"Karen - "

"I can cover it. Does that sound okay?"

"If I advertise what do you think I'd get offered?"

"Not more than fifty. This comes with the people mostly not believing in magic."

Hand signal for 'don't buy that' and 'let's not pick a fight'.

"All right."

"Okay. We can get you five hundred tomorrow. Still wanna get this conversion working sensibly, though."

"Maybe their world just has way more gold than ours."

"Maybe? - how many gold pieces for, like, a shirt, where you come from?"

"About six. How many dollars for the meal at IHOP? For passage across the world? For treatment for an illness? For a house in a city? For a slave? For one of those cars?"

"We paid like seventy bucks for IHOP, sit-down restaurants are kind of pricey. I - don't know how to measure passage across the world but I guess between two hundred and five hundred to fly to China, depending on how you time it? Treatment of an illness depends, some stuff that used to be deadly we can now prevent forever for a couple dollars, and some things we spend hundreds of thousands treating and sometimes the patients still die. House in a city super depends on the city and the house, I think anywhere from, like, a hundred thousand dollars to a million or more? We don't, uh, do slavery, that is not a thing. A new car is like twenty thousand, maybe?"

She starts doing more math on her paper.

He does this also.

"Okay, if we count in terms of how many shirts you can buy with it and not how much gold, one of your gold pieces is like three and a half dollars, as opposed to the sixty-five dollars it is if you count in gold. - you should probably sell some of your gold if you're gonna be here for a while. Like, I can't tell you how to live your life, but people like gold."

"We will probably do that, thank you. Also scrying and healing."

"Those things are objectively super valuable and we would be happy to pay you for them, but if you just advertise in the paper or whatever you will get a pittance. Let us talk to our government buddies and see what they're willing to offer for it, at least?"

"That sounds great, thank you."

"Cool." Alex can you talk to your government friends or whoever about how to make good use of generalized healing spells? And I guess how much to pay these guys for the service.

Yeah, I'll talk with them. I guess we don't want them just breaking the masquerade and opening up a scrying and magic healing store that quickly gets a reputation for actually working.

I mean, I dunno that it's the wrong call? But your government friends said no on that, right, so I feel. like we should give them a heads up first. And this does seem like a kind of volatile way to break it, even if I'm sure the hellmouth and the - whatever makes it hard for people to process the supernatural would dampen the effect somewhat. It's not like there isn't a magic shop in town already.

I'm sure the Defense Department can pay to keep them quiet and occupied. And we can get another scry done in the meantime. Your dad?

I'm guessing Azalea wants her husband, actually.

Ah. 

Possibly it's insensitive to not do Dad too? But it's like - we couldn't actually do anything for him, you know? At least I don't think so. Maybe if I looked at the spell lists more.

Gotta figure out how, someday, to have the world not be like this. But - not short term, yeah.

Yeah.

You guys almost here?