"What about you?"

"Um, in the context of my world I'm an atheist but I don't actually know if all the same evidence is present here."

"That's fair."

Snuggles?

Absolutely snuggles.

Yay! Because that was terrifying.

Edie's pretty much clueless about the terror but this does not appreciably harm the quality of snuggle.

Good.

"You okay?" Maybe not completely oblivious.

"It would have been really hard if you were very attached to belief in an omnibenevolent deity and it didn't turn out that it really looked like that in this world."

"Aha. No. I mean, I don't personally think we know enough about God, assuming He exists, to not give him the benefit of the doubt for the moment, but, no."

"Maybe he has limitations we don't know about," she elaborates. "...I think it's plausible that he's not actually omnipotent instead of being not actually omnibenevolent? And I don't want to go around announcing otherwise as a matter of personal policy. I have every sympathy with people who look at atrocities and natural disasters and declare that there is no loving God."

"Okay."

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"Good." Snuggle! Snuggle will smooth the awkward, right?

Snuggles mean that all is right with the world.

Good. At least for now.

"So like - what's the story of your life?"

"Well, my dad's a sorcerer and my mom's an artifact user, and they...both used to do the adventuring and taking down villains thing but don't really anymore, and they met while doing that and actually it was some stuff going wrong there that convinced them to retire in that area."

"If your dad's a sorcerer why do you have to ask around about sorcering me?"

"Because the villain in question was his teacher. He wasn't a good teacher. He didn't ask first, for one. Finding someone whose own activation was non-traumatic is a much better bet."

"Okay. So they retired and had kids..."

"They retired partly because Mom found out she was pregnant with us and had a hasty courthouse wedding," she snorts. "And Mom got a job at the University and Dad respecialized from the kind of shit his horrible teacher was force-feeding him into useful neighborhoody kind of stuff and had Art Baby and Social Malcontent Baby. I was apparently an adorable little monster when I was a little kid."