Oliver's commanding competence is lost on Emily, who still wants a boyfriend who's into exotic meditation and frolicking in rainbow mist and being kind to animals.

"Take her out? Jeepers. Can't we sit down and talk to her, or maybe in the worst case imprison her or exile her from Pelican Town or something?"

"But yes, we can definitely go talk to Gus."

Then he'll start walking.

"Mercy is for people who are sure they're going to win even if they're merciful.  But sure, Gus could proceed by waking up everyone who came to your tavern anytime Leah wasn't there, warning them to go on following previous behavior patterns so Leah couldn't spot them, but wake up whoever they came in contact with in private.  And then when you had overwhelming force, you could try fighting Leah in a way that didn't take her out in one shot, and then try to keep her prisoner, despite the fact that she's had two years to prepare and figure out clever tricks like the G signaling system."

"Though I guess it's not actually two years, as I think of that, if she's had nobody to talk to... but then how would she be completing art pieces fast enough to sell them?  That's one of the things I ought to ask her about."

Overwhelming force? Who even is Oliver? Maybe he has a point that he's not sure yet about this relationship.

He mentioned something about making a new boyfriend. Emily wonders if he was serious about that.

"Why would she need to sell very many art pieces at all?"

"Fair enough.  I was still thinking in my reality's mode, where you've got to sell a minimum amount of your work every month or you run out of money to buy food."

"Anything else obvious like that I'm missing, here?"

"I guess I just think you're really way too many steps ahead here. You said you talked to her for thirty seconds and then you jumped straight to 'we need to take her out.' Can't we give peace a chance?"

"What if she's exactly what she says she is: a person who wants a simple life? We can think of lots of ways she could have learned about waking people up without resorting to murder afterwards."

"No, I jumped straight to 'we need to make a plan for if she tries to kill us'.  I didn't propose to attack her without first going to the librarian or Mayor and checking to see if, in fact, anybody was found mysteriously dead around that time, and then, yeah, I agree that it'd be more civilized to wake everyone up and hold a trial for her."

Emily did not expect to be on Leah's side about anything this afternoon, but here she is.

They arrive at the Saloon and go in.

Anyone else present besides Gus?

Gus is behind the bar and Pam is seated on her usual stool down at the end.

"Gus, may I borrow you for a private conversation for a moment?"

"Only if Emily will pour me beers while he's gone!" Pam cackles.

"Sure thing!" Gus puts down the clean beer mug he's polishing with a cloth and trundles around the bar.

"Pam, sorry, Emily also ought to hear this.  We should only be a moment," from your perspective.

Gus leads Oliver and Emily through the billiards room and back to a storeroom full of barrels of varying sizes.

"What's going on? Did you find a way to make us all incredibly rich?"

"Glad to see you're asking the important questions!  Not yet.  Probably not today.  Working on it.  I'd ask if you were able to gain G by selling beers to Pam, but there's a secondary issue of greater importance."

"Leah is awake.  I think she's from my reality or a reality like it.  She likes Pelican Town the way it is.  She asked me to, quote, stop waking people up."

"That Leah knows what awakening is may imply that she's already woken somebody up, probably by accident, because she likes Pelican Town the way it is."

"We now face the question of where this awakened person is."

"Optimistically, they're leading their own life of quiet happiness here in town, or they left for Zuzu City to be around other awake people, and Leah is a nice person who wouldn't have done anything bad to them even if they'd gone around waking up others and disrupting her nice quiet life."

"Pessimistically, Leah figured out how to kill them using a sharp dinner knife from my reality where sharp things can actually kill people, and their body is still in her refrigerator because she can't dig a grave without a hoe."

"Leah knows Emily is awake.  Leah does not know you are awake.  If Emily and I mysteriously die or disappear then probably Leah did it and you need to be ready to take her out while she's not expecting it; or alternatively, carefully wake up as many people as you can without Leah noticing any of you and then take her prisoner and hold a trial for our murder.  Keep in mind that she's had a longer time than I have to think of clever ideas like using G transfers for emergency signals oh that reminds me Emily have your G back."  Oliver transfers the 21G she sent back to her.

"Leah? Kill someone? You must be joking. Leah's a sweet girl. Quiet, keeps to herself. Spends a lot of time foraging in the forest."

"Are you absolutely sure you and Emily aren't going to leave Pelican Town? If you do, for Yoba's sake, leave a note, because I sure don't want to organize a posse to take Leah down, no sirree."

"That's an excellent point, actually.  We're heading into weird territory here, and there's all sorts of other reasons both of us might vanish."  Oliver would totally have thought of this on his own, in just another second, he's very sure.

"If one of us sends 23G, that means we think we might be about to vanish for reasons having nothing to do with Leah.  46G would mean that we both ended up sending you that signal independently."

"If either I or Emily sends 1500G, or somewhere near that amount, it means Leah killed us.  Or if you get double that amount, it's probably because one of us sent that signal to the other, and then Leah got that one too."

"If we both vanish and there wasn't any signal... judgment call.  If I were in your shoes I'd maybe stealth it for a week and then start waking up the other townspeople, and not letting Leah know early about that, but also not assuming it was her."

"Do you have any evidence that she's actually killed anyone, or wants to kill anyone now?"

"Or, did anyone try to kill you back in Zuzu City?"

"Or, are murder plots just really common where you come from?"

"Pure attempted detective story thinking.  I infer that Leah woke somebody up, we don't see them, neither you nor Emily seem eager to leave Pelican Town or to leave the status quo undisturbed or to not wake anybody else up, what happened."

"People where I come from don't usually kill, but maybe Leah convinced herself that you weren't real people, or hadn't finished turning into real people.  She had a lot to lose, the way she sees things.  People don't usually murder where I come from, maybe partially because most people don't want to--but, I bet much more so, because it's hard to be sure you'll get away with it.  Pelican Town, I bet, doesn't have police who can run DNA tests on stray hairs around the site of a murder scene or disappearance.  I never considered killing you or Emily, but I think I'm probably unusually ethical for a person from my world."

"The reason you didn't consider killing us is because you're so ethical?"

"Why in the world would you even want to kill us in the first place?"

Emily's enchantment with Oliver is fading by the minute.

"I don't!  Both you and Gus seem like good people.  I split evenly the one dose of 4500G that we managed to get out of the system before it closed up on us.  I look at you, and I see people who just got to be real and just got to be born and who deserve your chance to go out and look at the world and make something of yourselves."  (This was sorta true even before Oliver said it, but now that it's part of a political defense he's making, it's definitely true!)  "Other people from my world might look at you and see complications, inconveniences, competitors, somebody else who wants to make money off of a limited amount of farm--though I've set something up with the Mayor that will maybe let us expand the farm, if we need to, Gus, and I think you can go fishing with a fishing rod even if there's only the one farm--"

"Not everyone from my world is like that.  People from my world vary widely.  If Leah is a nice person, well, there's a reason she didn't go back.  And if somebody thought the whole thing was a game--that's one of the things I have queued to talk with you about, this world looks in some ways like something that my world might think was a game--even though, I know, you're as real as I am now, whatever this world is made of--"

"Leah is innocent until proven guilty.  I get that.  But you can't assume it!"

Emily looks at Gus.

Gus looks at Emily.

Emily sighs.

"All right. That's fine. We can plan for the possibility that Leah is a murderous psychopath. We can agree to the signals you just said. None of that hurts us at all."

Gus nods.

"But don't you go and accuse Leah of murder, you hear? She's a nice girl. I don't know what's going on here but it'll hurt her a lot if you come in hot with this."