This had seemed a splendid idea when he was proposing it, Long muses as he crosses the carpet back to the little table with its jade teapot and hot plate and starts pouring a cup of tea. A lesson learned, all nicely fitting, that magic should not be used as a shortcut for things, and so forth. Very much the sort of task he had been given as a younger.... well, being.

He wonders if any of those long-ago sages and wise men had ever felt so patently uncomfortable in his presence as he does at the moment. Long has an extraordinarily limited experience with young ladies; they are not the sort of acquaintances one forms when turning into a middle-aged human without warning.

He pours the tea.

"Many of the boxes are already packed," he murmurs, gesturing with his free hand around at the mostly bare shelves. "Those stacks over there must still be placed into boxes. They are the more valuable books, the first editions and the antique volumes and the like, so I was hoping to wrap each first in the newspaper."

There is a small pile of newspapers there, the San Francisco Chronicle because that was the paper he was thinking of when he hatched them, but aside from the letterhead the actual articles are Lorem Ipsum gibberish, as his imagination had not extended to text.

"The tea is Oolong," he said, offering the handleless cup to Willow. He sounded halfway apologetic when he said, "I am afraid I have no sugar."