to have?"

"I mean, they're not, like, standard issue, but you see them a lot with the weirder BIT types and sometimes the GSD crowd. People's subconscious ideals: apparently pretty heavy on the wings?"

"Is that sort of data - wings and stuff - the principal evidence for it having to do with subconscious ideals?"

"Well, the subconscious ideals thing is the general rule. Not all BITs are ideal, not all GSD is loathsome, et cetera et cetera. But yeah, most folks with BIT addons are into it. Like, I could do with some horns and butterfly wings and maybe fangs, but I'd get super bored with them and want to change them in five minutes, so if I was gonna get that kind of stuff I'd have to be a shifter. Which I'm not, so I have to make do with being a megababe." She wipes away an invisible tear. "But Sky loves its wings. Pretty sure it'd marry its wings if that was a thing, and not just a weird thought."

"What causes the exceptions, any hypotheses on that?"

"I mean... mine is that everybody likes 'em in theory, and the ones who end up unhappy do because their pretty horns almost got them lynched, or they just keep banging them on door frames, or they really like hats, or something. But there's a bunch of other stuff that gets bandied around. And, like, I'm so not up on Pattern Theory or anything, so don't go quoting me on that."

Nod, nod. Bella is much of the way through her dinner by now. "You were right about the food, by the way, this is great."

"Of course I was." Ariel returns to her demolition of the Meat Mountain.

"People getting referred to as 'it' also a local oddity?"

"I mean, I think baselines have weird genders too. Sky just matches up a little bit better. They've got the whole sexless angelic being bit down. But, like, cause and effect, it's mostly just genderweird."

"Okay, fair enough."

Nod. (Rip, tear, mangle, chew.)

Bella goes back for dessert. She returns with decorously narrow slices of three kinds of pie and one each of four sorts of cookies.

"Excellent choices," Ariel approves around most of a pie.

Sally sighs theatrically and demonstrates the appropriate use of a knife and fork for Ariel's benefit.

Ariel cheerfully ignores her, as always.

"Incidentally, rumor has it you are in the market for silver, generally speaking," Bella says to Sally. "What does it go for here by the OZT, what is an OZT, I had my sister look it up for me and she doesn't know."

"OZT is troy ounce, of which there are 14.6 to an avoirdupois pound. I do need a lot of silver, but I usually get it at bulk rates from suppliers, so I'm getting about the best rate you can get in the US at the moment. It's at $16.5 to the troy, but I get it at $190 a pound, which evens out to $11.51. Why, are you from a planet made of it or something?"

"Oh my God I forgot to tell you. Back where she's from it's 2004. And the market prices are about the same."

"I am delighted to help with precious-metal arbitrage to cover my transit and incidentals. However, in the event that I can't get either government to take fiat currency from the other despite the fact that both of them are United Stateses, I should probably find something that I can arbitrage in the other direction. Magic things might be it, but require more marketing than commodities, which would take time and expertise I'd rather not respectively spend and acquire. Elsewise, I wind up having to earn all the money I use to buy you silver by doing actual work at home, and I'm rich here and my mom continues sleeping on a couch and competing for imported canned goods at the grocery store - because Yellowstone exploded. And having a job at home would cut into my plans here considerably."

"Eesh. Friggin' Yellowstone. You can ask payment from the government in the event of us sending over wizards and/or devisors to fix the Yellowstoning, I guess?"

"That also requires marketing and it might be a little harder to get a cut, but I'll look into it. But are there any moderately portable commodities that you think might currently be cheaper here than there? Because of mutants or the calendar year or for that matter Yellowstone?"