Somewhere there is a bar. There are no bottles behind the counter of this one, but she serves drinks nonetheless. Outside her one window, stars explode.
Right now there's some enthusiastic young human men with a ball crowded around a table with cup arrangements at either end, and some kind of plant creature sitting on a stool at the counter, poking at a slab of metal.
She doesn't know how late it is when the guards separate her from Valia. It doesn't feel like it's been a whole night, at least. They march her down a corridor and stop outside an empty cell.
"Well, go on then," says one of the guards, gesturing at it.
She was kind of assuming he would be the one to open it, but sure, she can open the door. It's kind of annoying to work around the chains, but it's not like opening a door is harder than writing a letter.
...This is not the inside of a prison cell. She's not really sure what it is instead. Probably it's some sort of trap but they're going to torture her to death anyway, if Calistria has answered her prayers in the most confusing way possible she's not going to waste it. She runs into the room and slams the door shut from the other side.
Awkwardly, the chains are making it a little difficult to wave back. She walks over to the weird-looking plant person, it's not like she has any better ideas. She's not really sure what this place is but it's definitely not the inside of a prison. (Unless it's some sort of magic archmage trap, but it's not like they need to use weird magic traps to kill her.)
The creature sets down the slab. "Welcome to Milliways, it's an interplanar bar. Would you like help taking a seat? I can probably get those off of you but not quickly."
The plant-person is dressed like an adventurer. Victòria did not know that plant-person adventurers or interplanar bars were a thing. Is this one of those things everyone knows about, would it have come up if she'd talked to a priest of Cayden's?
"Help taking a seat would be great. ...Not being in chains would also be great, if that's something you can do."
"If they're nonmagical and not rigged to poison you if someone is an idiot with lockpicks, I can give it a try. I'm not actually good at this, but I can pull up moving picture books and borrow lockpicks and spend a few hours, it shouldn't be metaplanarphysics."
Ey climbs off eir stool and approaches Victòria, which makes it clearer that ey's about halfling height. "You can put a hand on my head for support, I'm less likely to fall over than the stools are. I think you'll want to move your left foot like so…"
"I don't know if they're magical, I didn't ask for Detect Magic today and I couldn't cast it like this anyways. I doubt they're rigged to poison me." They won't be able to torture her to death if she dies of poison — wouldn't have been able to. It still doesn't entirely feel real that she might not be tortured to death.
She can follow seat-related directions.
Soon enough she is in a chair. It has a cushioned seat and back. A napkin appears on the table.
"Hello and welcome to Milliways. New patrons may have one free drink."
"...Is the napkin a person too or is there, like, a napkin-wizard hiding somewhere?"
"The bar is a person. She likes communicating with the sorts of things it would be reasonable for a bar to have, like napkins."
That's not actually weirder than a napkin-person, probably.
"Is it okay if I wait on the drink until after I'm not in chains anymore?" she asks the bar.
Another napkin. "Yes, definitely. Some people even leave without taking it at all."
"She also does free water. From what I've heard she's very generous about offering credit and not pushing for repayment but I personally have not felt comfortable testing that and many people feel similarly."
The plant pokes at the metal slab. It turns out to have glass on the other side, with light below the glass painting some kind of picture, though from Victòria's angle it's hard to tell exactly what.
Probably the metal slab is some kind of magic item or something. The plant-person is an adventurer, it makes sense for... she's not sure how to tell what gender a plant is... anyways, it makes sense that the plant-person adventurer has a magic item.
"I can do water myself, I'm a priestess. Or, I mean, I can do water once I have my hands free."
"Oh, huh. I'm a druid, I can conjure what I would call water, but most people here can't drink it. Who're you a priestess of?"
Ey pokes the slab more. It says "Hi everyone" in a cheerful tone before ey cuts it off.
"It's not a person. I think it's technically nonmagic, just extremely expensive and difficult to manufacture. It can play recordings of people. I don't know if you've heard of linkbooks or Discrete Storage or Clockwork Spies, it's kind of like a fancier version of those. If you'd like to verify that somehow that would be reasonable. And I haven't heard of Calistria, what's ey like?"
If Victòria looks at the item, she will notice it's currently showing a moving picture of someone's hands picking a lock. The hands are moving very slowly, and nothing is locked with the lock, it's just on a table.
