making up for lost time | Glowfic Constellation

Once Desnia exits the Iomedaen temple, she finds a secluded place to sit and nurse her baby.

She doesn’t tremble on the outside even a little bit.

She’s… not sure how she feels about that conversation?

She feels relieved and terrified and confused all at once.

She thinks she managed to keep up a coherent face that didn’t involve her gratuitously misrepresenting herself. Which is better than conversations sometimes go. That’s more important than usual if she’s going to be here for a while and running into the same people again and again instead of just skipping town whenever she decides the things that she's told different people have gotten too inconsistent.

As for takeaways from the conversation… she believes very deeply the ability of people to make better choices when they have better options. If he had renounced Asmodeus, if he had chosen Iomedae - then even the most evil people can always choose something better than who they’ve been - and she is gladdened by their so choosing - but he hadn’t done either.

The answer to the question that she was most interested in was clear: she does not need to be afraid of him right now, not while he is still a cleric of Iomedae. And he wouldn’t choose to stop. Because he doesn’t… believe in choices? Because of his vision of Law? She doesn’t really understand why, but it fits together.

She doesn’t understand Iomedae all that well, but as far as she knows gods don’t change their minds about their clerics often.

She squishes the thought that when she’s not looking maybe Iomedae will decleric him and Asmodeus will recleric him and then he would Maledict her.

Her breathing continues to be steady.

The conversation was in some ways unsatisfying but it wasn’t dangerous to her. She is good at telling the difference. Most things since the war have been unsatisfying, but many fewer have been dangerous.

Is the part of her that wants to constantly keep casting Detect Fiendish Presence back to its usual level instead of the frantically distracting level that it had been after the speech indicating that a priest of Asmodeus was in the convention hall with her? Not quite, but close enough. She casts it again anyway, because she wants to and she can.

He cannot currently Maledict her, he has never Maledicted anyone, the dominant strategic consideration involved in him or anyone Maledicting her is never going to be how distressed by the prospect she is so it was not a horrible strategic mistake to reveal some distress about it.

It only matters if threatening to Maledict her gets anyone anything closer to what they want and it won’t - she knows for a fact that no matter how much pain she’s in sheer spite will keep her going even if she can’t anymore care about anything else.

She… doesn’t actually want to replay the entire conversation in her head and see what bits she thinks she could have done better.

She wants to start making up for not having engaged with the convention, can she find anyone around? Talking to people individually feels more approachable than at the convention.

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"I have almost no memory of the actual content of school. I assume they tried to teach me things. I just remember suffocating and occasionally bleeding."

"The suffocating was just from you being inside or did they do something special where you were from? Bleeding sounds about usual, especially if you didn't learn so well.

- We learned to read and count and lots of things which were lies but it was useful to know which lies they wanted you to repeat."

"Just from being inside. I can write my name and pick out my ship even if all I have to look at is the name on the side, I'm all right about numbers if they're money and mean something about my work, that's about it."

"I can make my way through most things eventually, but I'm not very fast at it. Probably would get better with more consistent practice, I was fine enough at school and do some reading and writing sometimes since then. Just not that much.

- Does that mean you were missing out on the pamphlets? They were fun while they lasted, even if I was too slow at reading to get through many."

"I didn't read them. Heard a couple read but nothing that seemed tremendously worthwhile."

"I liked them. Just seemed - nice - that, people thought of things and wrote them down and shared them around. Something about doing things just because you can."

"I was running around putting out fires, that night, so I can't say I'll personally miss them much."

" - that night was bad.I was running around putting out fires and channeling and trying to convince people that I was a cleric of Desna and that whomever they wanted to fight wasn't actually a demon. Assuming it was just the one night, I left the morning after since the convention was off for a bit.

- Sometimes people decide to do things that are a real bad idea and I don't want them to do those things but also I don't want stop people from doing things just because I don't think it's a good idea? And different things are good ideas for different people.

There were a lot of pamphlets and just the one from someone trying to start trouble on purpose was a problem."

"It was just the one night, the rain put paid to any and all outdoor nonsense after that."

Her baby is indicating wanting to be put down, and this is a sufficiently bad idea that she is not going to indulge him in this.

"He wants to crawl around, and this rooftop isn't a safe place for that. So I'm going to go back down, let him explore somewhere he can't fall off of.

- And maybe look for someone to look after him tomorrow. I've been bringing him to the convention, but he's not usually quite as cooperative as he's been tonight."

"I saw a couple other delegates with kids, maybe you could all split the cost?"

She secures the baby again and starts carefully working her way down.

"That's a good idea, and they might also know someone who they trust already to look out for them. Not sure how to go around finding someone myself."

He climbs down too. He has no special attachment to being up so long as he is out. "I couldn't begin to guess."

The climb down is tricker than the climb up, in part because her baby starts wailing in earnest partway down and this is distracting.

She doesn't fall or lose her grip at any point, but there are couple moments where she needs to pause and plan her next moves downwards.

"Do you want me to get under you in case you slip?"

"That would speed me up a fair bit - I'm not likely to slip either way, but I'm trying to be a bit more careful than usual because of the baby."

He scoots around. He's very good at getting around in vertical space.

She picks up the pace. Not quite enough to have made it all the way to the ground before a guard on the ground notices them and approaches, yelling.

"It's not illegal to climb a building!" Jofre hollers back.

It turns out that being exposed on the side of a building while someone is yelling at her and approaching angrily is deeply motivating to pick up the pace.

A little further - and then she jumps down the remaining height, landing gracefully and stabilizing her baby on the landing, ready to bolt.

"You're not allowed to be on it, though!" the guard shouts back.

"We're delegates! The building's for us!" He's on the ground now too. "Anyway, we're done, what's it to you?"

"You're supposed to be in it, not on it," the guard grumbles. But now that they're off the building and have identified themselves as delegates, he's stopped his advance.

The baby has only gotten more unhappy with the sudden drop and the commotion.

Desnia assesses the situation as probably not immanently escalating, and focuses on soothing the baby.

Jofre maintains eye contact with the guard in case Desnia wants to run off and leave him to deal with any residual hostility.

The situation is not imminently escalating and she has another cleric by her side who seems to be sticking around and being helpful.

Desnia puts Jofre between herself and the guard, but doesn't take off running yet, only continues backing away from the situation.

"Shall we be off, then?" Desnia asks. She's not actually sure if he wants to continue hanging out after they've gotten off the building, but she does wants to help with any trouble that she contributed too, especially since this trouble seems very unlikely to pose a threat to the baby. This is more obvious to her now that she's on the ground.

The guard is glaring suspiciously but continuing to not approach.