Sigh. It was never going to be that easy, apparently.

NO. YOU WOULD KNOW.

BUT IF YOU'RE NOT MY CONTACT, WHY ARE YOU TELEPATHIC?

The toddler looks startled and then hastily turns their attention back to their fries without saying anything more by telepathy.

Around then the three pancake-eating girls have finished off their pancake stack and gotten up, moving as one, to approach Emily.

"Hey."

"That was a pretty intense french-fry eating contest."

"You want to be the opening act when our band plays here tonight?"

Being the opening act for a band is an extremely statistically unlikely thing to do! Probably less than 0.1% of Americans have ever done it!

"Oh, thank you so much, that's really kind, I couldn't possibly..." Emily's polite refusals overlap like the tiles on a terra cotta roof.

"Do you draw much of a crowd? Who all comes to your shows?"

"We're vacuously the most popular music show in town!  But I wouldn't say we draw the same crowds as a hot-dog eating contest.  That's why I'm wondering if intense french-fry eating as an opening act could be our next step."

     "We'd pay you, of course.  Like... one Bitcoin?"

  "Oh my god Jann, no.  One hundredth of a Bitcoin."

     "One hundredth of a Bitcoin?!  That's, what, one session with a sex worker?"

  "And normal people, if you ask them whether they'd rather get into a french-fry eating contest with a toddler, or have sex with a stranger, would prefer the french-fry eating contest.  So it shouldn't pay more."

      "...Really?  You think that's what a survey of normal people would say?"

"Normal women, you two.  It's a whole gender thing for normal people.  Normal men are prouder, so they'd be more scared of losing a french-fry eating contest to a toddler."

Being an opening act for a band just for funsies would be contraindicated, but a hundredth of a Bitcoin is a lot of money. Normal people say "yes" when they're offered a lot of money to do easy things.

She gestures at the toddler. "Is that the rate for each of us or would we have to split it?"

"Can toddlers receive Bitcoin?  I don't think they can do the public-private key math until they're older, right?"

   "They're usually pretty happy to work for french fries, in my experience?  Like they can't do the supply-demand price-equilibrating math either."

Emily looks at the toddler. Just because the toddler is not her contact does not mean she wants to be exploitive.

WHAT'S YOUR PRICE? YOU REALLY HAPPY JUST BEING PAID IN FRIES?

THEY SAY I'M TOO YOUNG TO OPEN A BANK ACCOUNT.  FRIES ARE TASTIER THAN MONEY ANYWAY.

"All right. The kid and I are in. What time do I need to be back here for the show? And also, can you point me in the direction of the Mayor's house?"

"Do you usually take it upon yourself to speak for toddlers who --"

      "Shhh.  Great to have you both!  We sing at 7:30p sharp, so it should work fine if you get here by 7:15p blunt.  If you're late you'll just have to eat french fries faster."

   "And the Mayor's house is thataway, exactly 317.4 meters from you."  One of the three women points her finger helpfully.

Should she walk or drive? She's young and fit and healthy, but who cares? The important thing is, what would a normal person do?

Urban planners use about a quarter of a mile, or around 400 meters, as the walk/drive threshold. Actual Americans vary in their behavior depending on the weather, the presence of sidewalks, and the possible need to haul giant Costco-sized packs of hundreds of Frozen BBQ Chicken Drumettes home with them. In this case, it's sunny, there's a sidewalk, and Emily does not anticipate doing major shopping on the trip.

She'll walk.

She gives a jaunty wave-salute to the denizens of the diner and sets off in the indicated direction.

The directions were very much given as the wizard teleports!  However in this case 14 Down St is not at all far off from Main St, the street distance is not far from the helicopter distance, and if Emily reasons out from first principles how a strictly median American would try to follow those directions she will end up at the mayoral residence. It's on a street of other American houses, big old homes built back when people still expected to have and raise families, except that this home has been recently repainted and turned by eager civic-minded souls of Prometheus into a ~mayor's~ ~residence~.

Well, there's no doubt that this is the right place!

Emily marches right up to the front door and rings the bell.

It makes a sound like "GLONG-GLONG-NOOOM", with the final tone fading slowly away like a slowly released organ key-press.

A few moments later there's a loud metallic crash, like somebody accidentally dropping a bowling ball into exposed heavy machinery, followed by a thump-thump-thump sound as of somebody falling down the stairs.

And finally the door is flung open.

"What is it?" he says, in a roughened, almost barking voice.

"Hi! My name is Emily and I'm new in town. I heard that you could use some help?"

It seems to take him a moment to process this.

"Are you by any chance... normal?" he says, in the tones of a man who has many times had this hope raised, and dashed into despair, and is now offering up the very last sparks of light in his soul to see how cruel the universe means to be to him and if it is really worth him playing the whole game at all.

"I mean... yeah? I think so? I sure try to be!" Emily kills the nervous laugh rising up in her throat before it takes flight. "Um. Yes."

"Okay, that was, and I mean this in deepest sincere unirony, a very normal response, for which I am grateful."

"What... kind of help did someone tell you I could use."

"You know what, they didn't really say? They just said you looked..."

Hunted.

"... stressed."

"Are you good at... organizing things.  Things that may, perhaps, not want to be organized."

"Oh, sure! My stuff never wants to be organized! That's why I keep thinking about getting some storage containers for it, or maybe renting a storage unit! I have loads of experience with things that do not want to be organized!"

This part of Emily's story is not particularly going to hold up, if anyone looks too closely. She does not, in fact, have a home with the allegedly American median 300,000 objects in it. She's not even sure that would be the correct number of objects to have, as the evidence backing that number is pretty thin.

But probably no one from Prometheus is going to go and check. People are mostly pretty preoccupied with their own problems.

"Do you have some... things... you need help with?"

"Suppose, hypothetically, that almost every resident of this town was trying to pay their taxes in a different form of goods or services, and that the number of such goods like grams of silver or Ethereum that had a known price in dollars was maybe, like, one-third of all the people paying taxes, and then suppose it had become a source of drama that some people in town were accusing others of not paying enough taxes."

"Why don't you just... only accept U.S. dollars?"

Emily is sure there will be some kind of bizarre "reason" but she can't guess what it will be.

"I think the third of townspeople who did that would be pretty disturbed if I told them they had to pay three times as much in order to make up for not accepting payments from two-thirds of residents!  Anyway, it was made very clear to me that it's not the mayor's job to make the rules, only to execute the rules.  Three branches of government and all that."

"Look, that's not even the real problem here, I was speaking hypothetically in order to get a sense of what sort of things you're offering to help with.  For that matter, why are you offering to help with them?"