"Huh, where are you from that doesn't know about Calistria? The Asmodeans didn't want us worshipping her but they didn't hide the fact she exists — uh, anyways. She's the goddess of vengeance, especially — if someone thinks they can get away with hurting people just because they're stronger or more powerful, and everyone is acting like they have the right to do whatever they want to you just because they're stronger than you, you give them what they deserve, rather than pretending like — like what they did was okay. ...Also of lust."
"Anyway, I'm from an Alternative branch of the world Suaal, complete with its own Inner and Outer Planes, I don't think I've ever run into someone else from there. Different deities are more active in different worlds. I see we're both familiar with Asmodeus, assuming him being a god of tyranny and such sounds right to you. Some of the other major deities I've heard of are Torag, god of dwarves and metalworking, Dai-Kitsu, goddess of farming, Thyslin, god of walls, Axis, plane of Law – technically not a god but pretty significant nonetheless. Do any of those sound familiar to you?"
"I've heard of Torag and I know he likes dwarves, I don't know how he feels about metal. I've heard of Axis but I've never heard anyone call it a god, do people call the other afterlives gods too? And for farming we've got Erastil, and I've never heard of a god of walls. And then we've got Pharasma, she made everything, she protects mothers in childbirth and stops their babies from dying and she really hates undead, and Iomedae, she's the goddess of fighting Evildoers, she really hates Asmodeus, and Shelyn, she likes art and music and she thinks it's a good idea to put Evildoers to work helping people if they decide to stop being Evil rather than just killing them. And a bunch of others but back home I was — working with — a priestess of Iomedae and a priestess of Shelyn."
...And probably they're going to be killed, they probably didn't get a miracle from Calistria. Calistria and Iomedae and Shelyn and Cayden I guess, if you can hear me please help Valia and Alicia and Raimon get here too, I don't want them to die either.
"Huh. Iomedae and Shelyn sound nice. Axis isn't a god, it's just that they have a lot of power and have clerics and temples and such and there isn't a god of Axis, so they're sort of godlike. – Bar, can I borrow a translucent lock and a curtain pick? Wait, no, I'm being ridiculous. Can we just borrow a key for whatever locks she's got?"
"Do you not have Abadar or Irori? Or Norgorber, I guess, apparently for some reason he lives in Axis even though he's Evil. —Thank you." She visibly relaxes slightly.
"Huh, weird. Do you not have a lot of Lawful Neutral people or something?"
"I don't know what 'a lot' is? There's a lot of lawful neutral Kochabites, though Kochab manages to stay celestial. I think Thyslin is Lawful Neutral or so?"
"Huh. Well, if you've got plenty of Lawful Neutral people, I don't have any other guesses for why none of the gods from Axis are doing anything on your world."
"My understanding is that gods just vary in how much they show up in different worlds."
"Before today I didn't even know there were other worlds besides my world and the First World!"
"There's a lot of worlds that Milliways contacts. Some of them don't seem to have any gods, even. Sometimes they're overwhelmed by zombies, or a meal is more expensive than sending a message around the world, or everyone's born with magic."
Blink blink. "If there aren't any gods how are there people at all?"
"Oh, this is really interesting! Are you familiar with farmers selecting their best animals to breed?"
"Kind of? I know it happens but I wasn't a farmer back home."
"Nature is kind of like that too! In the wild, life forms don't always reproduce and die at the same rate. Say, if there's a lot of wolves around, deer that are faster runners will be more likely to reproduce and less likely to die, so it's like nature is selecting for faster deer. …I can talk about the utility of intelligence in many worlds and how that creates pressures for people, I can talk about common misconceptions, I can speculate about early animalcules but I don't necessarily know all the details there. But I think in my world people and gods started existing together, because of this sort of process."
"I think I'm confused but I don't know what would make me less confused."
"The short version is that sometimes worlds get a really tiny bit of life, and then it turns into lots of different kinds of life and sometimes there ends up being people, even without any gods, because of how nature tends to work. And weirdly often at least some of the people are humans. I have no idea why."
"And the humans don't all... die? I was always taught that humans are so weak that if there weren't gods to protect our world we'd be crushed."
"Well, if the humans do all die they don't write books about it or show up to Milliways to buy drinks and chat, now, do they. – my understanding is my world is on the more delicate side, I'm curious what you expect would crush the humans in yours."
"I'm not sure, they didn't go into that much detail in school. ...I guess maybe that was also one of the things the Asmodeans were lying about."
