"I'm gonna sound like a bit of a broken record here but...waiting? Especially since - especially since, just realistically here, we're going to be able to try a lot more often if you're not traumatized."

She briefly consults her image of her twenty-year-old self. Twenty-year-old Karen, do you feel like you're probably going to be any less traumatized by having to have illicit sex with someone you don't know or like or want to marry and who probably thinks you're a total dumbass?

(Well, sixteen-year-old Karen, I'm glad you asked. No, I think sex is probably going to just keep being terrifying until you figure out how to make it not be terrifying. But I do think it'd be less terrifying with someone you - OK, loved might be too much to hope for here, but generally trusted, even if you had less than no interest in having sex with them under normal circumstances. Like, if Dennis were here - forgive me, younger self, I need to use someone as an example - you'd be nervous and worried about what he'd think of you and worried about whether you'd hurt him, but you wouldn't be like this, because you'd both be scared and upset, but you'd be on a team, you'd be slaying a god together, you'd know that together you had this in you, and - that would be enough. Because you trust each other and you know each other and you would definitely, definitely be on a team.)

Her projected twenty-year-old self makes some compelling points.

"I - don't know that waiting will help by itself. Knowing you better seems like it might, but that implies - needing to figure out how to make that happen, not assuming that if we wait longer it just magically will."

"Okay. Well, uh, we can talk. Do you know - what sorts of things it'd help to know?"

"Uh." Whether he likes her or cares about her or is going to keep her safe and not be terrible and be gentle and OK if she breaks down crying and honestly could she be any more pathetic. Think. Think of something not-pathetic to say. Come on, Karen, you killed Lurconis that one time, you shot your best friend in the head, you forged an unbreakable friendship bond with a vampire serial killer in no time flat, surely you can figure out an activity that everyone who has ever reproduced in the entire history of the world has also figured out.

"...honestly I'm a little unclear on how I get to know people? I think mostly everything is on fire all the time and I tend to just grab people to help put out the fires and then at some point I look up and I have a bunch of friends who I really trust, because I've put out a bunch of insane fires with them, but problematically the only fire that seems to be worth putting out right now is... this."

"Okay."

" - we could try to reconstruct the Bible together from memory because otherwise this timeline won't have it for a really long while." Wow that's the least sexy activity anyone has ever suggested.

"Yeah, OK, lemme grab some paper."

Well, it's something.

She leaves and returns with lots of paper.

"OK, so, skeleton." She sings a song that has all of the books of the Bible in it a few times through, writing them down as she goes. She doesn't remember where all of the apocrypha go because this is a protestant song, so she kinda notes those off to the side. "OK. I remember how Genesis starts - I won't get the wording of the whole creation section right, but I think I remember all of the days, and the structure of each is kind of similar. I remember how John and Luke start. Matthew starts with the genealogy of Christ, and we're never going to get that right, except that David's in there somewhere. I don't remember how Mark starts, I think with the baptism of Christ? That sounds right. Um - here, maybe if we sort events into the books they happen in and then note down any specific wording that goes with each event - we can have one sheet per book to start - "

He takes some sheets of paper. He remembers less than her overall but has like three quarters of the Sermon on the Mount by heart - "we had this really tedious pastor and I figured I wasn't slacking off if I was trying to memorize it instead -" and remembers lines from a long string of school plays and can sometimes finish a sentence if Karen starts it.

Karen has a kind of ridiculously good memory for random lines of things, and also spent like seven years in parochial school memorizing different verses of things every week " - not just the Bible, I've got some poetry and the first amendment and the Gettysburg Address and most of the Declaration of Independence, but a lot of the Bible - " and on top of that used to spend every night when she was very small getting read to from this version of the Bible that was a comic book and had sequential pictures of lots of different stories - so despite being terrible at actually consistently reading the Bible on her own, she's pretty good at this.

" - OK, I don't remember anything that happens in Habakuk. Nehemiah's the one about the wall. And - I'm sure other things happen in it at some point. The minor prophets are rough. - I feel like I have lots of stuff from the epistles but I mostly don't remember which things go with which epistle. Maybe we should just have a page for stuff that's probably from one of the epistles somewhere."

"Sure."

"OK."

Genesis grows some more pages. Exodus grows a second. Leviticus is painfully blank with the words "something about shellfish? mixed fabrics??" on it. She has the whole "Love is patient, love is kind" sequence but has no idea which epistle it goes with. Maybe Galatians? Her brain thinks a lot of things might go in Galatians, it's possible that it's just giving her that answer for everything. She has part of Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Something something. In this way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

" - y'know, it's weird, I think the sex part wouldn't be a sin if we were married. Unless we went and tried to be... not married, and went off and did stuff with other people later. And - I feel like it's stupid to care about that, even, since I'm gonna go to hell anyway - feel like it's stupid to care either way, really, because, I mean, why does premarital sex matter if you're gonna go to hell, and why does extramarital sex matter if you're gonna go to hell, but - knowing you're gonna go to hell makes a bunch of things weird, I guess."

