(Well, obviously it'd be illegal outside of Cheliax, normal countries are afraid to let people worship Asmodeus so they definitely wouldn't let people pray to him to take a baby's soul! Which is good, Asmodeus sucks, people shouldn't worship him.)

"Asmodeus is the god of — people who are strong or powerful or important being allowed to hurt anyone weaker than them as much as they want to, and everyone else acting like that's just their right. He's the strongest god — or, that's what his followers say, I think Pharasma might be stronger, but he's definitely pretty strong, he killed Aroden. Uh, Aroden was also a god, but he was a human first — that's why Asmodeus was able to kill him, because being part-human meant he could never be as strong as the proper gods. Asmodeus is in charge of Hell, and he's planning to take over the other afterlives someday, only I think he's not going to succeed, the Asmodeans think that if they tell everyone else they have to be Asmodean and hurt them for disobeying they'll all just go along with it but they're wrong." No matter how hard they try they can't stop people's souls from burning with the desperate need to make them pay. ...She's not going to be specific about that part, murder is probably still technically illegal here even if the person you killed really deserved it.

Well, "in charge of hell" sure settles the satanic cult question.  The rest is somewhat confusing, but what would you expect of a weird cult out in the woods, really? 

Assuming any of this is true.  She might still be making it all up and just like hand-making clothes and collecting weird objects.  But it really seems like they should check.

"That's an awful cult. We don't allow that sort of thing here. Can you tell us where all this was happening?"

It's good that they don't allow it but it also means she needs to be really careful not to admit to breaking their laws, which is hard, she still doesn't know what exactly the laws are. 

"The Asmodeans are in charge of the whole country of Cheliax, except for a couple provinces, only no one here has heard of any of the towns I know of so I think — either they're called something really different here or I traveled in time or something. I'm from Sofrituró but there's also Dekarium, Egorian, uh, Westcrown... Ostenso... uhhhhh.... Cor... Cor-something. Coritum or something like that. And lots of places I don't know the name for, obviously — Sofrituró's just a farming village but the others are bigger, everyone in Cheliax knows about Egorian, and I'd have thought everyone in all the nearby countries would too. ...And I didn't walk that far from home so I should still be in Cheliax, but I'm not." Because Cheliax definitely would have put her to death by now, or at least started to.

"You're not in Cheliax because Cheliax is made up.  You grew up in some kind of horrible cult compound out in the woods, where they worship the devil and do evil rituals and hurt people and pretend everywhere's like that, I have no idea how they managed that but we're going to find them and stop them and that'll be it."

"Unless," adds the other man, "you made it all up.  If you did, you're going to be in a lot of trouble when we find out, and we will, so you should just tell us before we spend a lot of effort looking and get really annoyed.  Is that what happened?  We know children like to make things up sometimes."

Well, she's not making things up — or she's not making up all of Cheliax, at least — but she's kind of worried they'll go out in the woods and look and not find anything because she's from thousands of years in the future or something. But she keeps trying to explain that to people and it keeps not working. (Or possibly this is just an excuse to punish her either way, but in that case there's not much she can do about it.)

If they do manage to find them, and put the priests and lords and men who force themselves on women to death, obviously that would be good, she'd love for that to happen, just ... well, it depends on what exactly happened to get her here. Maybe it'll work! Even if it won't, she's not going to claim she was lying about Cheliax when she wasn't, that would be stupid! It'd be pretty stupid even if she were lying about everything, no one's going to believe the 'just confess and we'll hurt you less' thing.

(Is it possible Cheliax just made up a whole country? She's never been very far from home before, but her mom's been to Egorian — or, she could have been lying about that, but she's met other people from faraway places too, not a lot of them but enough that it can't just have been her lord and his lands. And some of the things Cheliax said don't really make sense if it was all just a village, like there's no reason to even admit to Andoran province unless it's real. And Ms. Wójcicka didn't seem to believe in magic at all, which is definitely real, but maybe she was just stupid? Cheliax could've been smaller, maybe, a county or even just a barony rather than a whole kingdom... though that doesn't explain the map... but maybe she just read it wrong, only she'd need to have read it really wrong to end up that confused.)

"No!! ...I think it can't have been just my village, we did get people visiting from outside occasionally, but I guess I don't know if it was a whole country like they said."

If any of this is real then the visiting people were also lying, but - no point in trying to dig into it, it's really easy to lie to children and easy for children to get confused even if nobody's lying to them.

What they do dig into is the location - they try having her point out where it might be on the map, but they don't really believe in her ability to orient while walking either (people are generally terrible at that even if they're not confused teenagers), so they end up just wanting a detailed description of all her days of travel, to get some idea of how far she might have gone and whether there are any recognizable landmarks.