"They do sometimes tell the truth, if usually in very twisty ways. Bar loans out books from anywhere, you could see what other people in your world say about it."
"—It does? ...Does it have a copy of Calistria's holy books?"
"How do I... ask it for books?" (She's turning her head like she expects they're hiding behind the bar or something.)
"She can hear you. Tell her you want to borrow a book and she'll put it on the counter like she does with napkins."
"Could I borrow a copy of The Book of Joy and Blood for Wine and a book about which things the Asmodeans were lying about?"
There are now copies of The Book of Joy and Blood for Wine on the counter, as well as a napkin. "Do you have any preferences for length or region of origin or recency? There's a lot of books like that."
"It would be good if they were focused on the sort of things they taught us in school growing up. So probably it should be from somewhere near Cheliax and pretty recent. And it shouldn't just be replacing the lies with different lies, like it shouldn't be talking about how the Queen is Good or anything like that."
"I can do things which don't praise your queen, and which match lots of other books, but I can't actually perfectly assess truth." That said, she can have a copy of Severing Geryon's Tongue: On the Infernal Lies of Cheliax, and their Refuations, by "an Aspirant to the Windswept Lea".
And what does this book think the infernal lies of Cheliax are?
The table of contents may be suggestive?
- Hell is Not Inevitable
- Most Souls are Not Condemned
- No Thrune can Sell your Soul
- Aroden's Killer Remains Unknown
- It is Wise to Turn Away from Evil
- The Power of the Heavens
- Very Few Rule in Hell
- Turning Away from Evil
- The Petty Lies of Cheliax
- A Brief Chelish History
- Recent History of Galt and Andoran
- A Sampling of Other Lies
Blink blink blink. "—Who else could have killed Aroden?"
That's not the most important thing on the list but it might be the most confusing!
"There's a lot of claims about that. He put too much of his power into the Starstone and the ascension of so many through it drained him. Gozreh killed him so she could open the Eye of Abendego. He stole from the First Vault and Abadar unmade him accordingly. He spent all his power to prevent the end of all life on a distant planet. I don't actually know what killed your Aroden, there isn't a lot of consensus in the records."
"There are multiple worlds known as Golarion with associated Arodens. It's a big multiverse."
"I'm not sure I should say that some things are just intrinsically confusing, but this is the kind of subject that makes me very tempted."
"Fair enough."
Flip flip flip. She knew most people weren't damned, they checked Korva. She flips past the whole section on "turning away from Evil." What does the section called "A Sampling of Other Lies" say?
Composure while risking torture is not that valuable a skill in most professions in most countries. It is possible to call and trade with inevitables. The many dead of the Blackridge Academy class of 4705 in fact managed to escape Hell, if only because their killer summoned a daemon which ate the victims' souls. (You should not summon a daemon to eat people's souls. If you're reading this book and tempted, you should talk to a holy priest. If necessary, the Final Blade is not evil.) Taldor is doing badly but not as badly as the Thrunes say. It is not rare for women and men to both enjoy sex, if the man is considerate. Osirion does not feed failed seminary students to crocodiles.
The author continues in this vein for a while. One gets the feeling that this is a bit of a dumping-ground for claims which did not fit in the rest of the book.
It's not rare for women — huh. That explains some things.
She reads for a little while. Eventually she looks up at the plant-person. "Apparently there are things in the Dark Tapestry that are trying to do that but there's a lot of disagreement on how exactly they work, this book isn't sure. But if other worlds don't have any places like that maybe they wouldn't need gods to stop them from getting crushed."
"It's — uh, someone I know back home explained it but I don't know if I understood it all — it's like a place way out at the end of Creation that twists up anything that goes there. Shelyn's brother went there and got twisted around and now he's a god of torture."
"Makes sense. I think there are lots of humans in worlds where the biggest threats from faraway places are that a big rock might hit their planet or a star might explode."
"I think the gods could definitely protect people from a big rock or a star, that sounds way easier than a lot of the other things they're stopping," says Victòria, who knows nothing about the history of the Starstone or the size of stars. "Uh, I forgot what we were talking about before, do you remember?"
"Well, I think sometimes the stars just don't explode much. Anyway, we were comparing what deities we were familiar with."
"Right. Uh, I could list all the gods I've ever heard of if you want? Most of them are going to be Evil, though."
