"Hey, welcome home. So, bad news. I'm an executioner-witch of the Silver Maybies. No, no, the door's already locked, don't try to run. Is this your first time? Okay, I'll walk you through how this works. Someone paid the coven an amount of worth to have you killed. I can't tell you who, or how much. But you can try to outbid them. Here's the rules. One, I can't tell you who paid us. Two, I can't tell you how much they paid us. So your outbidding has to be done blind. Three, you get only one chance, one blind guess, at outbidding this mystery number. Take a long... hard think, maybe, about who your enemies are, how much resources they have... how much they might hate you.

"And then take a long, hard think... about how much your life is worth to you. What you'd be willing to, you know, give up, to keep the rest of it. If you bid the value of a single feather over the original payment, then not only do you get to live, I tell you who hired me, and then I go and kill them. Fun, yeah? It's like a guessing game. A fun, high-stakes guessing game. A penny or a castle over their bid and you win. A penny or a castle under their bid and you die.

"Since we're witches we can do it weird, too. You wanna bid your first-born? Favors, secrets, dignity... don't worry, our exchange rate is passed through Phyllis Inkroads, Red-Green God of Maths, Servant-Everlasting of Meadoe Rule and Aiax King-in-Gold themselves. So if you want to get weird with it, we can get weird with it. But you get one bid. One. You win? I give you some names, and I leave to end those names. Your one, blind bid is under? Then I just leave. And I come back sometime soon. When you aren't ready for it.

"And that brings us to your other option. You can try to just hold up and fight me. But think of it like this. We make all our money being paid to curse or kill people. And I'm not called an assassin-witch. It's executioner-witch. We believe in good business so I'll tell you upright. We have a ninety-one percent success rate on executions. That's nine percent chance by precedent. But. Well, I can hear your heart pounding from here, sweetie. You aren't in that nine percent. You know it. I know it. Flyhh over here knows it. So.

"Whenever you're ready to make a guess how much your life's worth. Let's hear it."