After they get as much information out of her as they have the patience for, there's a lecture about The Knife Incident.

"So, we're going to go look for this horrible place of yours, and if these people exist they're going to rot in jail.  But in the meantime you're out of there and in the normal world, where nobody's trying to hurt you, and you shouldn't stab anyone.  All right?  The doctor was doing his job, they need the blood samples to check stuff, they do it to me every year.  And anyone else who's doing something you find confusing and scary is probably also just doing their job and you really shouldn't stab them.  Got it?"  He really has no idea how to convincingly explain that you... shouldn't stab people for random things... and feels like he's probably not doing a great job, but maybe the orphanage people can do better.

... And yes, in addition to being something she really shouldn't do again, the stabbing was already a serious crime, but...  The orphanage director really doesn't want this whole thing public, and he's good friends with the police commissioner.  The doctor doesn't want her charged - "Well, I was trying to steal her blood, and really it's my own fault, letting a teenage girl get the drop on me like that" - and honestly yeah, the policeman thinks, if he got stabbed by someone looking like that he wouldn't want it written about in newspapers either.  And anyway, they can't hold any kind of sensible trial until they know whether the whole satanic cult thing is real, because if it is then it's barely even her fault and they don't want to have to drag her through the courts twice, so... everyone just agreed to put it all off until they have a better idea of what's going on.  She's in the orphanage's charge and they know what's up with her now, they're not going to let it happen again, and they're the right people to deal with this sort of situation in the first place.

She will cooperatively talk about all the different places and landmarks she can remember. There was the part where she got yelled at for drinking out of a lake, and the part where she got totally turned around, and the part where she walked in a river, and the torture devices in the woods, and — she's going to skip all the stealing food and most of the trespassing, but she'll mention the house she had to run away from, it was made of the weird rocks they have around here, there wasn't anything like that in Cheliax. (And a couple people saw her, so if the guardsmen go back to look, they might find out she was there anyway.) She remembers most of the trip, and it's only a little bit out of order.

...When she's coming up with her fake route out of Sofrituró she'll make it sound like she went by the manor where she grew up. (Maybe it'll get her killed, if it sends the guardsmen there when they wouldn't have gone and they put all the pieces together, but it probably also makes it more likely she can make the priest and all the rest of the nobles pay. She was focused on getting her revenge on Guifré, but it's not hard to remember all the things the rest of them ought to pay for, and the possibility that they might just all get away with it, if she's thousands of years in the past or something, keeps pressing up against the edge of her ribcage like she'd somehow swallowed a hot coal.)

She is perfectly willing to promise the guardsmen she won't stab anyone else. (This is a really easy promise to make. She doesn't have a knife, so she couldn't anyway, and if she does get another knife and end up in a scenario where she's willing to die for stabbing someone, she can just break the promise.)

They make a variety of faces at the torture devices and the weird flat rocks, but, well, they already know she's strange.  It... can be someone else's job to explain to her why she shouldn't drink raw lake water.  Asking what she was eating this whole time can also be someone else's job, they really have enough to deal with here. 

... Nobody particularly wants any of it to be their job, it turns out. 

"She gets violent about completely random things, we can't put her with any of the other kids, and I'm not exactly enthusiastic about being alone with her either."

"Well we can't exactly keep her locked up the basement!"

"There's that one guy in a village somewhere?...  Maybe he'd manage not to freak her out with anything random..."  Or at least if he does it's not going to be their problem, nobody adds.

(Honestly most of them aren't very clear on how the director ended up making friends with that one guy in a village somewhere who will just occasionally take in a kid they have no idea what to do with and somehow calm them down.  But gift horses and all that, and anyway nobody's sure if it's the sort of thing you shouldn't ask questions about, so they don't.)

And so the director ends up making a phone call to that one guy in a village somewhere.  Or more specifically a phone call to the village police station, one of the few places there that has a phone.  The policeman on duty says he can go and get Marek from his place so they can talk, but he'd really rather do it tomorrow morning, is it urgent? 

Well, no, not really, it's too late in the day to have the conversation and get the girl on the train, so they might as well do it tomorrow.  Leaving them to find some reasonable way to deal with her overnight, but one night locked in the basement surely isn't that bad, if she's been sleeping in random barns anyway...

Aneta comes by, with one of the men standing outside in case of any more random violence.  "We'll figure out what to do with you tomorrow, but here's a blanket and a sandwich."  And an old foam camping mat and a jug of lukewarm tea, as it turns out.  "Are you going to be all right til morning? Need the bathroom or anything? Have any questions?"  She doesn't exactly sound encouraging of questions or happy about the situation, but she's not angry with Agnieszka specifically, just grouchy about the entire mess.