"I'm kind of curious but I can ask Bar myself if you don't want to talk, assuming people mostly write about gods that exist. If you'd like time to read I'm certainly not in a hurry. – Usually time in your world is paused when you're in Milliways."
"Your budget, assuming you eat food or care about privacy at all. Food after the first drink isn't free and renting a room isn't either. If you get a job cleaning you can get a room with it. If you can do medical or security work you can get room and board and then stay indefinitely. If you age you'll still die of that, though."
But as long as she stays here, nothing bad can happen to Valia or Alicia or Raimon.
"I could probably do a little medical work or maybe a little security work, but I'm only first circle. I guess I could also clean but I wasn't smart enough to go to wizard school, I don't know if the boss here would still hire me."
"Circles aren't everything, how much medical experience do you have? And I've seen other people here cleaning with brooms and mops. I think Bar hands them out, like she does with bandages if you work at the infirmary. Does the place you're from have so many wizards the average cleaner has prestidigitation?"
"I've healed up people who got hurt during self-defense practice? But not much apart from that. And I don't know how many wizards is the usual number, they said in school we had more than any other country but I think that was probably something the Asmodeans made up so that we'd look better. Back home we had maids and such for tidying and they weren't wizards or anything, but my mother handled anything that left a stain. —Uh, she had cantrips but not first-circle spells."
"I know Bar assigns doctors based on expected cases but I'm not sure if that's enough? We get people with animalcule diseases, spiritual diseases, stopped hearts, pregnancies, unwanted implants, and so on. Sometimes there's complicated procedures they get periodically at home which they also need here. Anyway, Bar has access to alchemical goods for stains and if there's stains she wants cleaned she'll probably give them out. I don't think I've seen wizards cleaning here yet."
"Yeah, I don't know how to deal with any of that, except healing up someone who just gave birth. If you don't have to be a wizard I can do cleaning, and then... sell spells to the people here to pay for food? Or something?"
"Might be viable? I'd start with selling the chains, they probably have any value and then you wouldn't have a pile of chains lying around. You could also try going home with someone else, if you meet someone interested. – Not me. When I open my door I expect all Hell will break loose."
Blink blink — oh, that's a weird foreign metaphor. Actually, it's really weird that the plant-person speaks Chelish if they're not from Cheliax.
"I think I want time to be paused back home as long as possible, there were — bad things that were probably going to happen to people I knew, and as long as it's paused they won't."
Griffie is actually being completely literal but it's reasonable Victòria wouldn't guess that.
Also, now it's eir turn to blink confusedly.
"Does your kind of human tend to have experiences when time is paused for them?"
"...not that I know of? Or, I mean, powerful wizards can do lots of things, I've heard of there being magic that works with time somehow, but I don't know exactly how."
"Then I'm not sure why they would benefit from time being paused for a duration that feels longer for you. If you're planning to try accumulating power and going back that's one thing, but it doesn't sound like you are?"
"...Well, once time starts up again bad things are going to happen to them, and as long as time hasn't started then they're still okay, and... I want them to be okay rather than dead?" Frown. "I guess if I could learn magic that would save them that would be even better? I wasn't smart enough for wizard school, but—" She touches the place on her chest where her holy symbol should be. (Wow, she really misses her holy symbol.)
"I feel like you're making a mistake regarding pauses but I'm not completely sure and I also don't know that I have the vocabulary to explain it."
"Oh, that would be great. ...Could it also get me the materials to make one? It's fine if not, just, I made my old one myself."
"If you didn't make it from magic materials, I don't see any reason why not."
"Just regular wood, and later I added some paint." She looks at the bar. "Could I get those? And a knife for carving it, and some painting supplies."
She can have a bit of wood, tiny bowls of yellow and grey and red paints, a paintbrush, a cup of water, and a little carving knife. Also a napkin. "These are on your tab. If you return the knife and the brush and the bowls when you're done with them, and sell me the chains, you should have a bit of money left."
She had not really been thinking about how she was going to pay for this, which in hindsight was kind of stupid. Still, if the price for having a holy symbol is just about all the money she has, that sounds totally worth it. She starts carving the wood.
"How do I sell you the chains? Do I just, uh, leave them on the counter?"
...Probably this is not some sort of trap that will somehow result in her selling her soul. She sets the chains on the counter.
"Okay. Uh, I'm selling them."
The magic bar that's a person is still really weird.
She goes back to carving her holy symbol. "Oh, I forgot to ask — how much would it cost to get a strap or something to hang it from?"
