'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.'

'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?'

'That sounds cool,' says Holly.

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

'Thanks!'

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?'

'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.'

'Is troported food worse than regular?'

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

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

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

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

'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?'

'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.'

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

'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?'

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

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

[Why couldn't you write things down?]

[I didn't bring much paper.]

[Notebooks and pens are cheap. In fact--] and they open the drawer beside the bed and pull out a pad of motel stationary and a pen with the motel's name written on the side. [Here. To start with. I can get you real notepaper later.]

[Thanks.] And she starts noting down transliterations of the words she's sure she remembers how they correspond to meanings.

[You're welcome,] she replies, and finishes packing their bag and zips it shut. [Alright, we'll make a brief circuit of the town to see if anyone needs something metal dealt with or help remembering something or something, and then off to a larger town.]

[Okay. We can help too, if you find anything we can - well, mostly Holly - can do, the mice are for us.]