"I can be brute forced, it's been done to get a good estimate of my strength, I don't know if you could do it or not."

"Are you okay? Brute forcing my kind of shields usually is really unpleasant for the person being brute forced."

"I agreed to the test. And now I know approximately who I should never get into telepathic fights with, to a fuzzy approximation. It wasn't fun but I was okay."

"I'm glad. I know just from mutual poking and stuff that I'm a little better than Papa was at my age, but I think most of that's the effect of having had an older telepath to learn from. I'm stronger than Sophie, on about the same level as Jean..."

"On a loose ten point scale I'm a four overall, nine defensively. Ten is the really big leagues, but I only approach it in one totally passive ability so even if I didn't have moral objections to it I couldn't go be a dungeon delver on my subtle arts ability alone."

"What's a dungeon delver?"

"Uncharitably? People who are good at violence and like conducting home invasions as long as the homes are underground or in poor repair and inhabited by nonhumans."

"...I'm not sure I see any reason to be charitable, there."

"Sometimes the nonhumans in the poorly-repaired and/or underground residences are legitimate threats to nearby people, it can be sort of hard to sort out who started that sort of conflict, and if I have to guess who started it I will tend to go with the population who would try to eat me given the opportunity. Dungeon delving is also how a lot of major heroes get good enough at what they do to do things like slay the Bloodletter."

"Okay, that sounds like 'the kind of thing that is a good idea in theory, but requires way better oversight'."

"And the oversight is terrible, but it's getting better as we learn more about other kinds of people - with occasional setbacks when we learn that, yes, ogres really do enjoy the taste of human flesh when they're back home and they're just politely indulging local ordinance."

"Better than not, I suppose. And I...can't say I approve of any amount of consumption of sentient beings, but I'm also not going to start looking accusitorily at people because I think their reasons for not doing terrible things aren't good enough."

"Oh, yeah, I don't care why they're temporarily not eating people except for the implications of 'temporarily'."

"Agreed. Luckily if there's anyone in my world with a taste for human flesh it's an isolated incident and not at all problematic to deal with."

"That's nice. I found out a little while ago that a species that is usually considered friendly and benign has absolutely no moral qualms about eating humans if they happen to be in the water at the time."

"Joy."

"And I'm not sure how to handle this information, because our humans aren't such great people either and they might consider it a reason to be unwarranted amounts of horrible to the mermaids."

"That does sound like a problem. I don't suppose it's occurred to the ogres and whatever else that eating people is going to get unwarranted amounts of horrible rained down on their heads?"

"Oh, the ogres can handle it, or at least prefer to try. Mermaids sort of - get toothy, but they still aren't as big and tough as an ogre."

"I suppose that makes sense, on the ogres' side at least. For values of sense that have more to do with 'this is a predictable behavior' than 'it is in any way sensible'."

"I'm glad you get the distinction between those things. A lot of people don't."

"If more people understood the difference, there would be less of a difference."

Bella thinks about that, then giggles.

"I'm not coming up with any clever solutions for the mermaid problem."

"I'm figuring I talk to some dolphins and octopi and see where that gets me, and if I'm very lucky it gets me dolphin friends who can talk to the mermaids more effectively about this than I can."