Time to tie some loose ends.
Like the one loose end that has to do with Mama Beauty meeting up with Beast for some sort of contract.
Someone hold me, I am not ready for this.
No seriously, that phrasing is bothering me. "...you have sought me out...thus, I surmise this isn't the first bargain of this nature that you've made."
Either:
-Beast knows she's come back to the table out of desperation and is taunting her, which is not the gentle and understanding Beast we know (although, people do change...)
or...
-Beast means "me" the Arbiter (which doesn't preclude the first point), implying the existence of a prior Arbiter, which...
-Raises the question, "Did Argus agree to become the Arbiter to discharge his guilt, only to lose a lot more than expected?"
"It's rare that I'm approached directly. And yet you have sought me out...thus I must surmise this isn't the first bargain of this nature that you've made."
This is worded in a very interesting way, since it presumes that there are multiple ways in which to make a contract. Presumably most people only make contracts once, and coming to to castle itself isn't always necessary to do so. We've seen that the Beast can leave the castle early on in the story--he does it to give a rose, a symbol of the contract between him, her, and her mother, to Beauty in the prologue. So perhaps the Beast is allowed to go out into the world and meet people who want to have their wishes granted, rather than those people coming to him. Perhaps there are also other arbiters in this world. Or perhaps there are other places like the enchanted fountain, which the Beast, as a human, was warned to stay away from. Perhaps people can go to places like that to have their wishes granted, so meeting with an arbiter isn't even a requirement.
Beauty's mother, knowing more about this magical system than we do (I suspect she isn't human, perhaps being a fairy or something of that nature), is now bypassing those options and coming to the Beast directly. Perhaps she hopes to negotiate better terms into her new contract, or, more likely, she simply doesn't have the time to waste in hoping that a magical location or an arbiter will appear before her to help her. Going to the source is more reliable. I'm not sure if we'll find out what her first wish was (I suspect it had something to do with her being able to settle down and have a family--I'd be thrilled to see a short spin-off that goes into detail about that!), but maybe now we'll see what her second wish was.
