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Izumi laughs. "Yeah, shame on him, telling on us so an adult would come and provide actual help!"
Peppa smiles, but it turns into a cringe. "...though, when I was the one running to get an adult, I don't think I did much better. Oh, I lied, of course, but I can still recall one time, 'Aunty Aunty Aunty, we're not playing Mumblety-peg and Izzy and Gohan are bleeding and we're not playing Mumblety-peg and they tripped onto some knives that we did not take from the good cutlery and were super always there by our new Peg for Mumblety-peg!'"
Bemused, Izzy asks, "How come that didn't work, you covered all the bases!"
Peppa lets out a dramatic sigh. "I guess it was written on my face, just not cut out for lying."
She grins. "Well, don't beat yourself up over it." She looks back to the answer key, and compares her answers. "Oh, you piss-poor excuse for a princess."
...
Concerned, Peppa whispers, "Izzy?"
She huffs. "Yeah Peppa, sorry, I'm trying to figure out where I'm screwing up in this one problem."
"Uh." Peppa thinks on a solution. Heck, if she's already doing it, "Maybe I could help-"
Izumi corrects herself. "Ah, I forgot to do this one thing. Did I forget to do it on the other problems? Well, I didn't forget to do it for the others, the answer key says so, but just goes to show that one moment's slip-up can throw the rest of my answers' veracity into question, and I can't have that."
"I don't think it matters that much."
"Imagine if I had twenty people to rule over, and I mess up in dealing with one of them, that one person is going to get screwed over by my failure. One person out of twenty. Now imagine that I have twenty-<span class="mu-i">thousand</span> people to rule over."
"Seems like a small town?"
"Hm, that is the population of a small town, is Frypan's demesne a small town? Twenty-thousand could be a low estimate. When's the last time we had a census done, what is the extent of our borders? Abuelo got the money to build the castle three times from somewhere, but did that treasure hoard of his come from the good, honest murdering and looting of another king on his level, or was it taken from another source? Did his reign of terror scare people into paying or did it scare them into fleeing? And Mamá considers it rude to ask him just how many people he ate back then."
"...your Oxy Grampa ate people?"
She shrugs. "If he did or didn't, it's what the surrounding residents believe. They still call him a demon king, and the horns and flaming castle did him no favors." She chuckles. "Let's say we did try explain that there was a perfectly sound reason our castle kept catching on fire, and that it was because the afterlife's spirit furnace was venting flames onto our castle in particular? Yeah, no."
Peppa scratches her head. "Yeah, that's a lot of PR to tackle."
Izzy shakes her head. "It's in the past." Then, she looks at her phone's clock. "Like a lot of our kingdom, tech-wise."
