Marie can’t remember the last time she felt this comfortable. She wishes she could still be happy about it. She says nothing.

“Would food or water or more sleep make you more functional? I don’t actually know how that works for petitioners.”

"I don't eat. I am grateful to be allowed water. I will try to be functional and obedient, I'm sorry, I don't know what else you want from me."

She gets out a cup … no, two cups, she isn’t not thirsty and it might make a point. She fills both of them with a brief incantation and a gesture, then holds one out to Marie.

“To health.”

"To health. I'm allowed to drink this, right?"

Even holding the cup in one hand she strongly prefers to mumble in sign language with her free hand rather than try to speak out loud.

“Definitely. I can do this all day. I was doing laundry with it earlier.”

She doesn't follow the logic but that's not important. What's important is that she's incredibly thirsty and drinks the whole cup about as fast as she can.

Now the cup is full again.

Oh, is she going to be punished by being made to drink more and more water until she regrets having ever wanted it? She drinks more slowly this time, in the hope of dragging out the part where she enjoys drinking the water.

Zoriana seems approving of the slower pace, actually. She’ll fill the cup.

“Let me know when you’re done so I can pack up.”

"I will of course be done with whatever you want whenever you want. Or try. I'm sorry."

"The point of this is for you to … feel better, look more alive. Well. Not quite alive, but hopefully you can follow? Does your type of petitioner not know how much water is good for them? Most humanoids have a thing where when we drink slowly we can usually tell but I guess they might have broken it."

Marie tries to look less horrible. "I don't know. I'm sorry."

Bevaluu would probably be so much better than this.

Irrisen runs are straightforward. You're trying to help live humans, which you've probably met a lot of before. The local humans may come up with ideas like raiding the local Jadwiga's wine cellar and getting drunk to ward off the cold, but they at least broadly know what's good for them. They've probably even heard some vague legends of outlaws bringing warmth, so they might be disappointed that you can't haul them out in a chariot of fire but they have a broad sense of what you might be.

"How about you try drinking a few more cups, slowly, while paying attention. If you stop wanting to drink the water you stop drinking it, and if it turns out that you have a limitless thirst for water but after five cups you turn into a crocodile at least we'll know."

She drinks three more cups of water, because that is a few and less than five, and she drinks them slowly, because she was told to, and she pays attention, though actually there's no connection between any feelings of thirst she might have and the point at which she stops drinking. She can apologize even while her mouth is full and she does this.

This is not how someone who is up for sneaking through an unknown hellscape looks.

Lady Luck bless her, she's going to have to wait here until she can get more spells.

There's not much to do but talk.

"So. Earlier you asked if I was an angel and I said 'sort of'. I wasn't as sure of what you meant at the time and I didn't have very good vocabulary. I'm a living human. I am blessed by the Starsong, Desna, who did not create the universe, with gifts like healing and the creation of water and the ability to share languages. Desna also empowers dead people who live near her, sometimes with greater gifts, and sometimes those people are called angels. But all the angels I know of aren't supposed to torture people, ever, no matter how other people behave. And I'm not supposed to either."

Oh, no. If she's not an angel then Marie might get in trouble for listening to her after all. And none of this makes sense or is plausible. And here they still are.

There doesn't seem to be much point in saying anything, given that.

"Do you want to ask any questions or get some sleep? Now's a great time to sleep if you're tired, because I'm not."

That sparks another round of apologies.

There is a reason she spends so much time drawing maps in space and not on offering counsel.

"I’m going to tell a story to pass time. It’s not particularly edifying and you're free to ignore it." Specifically, she's going to describe Desna placing the stars, the kind of telling that's almost pure mnemonic for knowing where stars are in the (northern) Golarion sky. It's very repetitive.

This person isn't actually going to ignore it, of course. She might conclude that she has to memorize it, which is why Zoriana is picking such a repetitive version. She might try to find a hidden lesson, which is why Zoriana is picking a story whose main implicit moral is that it's good to know which way is north and not anything that could plausibly be something the woman could act on.

Zoriana also doesn't, actually, think now is the time to talk about specific details of habitable other places. Focusing on the space they're in right now is important, but a reminder that something else exists at all can be grounding. It is for Zoriana, at least.

Sign language is convenient because it means she's not interrupting if she just keeps apologizing. At some point she starts rocking herself back and forth.

She can only draw this out for so long. Eventually she switches to discussing Sarenrae and her ioun stones, which are apparently magic crystals that circle the head. Sarenrae's are apparently extremely large and if the story is to be believed Zoriana lives on one.

After that she almost yawns.

"If I sleep, are you willing to wake me if anything happens?"

"Okay."

In theory, this woman could screw her over. In practice, though, just shouting loudly enough might do it, and the woman hasn't. Killing someone like Zoriana with a pitcher or a broken shard thereof isn't trivial, and she's in some ways more perceptive in her sleep than other people are when awake.

She sets her bag down somewhere relatively clean and lies down with her head on it. She's still wearing her armor, which isn't comfortable, but she can, technically, sleep in it.

Marie just needs to stay conscious and wake her if anything happens.

She doesn't care about any of the pagan nonsense from the stories. This person can miraculously heal people and teleport and it's not like the angels have actually demonstrated that they can do anything especially more impressive than that. The only important thing is that if she does whatever anyone asks she's less likely to be tortured horribly.

On the other hand, what if this is a test to see whether she'll obey someone who worships false gods? Well... she'll apologize and be broken even more, in that case, but she'll say that all she was asked to do was keep watch.

It just hurts. Everything hurts. Existing hurts. Being awake hurts. She wants very badly to bang her head against something hard but she obviously can't do that because she was asked to do something else and she has to do what she was asked because maybe if she does that then she won't be hurt as badly.

Zoriana said something earlier before teaching Marie her languages. Marie didn't recognize a single word of it; she just heard a bunch of sounds.

Marie has been renamed without regard for what languages she speaks, and she's been taught to pronounce all her new names perfectly, and she's learned to do that in as few tries as possible to minimize how much she's punished. And Marie has been through some language lessons - actually, Marie has been through a lot of language lessons. The way learning new languages works, of course, is that you have to memorize a lot of things that don't make any sense, and then eventually you have enough pieces that you can start putting sentences together and understanding things.

Zoriana said something before Marie could understand her, and the thing she said was angels don't torture people.

It's not true. But it would be nice to live in the kind of place where you could end up that badly mistaken.

She stares at the door and tries to stop thinking. Everything hurts. It makes her sick how much she wishes she could have gone someplace where you could end up believing angels don't torture people before it was too late for her to ever be okay. She is perfectly obedient and she's slowly growing back the things Zoriana couldn't heal and it's much less than eight hours later that she hears someone outside the door and kicks Zoriana.