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Jamie is . . . getting twitchy.

Beyond that door somewhere is his Home. It's close. He knows it. But he needs Joris to get there, and Joris - and Helen - aren't ready to leave yet.

And Jamie isn't ready to tell them about his hopes of getting Home soon.

So there they are.

In an attempt to stave off twitchiness, Jamie's doing his best to fill his time with as many activities as possible. Today it's toasting marshmallows in the fireplace. It's fun to see the rats make faces as the goo drips!

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Jamie smiles at her, and explains, very gently, "It's a matter of personal taste. It can be any level of brown you like."

"They're safe to eat raw?" Helen asks, though her chin stiffens and she lets her hair fall into her face as she holds her marshmallows out carefully over the fire.

Hatred, Jamie. Hatred and loathing.

"Perfectly safe. They're only made of sugar really. Lots of people do eat them raw."

Jamie feels that this particular conversational (and culinary) battle, he is winning!

Probably.

Wait, no, Helen never loses. Shut up. Instead she focuses (dignified and winningly) on her marshmallow stick, rotating it now and then.

Wins are rare enough for Jamie that he is very much savoring this one.

"You're doing very well," he says, with kindly encouragement.

Helen's back stiffens. "Don't you have marshmallows to eat?"

Jamie promptly takes a bite out of the side of one of his browned marshmallows.

Which doesn't stop him saying, through sticky teeth, "I just thought you'd like to know, since you were concerned."

"Very thoughtful of you," Helen replies, tightly.

She rotates her stick, again, as the sides start to bubble brown.

Just see Jamie give Helen any more helpful advice! He leans himself back, gnawing on his next marshmallow, and watches with interest to see if Helen will char her marshmallow into cinders.

Not quite. When the marshmallow on the top catches fire, she pulls the stick out, blowing on it. She manages to extinguish it, but the extra air sends the marshmallow tilting off onto the hand she has instictively held under the stick.

Helen hisses and shakes her hand, but only half of the marshmallow goes flying--towards the fire. the rest stays stubbornly stuck to her hand.

"- Helen," Jamie says, half-exasperated and half-concerned, and grabs for her hand to wipe it off.

"Hold still, you'll burn."

Helen's had worse hurts, but still--it hurts. She jerks her arm away from him.

"Don't touch me!" She snaps, almost shrill. (Rubbing at a burn with hot residue makes it worse, she knows. She's not thinking of that.)

Breathe. In a tightly controlled voice: "I need cool water."

Two waitrats run to get some.

Jamie pulls his hands back and holds them high and exaggeratedly away from her.

"Pardon me for trying to help," he mutters. It isn't as if he's never dealt with burns before either!

If Helen's hand didn't hurt so much, she'd tell she didn't need his help. As it is she just glares at him through her hair and gently sinks her hand into the bowl of cool water the waitrats brought.

She's very mad at herself. It was stupid to put her hand under the stick.

"It ought to get better quick, anyways," Jamie says, after a moment. "You know we don't take much permanent damage."

"Yes," she nods sideways. She carefully moves the stick from her right hand to rest across her legs, and tugs off a marshmallow.

She eats it, grouchily. Might as well not waste her injuries or something. "I don't know why we don't. In general moving between worlds is supposed to slow things down, not speed them up."

Jamie snorts. "They don't want us to die and leave inconvenient corpses lying about their game boards to get in the way of play."

Helen shrugs. "Yes, but you'd think They'd at least have to go about it in some sort of sensible manner!

"Not that They're sensible in any way or idea," she adds, clearly upset by the lack of logic. "It is not the way the universe ought to work."

"If you were the evil force running the universe," Jamie says politely, "I'm sure you'd organize things differently."

And God help them all.

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