Bella permits herself a little snickering.

+What are you laughing at,+ he says, grinning around his latest mouthful of tuna.

"You poked yourself in the face with a fork. I have never seen anyone over age four do that."

+I got excited! You'd get excited too if it was your first time eating food!+

"Which event," Bella says, "happened to me when I was well under the age of four, and involved a spoon in someone else's hand, and mashed sweet potato."

+Ooh, what's a sweet potato? I wanna eat one.+

"We don't have any around right now. There are thousands of things to eat, I'm not going to just run to the store and grab you examples of every single one."

"Where are you going to get sweet potatoes while I sleep?"

+No idea! I'll think of something.+

"You're not going to just teleport places and steal them, are you?"

+...Would... that be bad?+

"Yeah? They don't belong to you."

"So that's what belonging means, is that you can't take it, it's not yours, it's somebody else's and if you take it they will have grounds to be upset and that would be mean of you. If you find food growing wild you can have that - but you'd have to be able to tell the difference between wild and cultivated."

+...Okay, but how else am I gonna eat all the food there is to eat?+

"You're gonna spread this project out over a long enough time that I can acquire it for you at a reasonable rate. Or acquire money so you can buy the food, I guess, you could get a job."

+Get a job how? Don't you need to have, like - human stuff, for those?+

"It'd help to have documentation, but you could teleport to other countries where they're less strict about it," shrugs Bella. "Or find somebody who'll pay you under the table around here if you don't want to deal with currency exchange. I don't think it especially matters if the job's legal as long as it's not unethical."

+...And how do I tell if it's unethical or not?+

"Uh, you could ask me, if you don't know," she suggests. "Picking fruit, fine, busing tables, fine, selling pot to elementary schoolers, not fine, assassinating people, not fine."

+I could've figured out the assassination one by myself,+ he volunteers.

"Okay, well, there, that's a start," says Bella.

+Still not sure why I should care. I mean, about the rest.+

"Uh... okay, can you take my word for it about dealing pot to kindergarteners or do we need to actually talk philosophy right now in order to preclude this outcome?"