"I bet they did," I smirked. "Did they take all your money?"

"Not all of it," Wensley hastened to assure us. "Well, most. We could still scrape by. I think they felt sorry for us. So they sold us this." From inside his tunic he brought out a D-hopper. It looked functional but in poor condition. "A marvelous device," he said enthusiastically. "Everyone wanted to have a chance to try traveling to other dimensions—imagine, before the Deveels came we never knew there were other dimensions! I think perhaps we would have been better off never knowing, because, well, travel can be so expensive, you know ..."

I nodded.

"Your people saw all kinds of new things and went on a buying spree. It happens."

I knew, because when I first went into the Bazaar at Deva I wanted to buy everything I saw, too. It was lucky for me that I didn't have any money to spend. I still ended up with a baby dragon. "That's right," Wensley confirmed. "And the payments we owed for our purchases and the D-hopper turned out to be more than we could handle. To be honest, Wuhses have never been very good at negotiation. Among ourselves we agree all the time."

"So you're on the run from bill collectors?" I asked.

"No, no! We always pay our debts. That wouldn't be fair, to cheat someone out of their hard-earned wages ... well..." Wensley paused. "... out of what we owed them. It's not their fault we weren't experienced enough to handle such..."

"Cheats?" Bunny suggested.

Wensley blushed to the roots of his pale hair. "Oh, let's not call them that. But we ran out of money. Almost completely. We needed help."

"I'm not a financial advisor," I stated.

"We don't need a financial advisor," Wensley pleaded, his eyes huge with woe. "We found financial advisors. Now we need help getting rid of them."

Bunny and I looked at one another, then back to our guest. "Why don't you just