"Oh, that makes sense. Uh, Griffie is the plant person?"

Ey looks a bit startled. "Oh. Yes. Would you be comfortable sharing your name or a pseudonym?"

"I'm Victòria." In addition to being a set of syllables it is also, unmistakably, the word for "victory."

"It's nice to meet you, Victòria."

"Nice to meet you too." 

She picks up the string, incidentally touching several of the other knots.

The string reads "If this works for you, then it's free, untie it if you like."

Oh, there were more words. She thought the string was just saying it was free. 

She unties the knots.

Now she has a length of kitchen twine without knots in it.

Griffie glances at the books on the counter.

"So, is Calistria's symbol the wasp, or the knife arrangement, or something else?"

"The daggers, but the wasp's associated with her too. I guess I haven't checked if I could use a carved wasp to cast, it might work."

Griffie nods.

"If you're a decent painter it's possible you could sell that to guests? Bar can sell copies of pictures, but sometimes people with fingernails want them painted and Bar can't do that. I don't know what the demand would look like, though."

"I've done some painting but not a ton of it. I could... paint people's fingernails... if that's something people want?" She's never done it before but it doesn't sound that hard.

"I don't know how popular it'd be. The Milliways population is pretty eclectic."

Nod. "Selling spells might be easier, then, I don't really know. That's not really what I picked out my spells for this morning" (this morning? she's not actually sure how long it's been) "but I can ask for different ones at dawn."

"Right. Dawn. It's … time here is complicated. You'll almost certainly get your spells at some reasonable point. Sorry, it's been a while since I talked to a normal cleric."

"So, how did you end up here, anyway?"

"I don't really know. I was — the guard told me to open the door to my cell, and instead of a cell I found this tavern, and I thought it might be a trap, but I figured even if it was a trap they were probably already planning on torturing me to death so I might as well hope it wasn't. But I've never heard of anything like this place just randomly showing up, I don't know how that happened."

"Huh. Doors just lead to Milliways sometimes. Some people have special luck with it, and some universes are more or less conducive to it – mine doesn't like it very much, for instance. I'm glad you don't seem on track to be tortured to death. What were they after you for, anyway?"

"So the Iomedaean priestess I mentioned before gave a speech about how all the Evil nobles should repent and go fight demons instead of secretly trying to keep hurting people. —Uh, for context, the country I live in used to be ruled by Asmodeus, and when the Queen and the Archmages took over they left a bunch of the Evil nobles in charge. And now we're having a convention to decide what the new laws should be, except there's a bunch of Evil nobles and people like them just running around getting away with everything. 

Anyways. Valia and I were both on the anti-diabolism committee, and she'd noticed that a lot of normal people who hadn't done anything that bad kept acting scared, so she had the idea of giving a speech about how normal people don't need to worry, it's only the Evil nobles who should be scared. And she can't read, so she had me and Alicia, that's the Shelynite priestess I mentioned earlier, read the laws out to her and help her make absolutely sure she didn't break the laws.

Except then a bunch of Evildoers decided to just go kill random innocent people for no good reason even though that's the exact opposite of what she wanted. And the Queen is really mad at Valia, even though she didn't break the law and didn't do anything wrong except for not realizing how people would react to the speech. So she had Valia arrested for giving it, and then today, at least I think it was today, she had me arrested for helping her write it."

Also she burned down a school, but the plant-person might be really Lawful or something, she doesn't know.

"Huh. That sounds like a really difficult situation. I can see why the queen would be upset, given what happened, but it's still unfortunate when following the laws isn't enough to keep you safe. A lot of mortal states are like that but it's really easy to be taken by surprise by it, they don't exactly tell you up front."

"...well, it wouldn't have been surprising back when the country was still being ruled by Asmodeus. It shouldn't've been surprising now, I already knew the Queen didn't care about normal people getting hurt by Evil nobles, but — I guess I trusted she wouldn't be quite as bad as the Asmodeans."

"None of the countries where I'm from are officially Asmodean and they're still often like this. Plowana-Curdime bans slavery, an Asmodean state wouldn't, and they still arrested people who never broke the law if they really wanted to."

"Even if it's not technically Asmodean it's still Evil to go around arresting people who didn't do anything wrong, just because they made the Queen mad."

"I think that depends on how long you keep them for? If a lot of people suddenly get killed sometimes it makes sense to arrest people while you figure out what's going on and then let them go in the morning."

"They arrested her on the third and now it's the seventh. Or maybe the eighth. It was the seventh when they arrested me but I don't know for sure how long it's been."

"That sounds like a different thing, then. I'm sorry that happened."