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"How was school, honey?"
She tries to make the kids' favorite meals on their first day of school, but when she asked Iomedae's favorite meal the girl first stared at her blankly and then after some extended clarifications proposed that they could roast a pig, and she can't actually roast a pig, so dinner is pork chops, and potatoes, and salad from the farmer's market. Iomedae is not a picky eater.
(The girl is in fact clinically obese. The doctor suggested they talk with her about cutting back on junk food, but the social worker said that was a bad idea, with a kid new to care - don't restrict her food access at all, just get her more exercise. So Jenny signed her up for swim lessons at the YMCA and for track and field at school. Iomedae balked at the swimming lessons on the grounds that swimsuits were immodest, and they do actually make hijabi wetsuit things but apparently not in her size. Hopefully track and field she'll actually enjoy.)
Elynor has her chin in her hands. "You could if you are really fucking sure it's worth bothering Spike. I.... you're sure this kid isn't just someone from a weird cult? I know it's our job to look for potential supernatural explanations and make sure that if demons are doing bad shit then we shut it the hell down, but, honestly, fuck, I hate to say it but maybe she's just an abuse victim in foster care."
"With respect, excellency, you have not fought this girl. I do not think abusive cults usually raise their women to be like two hundred pounds of solid muscle, nor do they usually put blades in their hands and teach them. I'd have said she'd been fighting at least a few years just from watching her body mechanics and her instincts, though it might be much less time if she's been intensively training rather than following a twice-a-week schedule."
"Certainly not the Christian variety, at least," Reynhard agrees, "and she's apparently deeply Christian."
"No, she's - look, we all agree she clearly believes in some kind of faith healing and thinks she's been personally chosen to be a holy warrior. That would fit with her having some kind of healing artefact, potentially, we agree on that point. But she thinks God specifically wrote scripture that says women aren't equal yet but they will be one day in a civilised world, and we all noticed she has very specific hangups about truth and signatures and promises, and when I told her no religion she.... in hindsight I think she assumed we meant we were polytheistic. And she quite seriously assured me that she did not intend to go to hell and swordfight Satan until she was older."
"I suppose if she's from a country we've never had any contact with, it makes perfect sense she also has a religion we've never made any contact with."
"...Why not? The idea of a character from a fantasy story coming to life, or coming to speak to you, is a trope. I really liked Inkheart..."
Raoulin has been rocking gently in the rocking-chair in the corner, occupied partly by the purring cat in his lap. He is understandably very sleepy after coming back from an absolute slog of a mission, and people have mostly been happy to leave him alone to nurse his coffee. But this is too interesting to not ask.
"I'm just saying it could potentially be really old. If there's old enough stories about people from stories coming to life....?"
"Not how magic works, surely? The requirement is not an old enough story, it's an old enough moral conviction."
Baroness Elynor shakes her head. "Right, but dragons exist, and it's not that people have a really old moral conviction that dragons should exist, it's that - for whatever reason - sometimes moral convictions specifically about authority and dignity and the fucking rights of kings turn into dragon-shaped problems, like how moral convictions about sex sometimes become succubus-shaped problems or moral convictions about loyalty become direwolves or some shit. The question is what sort of moral conviction gives us a fucking storybook character."
"No, I think this actually just doesn't make sense. There's many old fantasy stories but - before modern widespread literacy they don't have worldbuilding. At most maybe there's a fantasy land, like Avalon or Tir Na Nog or a Dreamland, or there's heroes with specific powers, but there's not - a fake village called Ujue in a place called Menador in Taldor with a whole separate religion with different beliefs. I think that sounds like.... a level of detail in separating the story's world from Earth that would be post-Tolkien."
"We have worldbuilding. We're in the barony of Kalomeros in Atlantia, we've got songs and everything and a mythos. And a whole cadre of Laurels turning out magical artefacts as fast as they can launder them."
"So she's a fucking figment of my imagination brought to life by how much I love Atlantia?" Elynor asks. "Shit."
"Fuck it, I just want to ask her. There's no way we're getting her away from Jenny to ask her whether she's got a magic artefact but... can we quiz her, find out what magic is going on with her, then just memory wipe both foster parents?"
"....As much as I hate to say it, if she really does have magic and really isn't aware she's supposed to keep it secret, she is an active risk to the secrecy of magic."
"If we're suggesting memory editing the fifteen year old, I have to object in the strongest possible terms. We don't know enough about her to specifically remove the dangerous memories, and if you're proposing we reduce her to knowing as little about her own past as we know, that is unconscionable."
"It kind of feels like it's crossing a line a little bit to use my powers against humans, and sorta feels like it's crossing the line a lot if I snuck into her house or something, but, you know, I could go invisible and pass her a note."
