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"Maybe burning down the house?" She laughs a little. "Well, I have no arsonist tendencies, don't worry."

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He giggles.

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Aya starts to say something: "When -"

And then she stops and closes her mouth.
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"...Mm?"

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Aya scrunches towards herself a little.

"My prior owner - led me to believe I'd be left to myself when she died. I was thinking of asking you a similar question but I'm not sure I want to."
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"If I'll free you when my father dies, you mean? I will," he says. "But you don't have to believe it if you don't want to risk the disappointment."

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She nods.

"I was going to -" She stops again. "I don't know if you actually want to know or if you were just mentioning not knowing earlier for some other reason."
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"Well - if you'd rather keep it to yourself, don't mind me. But yeah, I kind of do."

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"If she'd willed me to myself I was going to sleep in the temple attic and I had a job half-lined-up at the post office and I was going to save up and go to school. She left me to her grandson instead and he passed me along to a reseller at the market where Berete found me."

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He absorbs this, looking thoughtful, possibly sympathetic.

Then he blinks and says, "—You know, I don't even know your name? I just noticed that."
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"Oh - I thought Berete might have mentioned it at some point. I'm Ayabel. Aya is fine."

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"Okay."

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"Anyway. I'll let you know if I want something and can't get it myself, and otherwise stay out of the way, is I think what we've concluded?"

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"I guess so," he says. "The staying out of the way part isn't actually mandatory, but if it seems like it'd be easier, then yeah."

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"Well - I don't want to annoy you. You might not own me on paper but you can probably get rid of me if you set your mind to it and most of the next options are a good few steps down."

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"I do not," he says, "think you could piss me off that badly if you tried."

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"Which is very nice of you, which is another reason to want not to annoy you."

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"It's also a measure of how hard it is to annoy me."

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"You seemed well past annoyed right after you were surprised with a person for your birthday."

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"Yeah," he says. "Sure. So the first step in making me that angry is to become Duke of Viore, and then arrange for me to be your only child, and then spend seventeen years treating me like my only purpose in life is to behave exactly how you want me to at all times, and then you'll have no trouble at all pissing me off. People who aren't my father don't annoy me that much because they're just - they work on a completely different scale."

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"Ah."
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He shrugs.

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"...Is he likely to use me in the project of attempting to manage you or did he mean it when he talked about keeping me out from underfoot?"

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"He manages me just fine with his favourite method."

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"If you say so."

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