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Chuu Lee pats her friend on the back. “Yeah, yeah.”
Oh, she was crying then. Peppa walks out from under the umbrella to give them some space, and <span class="mu-i">that’s</span> when the rain chooses to come on pouring down. She walks back beneath the umbrella, dripping.
Chuu Lee chides playfully, “Also, don’t know if you knew, but I do have the power to sense the energy of living beings, so we could use that to find her.”
“Ahaha, sorry, somehow forgot about Chewie the Bloodhound’s insane hide-and-seek record!” She sniffs. “But I tried that too. Can’t sense her anywhere.”
Chuu Lee grimaces. Then she asks, tone a bit lighter, “Ah, Maple taught you how?”
“Yeah, in exchange for teaching her to eyeball measurements, ahaha, ah...”
With one hand, she strokes her friend’s back soothingly, and with the other, Chuu Lee snaps her fingers. “She beat me to the punch again!” Then, more seriously, she asks, “Well if sensing her energy doesn’t work, we could use magic. Could ask Fortuneteller Baba?”
Cookie shakes her head. “Puff was looking into it just a bit ago to find his own kid, poor thing got spirited away by demons. The fee’s eleven million, up front.”
Peppa taps her chin. Eleven million? Doesn’t seem like terribly much. The 100,000 zenni allowance her Mom gave her last week didn’t go very far at all with how hungry she was by the end of it.
“Puff’s kid ran off too?!?” Her teacher gripes. “And yeesh, eleven million? There goes your life savings. Winning the World Tourney only got me one million!”
Peppa nearly loses her balance from that statement. She won 100 million from winning a World Tourney, but then recalls it was the one hosted by X.S. Cash. To get a better sense about the worth of things, Peppa asks her Teach mind-to-mind, <span class="mu-i">“So eleven million is a lot?”</span>
Chuu Lee blinks, then stares at her in disbelief. <span class="mu-i">”Seriously- you are serious, hm. So, let’s put it like this, say you’re buying your first car. That would cost around one million to pay off.”</span>
<span class="mu-i">“But I can fly and telepor-”</span> In response to a stern look from Teacher, she switches tracks. <span class="mu-i">”Okay, ‘first car,’ so it’s an amount of money that high schoolers have by the time they graduate and need a car? From a summer job, yeah?”</span>
Her teacher receives that transmitted thought, lets it pinball around her brain for a bit, and then allows it to be digested. When it goes through, Chuu Lee gets a troubled, uncomfortable look, the kind one has when they have to explain to a child that sometimes not all the puppies in a litter make it. Then she squints, hooks onto something, and looks to her student with a desperate hope, <span class="mu-i">”The upfront payment, yeah! That’s worth a summer job’s wages, maybe?”</span>
Peppa nods in understanding. <span class="mu-i">“So one million cash, up front! Since credit cards are untrustworthy, which I learned from all the times my mom told me, ‘You can’t be trusted with it.”’</span>
Her teacher mutters, “Oh peas and rice. <span class="mu-i">Peppa, not mad but I'm gonna need radio silence for a bit."</span>