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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.