He knows Leviticus! Or, well, he knows that it contains a lot of rules about sacrificial offerings of livestock though he's not sure of the details so it's probably better to leave them out, and it's where 'thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman, it's an abomination' is from, along with "uh, not your mother, not your father, not your sister, not your niece, not your aunt, not your daughter-in-law, not your brother's wife, and don't sacrifice your children to Moloch, that's all Leviticus -"

"I think you're being kind of hard on yourself, there? I mean unless you're reasoning that Jesus doesn't exist yet which is true I guess, but. I dunno. I always knew I was going to kill a lot of people in my life and some of them would be innocent, and I think, you know, the big picture matters."

"No, I don't think so. I think - I think that God can forgive anything. Anyone who repents, anyone who asks him. But you have to repent. And this - Catholics don't believe in choosing the lesser of two evils. Not when both things are inherently evil. There's always a - there's always something you can do, some right answer, and it's never the one marked 'sacrifice your infant in a pagan ritual'. But I don't know. I don't know what the right option is. And - I know that this isn't it, but - at least this way fewer people have to die than if we do nothing. Baby goes to heaven, not their fault. Little orc babies grow up safe in little orc cities and tell stories about orc reconstruction. I don't know how to repent of that, not if I don't see what the right thing was. And I go to hell, I get to give up eternal life, but - greater love hath no man than this, that he give up his life for his brothers. I guess.

" - where does that one go, Romans? Is it even 'brothers', or is it 'friends'?"

"John 15:13," he says immediately. "Popular on dogtags. I think it's friends."

"Oh, cool. I guess it would be." She sorts it. "Anyway. This is it for me - barring my friends figuring out the secret to true resurrection, which, uh, not holding my breath - but... I guess I'm OK with it. I mean, like, I'm not OK with it at all, whenever I stop to think about it for a bit, but - I'm even less OK with abandoning someone else to it, and letting other people suffer in the mean time. And if that's what I got out of my Christianity this whole time, then - you could do worse, I guess."

"...I guess.

So you want to get married?"

"Honestly no? Like, I really have to think more about it, and you are sort of literally the only other human in the universe right now, so it's not like I have a lot of options on this front, but - I mean part of it is that I don't know that it'd be a valid marriage anyway, like, to be validly married under Catholic law no one can have been coercing you, and as much as I legitimately do think this whole insane plan is more my plan than anyone else's plan, I do not think I would have much trouble convincing people to give me an annulment if I got back home. Or, like, I wouldn't if the circumstances I would describe weren't, like, transparently insane. And then also for it to be a valid marriage you have to be willing to raise your children Catholic, and I don't really know how human sacrificing them fits into this but I kind of think they just turn the font up eighteen sizes and write "don't" if you consult a book about that one.

" - so - maybe someday, I dunno. But - it feels more - final, even though I'm damned either way? And I just - it might even help with the feeling - safe and comfortable, and stuff, but - I also feel like maybe it's better to reserve something for if we actually decide that we like each other someday? But I don't know, really, I have to think about it more.

"...do you wanna get married?"

"Uh, pretty much the same things crossed my mind except without the Catholic - can you even be Catholic without, like, priests? and popes?

- and with the addition of 'maybe I just got off on the wrong foot with Alex and am now interpreting him in the unfriendliest way possible all the time but it sure looks like he's planning to scoop you up as soon as you get to whatever age Quendi consider decent' -"

Shush, brain.

" - I really don't think there's an age that humans can get to where a thirty-four-thousand-year-old is going to consider it other than super weird to date them."

"Maybe not. Anyway, I think we should make that decision separately. If it'll make a big difference for you I'd be willing to think about it more, though."

"It - I dunno. Leaning towards no. There's - a part of my brain that would find it tremendously reassuring because it kind of thinks that people who've promised to be with you forever are much less scary - scary's the wrong word by itself, uh, much less people who it'd be scary to do sex things with, but there's - actually nothing about a wedding ceremony in itself that tells you how someone's going to treat you for the rest of your life, so I'm kind of leaning towards telling that part of my brain to shut up. But - it is continuing to make its case right now."

"It does seem like a conversation about what we imagine, uh, doing or being, after, like that's important."

"Yeah. I am - not really ready to think about what happens after. I think for now I just gotta get through this."

"...but it'd be helpful to know whether I'm going to leave after?"