Original Me is working these days, so he could spare a bit of money for us, as long as we didn't go nuts. I'm going to define "going nuts" as more than a hundred a week and stay under that until we get stable. Doing what, I don't know. But gathering is looking good, so as long as we can sell things for cash we might be okay.

We found copper near town. It's funny that there were so many TV shows that had people stealing wire and pipes to sell because copper was so expensive, but I checked the commodity prices for it and it's only about five dollars a pound. So if anyone really is doing that, all they're getting is maybe beer money. Not enough to live on, unless we have enough copper that people will wonder where we got it. And why we didn't have a truck to haul it around in.

I had to explain to Tsu'na that people here don't have inventory space like we do. For the first time, as we sat in the diner, she looked around and noticed the bags and backpacks and briefcases and packages people carried. "So people are limited by what they can carry?"

"Or put in a vehicle, yeah." I took out ten gil and stacked the coins on the table. "If they had gil it would take up space and have weight. A hundred gil would be ten stacks like this. A thousand would be ten times that and probably fill the table. A million would be a thousand tabletops full and..." My eyes ran over the room. "...maybe fill the restaurant."

"And we each have millions."

"Yeah. A good part of why this world switched to paper money a few hundred years ago." I showed her a dollar bill.

She looked it over, rubbing it between her fingers. "It seems flimsy."

"Kinda, yeah. It tears, it burns, it stains, but it's lighter than metal. Though a million of those can get bulky and heavy too. Which is why a lot of people today don't even carry cash. They use these instead." I handed over "my" debit card. "You get this from a bank. When you go to buy something, you give that to the merchant, he sticks it in a machine, the machine tells the bank you want them to give the merchant money. You don't have to have the money on you."

"But you have been using the paper money."

"Yeah, because I don't have my own debit card. This is a copy of Original Me's, so if I use it I'm spending his money. He says it's okay, but we can't do that forever."

"So you will get your own card?"

"That takes a bank account. And that takes ID. And ID takes identity, which we really don't have. We can't prove we're in the country legally, so we can't just walk up to a government office and get ID without worrying about arrest and deportation. Um...kicking us out of the country."

"To where?"

"They don't care. Probably Mexico. Where we still won't have ID."

"And what will we do about this?"

"I'm flattered by your faith in me, my love."

"That does not answer my question."

"Yeah...There's people who sell fake ID. I don't know how to find them. It'll probably take a lot of money...more than Original Me's got lying around."

"And they do not take gil."

"No. I mean, if I knew what gil was made of, we could maybe melt it down and pass it off as gold or something. Then we could buy most anything."

She picked up a gil coin and turned it in her fingers. "I never thought about what they were made of."

"Probably something more valuable than copper. Anyway, the machines keep records of who does what where, so that's another reason to not use them if we don't have to. Cuz sooner or later people will wonder who we are and where we're from and why we haven't paid taxes ever."

"Is all this why we are hiding? We are hiding, are we not?"

"Part of it. And like I said before, we don't want to be around confused and upset humans. If we told them we were from another world, it's possible people would think us crazy enough to lock us up in a hospital, where they'd try to convince us we were crazy to think that way. Or it's possible people would believe us enough to lock us up in a laboratory, where they'd try to study us to figure out what we were. Or they'd get scared and try to hurt us or kill us or something, because there's people who really don't like different."

She stared at me a long time before asking, "Why did we come here, Husband?"

"Wasn't my idea. I thought the Circle would take us some place outside Eorzea. I didn't know where."

She sighed and reached over to lay her hand on mine. "What was it you once said? 'I can think of worse ways to spend eternity'?"

"Remembered that, did you?"

"Of course."

"Yeah, well. Let's worry about one day at a time."