Something about the whole conversation makes her laugh harder -- leprechaun children, impossibly tiny magical creatures with no point but to haunt rainbows or something. Tom with a whole cage of them, poking them with his cane.

She's practically in tears.

It takes her a moment to recover, get back to a real topic. "Russia is so big, we have everything you can think of. Most of the country is just farmland with almost no one living there. But the woods, the woods are the best part. That's where you go for mushroom-picking in the summer, after the rain. You can fly to the more southern parts of Siberia, it's like heaven for that."