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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.)
One of the queen's attendants crosses her arms and says firmly, "It doesn't matter if the sword is evil. I realise this is easy to forget for y'all stick jocks, but it is inappropriate to use a sword in the process of persuading a foster kid to come home."
Reynhard had indeed forgotten that. (In his defence, he thinks, it is appropriate in lots of situations for knights to have swords.)
"What does Lucy have that we're sure isn't evil?"
This question comes from one of the other knights, a man named Eustace from Sacred Stone.
"Her whole deal is innocence and honesty, right now. She's... good enough at it that we've been considering whether it's safe to give her purity and truth."
"She doesn't tolerate evil. Or anything she even vaguely thinks is evil, to the point where it's frankly often annoying and inconvenient."
"And the part where it might burn her to a crisp if she does decide to do something it doesn't like?" Elynor asks. She disapproves strongly of the level of danger that everyone seems to feel is appropriate for Lucy, though she stopped using Baronial power to intervene once Lucy made her own opinions on the topic quite thoroughly known.
Katherine was deeply, deeply annoyed by the revelation that their time had all been wasted by a girl pretending to be a game character. So she went to talk to Baroness Elynor, and then just as she was about to get into a conversation with the Baroness, Elynor was dragged away for some kind of emergency involving the kid running off into the woods. This did not make Katherine less annoyed.
Her mood was not improving, so she ended up going home before court and working on her weaving.
She's vaguely aware she's going to be in some kind of trouble if everyone decides that it's her fault that the kid ran off, and she knows better than to try and engage with that while she's still furious. If people yell at her when she's feeling this fiery, she'll just yell right back. So she sits at her loom and immersed herself in the peace of the tapestry slowly coming together until she's finished half the image and her hand cramps up, and then she checks her phone.
That's... about the number of missed calls she was expecting, honestly.
She's looking at her messages with Reynhard first, when another notification comes in from Raoulin.
> What game was that you said you recognised her from?
Irritation, just beaten back, floods her mind again. She sighs deeply and types back:
> fucking PATHFINDER, like she didn't expect us to recognise that??
> Yes, I am very certain
> Sorry Katherine, all of us make mistakes sometimes, I'm sure I've made worse
Pathfinder characters do not come to life. Pathfinder isn't even a game that makes any sense! People don't all run at the same speed and people don't just randomly trip up on one in twenty attempts at anything and magic isn't classified into neat tiers that you get more of through killing monsters somehow being a specific kind of experience capable of upgrading your soul. 5e isn't actually any better on those fronts but at least 5e makes any sense to her at all and doesn't require a character sheet that looks like someone at work got really overexcited trying to merge Excel spreadsheets into one another. PATHFINDER characters do not come to LIFE.
If Iomedae is telling the truth, somehow, then Katherine owes her.... a huge apology.
She imagines briefly being transported to an alternate universe where she's confused and doesn't speak the language and nobody's ever heard of a computer and they don't know how to help her, and adopted into foster care, and taken to a reenactment event that was a lot like Earth - oh, god, Iomedae must have felt like the SCA was her first dose of relative normalcy ever since she arrived - and then expressing that she was also from Earth and being immediately mocked because Earth isn't real - oh, god, if that was how she found out that the event was not her finally stumbling across some normal people but was instead a play by people who thought her world was purely fiction -
The virtue of courtesy is not her favourite value but it's also not one she likes failing at quite this horrendously, right in front of Sir Raoulin Constant, who is being really unreasonably generous and that makes her feel so much worse -
And Iomedae ran away right after their conversation which means it probably really is Katherine's fault.
With shaking hands, she pockets her phone and goes to look for her car keys.
Yeah, she doesn't really need to text him back, Raoulin has figured out the answer.
Haley's brother Aleksei DMs a pathfinder game, Raoulin's pretty sure. He's heard Cináed mention it. Now just to figure out.... huh.
Iomedae and Haley's tracks turn round and head back to site.
Jenny has left a voicemail for the social worker and is fretting over whether to call the police again. "It's just so unlike her," she complains worriedly at either Nicole or the car window. "I don't understand."
"What kind of things does she like?" asks Nicole, whose voice is beginning to actually turn hoarse. She's craving some of that ginger sharbat that her herald friend makes or maybe some sekanjabin. After they'd tried yelling Iomedae's name in enough fields, they started stopping and knocking on the door of various farms to ask the farmers if they'd seen anything - except of course the farm where Iomedae and Haley were hiding, which Nicole carefully avoids driving past.
"Favourite songs we could play, favourite foods to try the smell of? I realise it's treating her a bit like a cat, but we want her to know that we're not going to treat her badly or shout at her if she comes back, we'll just be very glad to have her home."