There's a length of knotted kitchen twine on the counter. The knots seem like words, though it's hard to read them without touching them.
That's so confusing! How is it doing that!
"...is the rope a person??"
"It's a piece of writing. Milliways has a translation effect, it's how you can understand Griffie."
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."
"Nice to meet you too."
She picks up the string, incidentally touching several of the other knots.
Oh, there were more words. She thought the string was just saying it was free.
She unties the knots.
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."
"We were careful, we checked all the laws — she doesn't deserve to die—"
Blink blink. "—I mean, the people who went out and murdered innocent people deserve to die."
"I know that prison is expensive and dumping people on the upper planes even moreso and people get scared when the justice system changes, but I'm not sure I'd say they deserve it necessarily?"
"—You're not actually speaking Chelish, right? Does 'deserve' mean something different in your language?"
“I’m not. Hmm. If someone ‘deserves’ something, that means it would be good and appropriate for the thing to happen to the person. Like, if Alis deserves an apple, it means it would be good and appropriate for her to get an apple.”
"Well, I think it's good and appropriate for people who murdered innocent people to die for it!"
"Sure — so, one of the people who took advantage of the riots to kill innocent people wrote a pamphlet where he took pieces of Valia's speech and then added his own words to make it look like she'd said to murder every single devilspawn even if they weren't actually Evil. And his trial was a couple days ago, and he got sentenced to death, and that's good, I'm glad, I wouldn't want him to get away with that."
"If you'd had the budget to plane shift him to some prison in Heaven he wouldn't have gotten away with it, though, he'd be getting lots of explanations about why what he did was wrong and monitoring and such and the ambient planar effects would probably be annoying for a little while and then maybe if we were lucky he'd end up better."
"I don't want him to — go to Heaven and get to just be fine forever — he doesn't deserve to go to Heaven after what he did—"
"Presumably he'd regret his actions if he was redeemed, and feel like they were horrible, and maybe try to make up for them depending on how feasible that would be!"
"I guess if he... regretted them enough that he made himself suffer as much as he deserved... that might be alright? But that seems like an awful lot to count on, when you could just kill him instead."
"I'm not sure what making him suffer would solve. I was picturing things more like fighting to retrieve any of the tieflings who went to a Lower Plane or such."
"...do people in your world just not want to hurt people who hurt them, or who hurt other people who didn't deserve it?"
"...well, him suffering would solve the thing where he hurt a lot of innocent people and shouldn't get away with that?" Maybe plant-people just don't have consciences or something?
"I guess you could call that not getting away with it, and I know some people feel closure about that, but I don't really think it would solve the thing where he hurt a lot of innocent people. You generally can't actually solve things like that. You just have to go forward."
"I mean, obviously it would be better if he hadn't done it in the first place. But he did, and making him hurt the way he hurt other people won't bring back the people he killed but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing."
"I know some people are tempted by that but I haven't had any recent conversations with people who think it's the right thing to do. If you have the energy to make him hurt you have the energy to try making sure that some of the former dependents of the victims are a bit more likely to get fed, or such. …to be clear I'm not arguing against stopping him, and maybe executing him if you can't afford to hold him. Obviously you need to prevent him from doing it again."
"You can feed the victims' families and also give him what he deserves, there's nothing stopping you from doing both."
"...no? But I don't see what that has to do with anything."
"If you spend time and resources on hurting someone then you have less time and resources for other activities, yes?"
"Sure, but it doesn't take unlimited time or resources to hurt people who deserve it, and it doesn't take unlimited time or resources to feed the victims' families either. ...and if it was someone I cared about who'd gotten killed, I'd rather him get what he deserved than have a little money for food, anyway."
"Huh. When some psychopomps tried to kill me and the party oracle promised to track down and kill the one who had previously been arguing that I should die I mostly found that concerning. Admittedly in significant part because she's mostly an extremely merciful person."
"This is actually a really long story and I'm not sure you want all of it, but we didn't really let them go, Inevitables made us break it up. Which was probably good, everyone was calling for reinforcements and we were in a dense urban area so things could have gotten bad for bystanders fast."
Maybe it wouldn't feel wrong to just let someone go if she didn't have a choice about it? She's pretty sure she'd still be mad, just, a different kind of mad, and probably she'd partially be mad at the inevitables.
"And the inevitables were also stopping you from tracking them down later...?"