She's been here for hours and hours and they took her waterskin, she doesn't need a bathroom. (She is pretty thirsty by now, but it looks like they have a pitcher of... watered down beer, or whatever that is... so she should be fine.) She does have some questions, but even if Ms. Wójcicka weren't making it really obvious that she's not actually supposed to ask them, a lot of them are things like 'have you decided you definitely won't torture me to death' (which she wouldn't really expect to get an honest answer to regardless) or 'have the guards managed to find the people back home' (which probably sounds suspicious if she actually time traveled), or questions about magic and the gods that Ms. Wójcicka won't know the answer to. 

"I'll be alright, ma'am." 

She lays out the little mattress and the blanket (wow, this is a lot nicer than the places she's been sleeping) and starts on the pitcher and the sandwich.

"All right, then."  A dubious look, but it's not as if she doesn't want to go home already.

In the morning someone else shows up with breakfast (and a continued absence of both torture and useful information), and in the meantime Marek Dąbrowski makes a phone call.  He's in a good mood, after the early morning walk and with the perspective of something to do.

"Good morning.  What can I do for you?"

"Thank you for calling me back.  We have a really... complicated case on our hands."  A sigh.  He really does feel bad about all this.  "Honestly I have no idea what we could do with her that won't turn into a disaster - and maybe you won't either, but I thought I'd ask you."

"I thought my life wasn't interesting enough this month.  What sort of disaster?"

"She, ah... stabbed one of the workers."

Well, that's obviously awful, and a bad sign about whatever's going on with her, but they both know that and it will help no one to dwell on it right now.  He can keep being cheerful - he's managed it for worse.  "Mm, and you want the next stabbing to be someone who's not your problem?"  A bit of a laugh.  "That's a reasonable start.  Do keep going."

He gets a summary of the whole maybe-horrible-cult-or-maybe-lying-or-possibly-crazy situation, and the details about the stabbing, oh and on top of that she has a broken leg...

"So, how about I go over there and make sure she wants to go back with me.  I don't expect this to go very well if she doesn't."

"Good luck getting her to have an opinion. She's the easiest and politest kid - honestly, it's kind of depressing - right up until the point where she's suddenly trying to murder everyone for no apparent fucking reason."

"The poor girl. It certainly sounds like she thinks something awful is happening. Well, I'll be there in a few hours, depending on how delayed the trains are today."

"Great.  We just won't do anything until you can talk to her."

"Mhm.  You are feeding her, right?"

"Yes, yes, get on the train and stop telling me how to do my job."

"I'll do that."

And so a few hours later there's the sound of the door being unlocked, and then a knock.

"Hello. Can I come in?"  An man's voice, unfamiliar.

She would really be a lot more comfortable with this if she still had her knife, but she's not really under the impression that she has much of a choice here. She scoots away from the door again, away from her sleeping mat. "Yes, sir."

They really did just lock her in a random empty basement room, didn't they.  He's not even sure they had a better option.

He sits down on the floor, on the other side of the small room from her and not blocking the door.  He doesn't quite smile at her, because she's not a child and they're strangers to each other in an unhappy situation, but he does seem more friendly and certainly less impatient than the other people she's met here so far.

"Good morning.  I'm Marek Dąbrowski, and... honestly I'm not sure where to start."  He can't very well start by proposing that a sixteen-year-old girl who might have no idea what's happening go home with him.  "Do you want me to try to explain what I'm doing here, or do you want to first tell me what's going on with you, so I have a better chance of making sense?"  It would help, if she was one of those kids who really want to tell something to someone remotely friendly-sounding.

She'd rather he explain first, but it really seems like he's implying she should go first. 

"I'm from — I thought I was from Cheliax, from a little farming village called Sofrituró, which was ruled by Asmodeans who made everyone worship Asmodeus. Uh, Asmodeus is the Lawful Evil god of powerful strong people being allowed to do whatever they want to weaker people and everyone pretending like that's a good thing. I always knew that was wrong, but most people agreed with them, so I had to pretend like I agreed with them even though I didn't.

A few days ago I ran away from home, to try and get to some other country, and then — somehow I wound up in... Poland? Europe? — and no one here had ever heard of Cheliax or Sofrituró or any of the gods I know of, even the ones like Erastil that I'd've thought people would worship everywhere. And I broke my leg and got taken to a doctor and then I met another woman who had me look at a bunch of maps, and then she brought me to the big city here and the orphanage, and then another doctor — uh, and she had me look out the train for anyplace I recognized but there weren't any. And the guards thought probably the people back home were just lying about whether Cheliax was a whole country but I'm not sure, I think maybe I went back in time, or I'm in a faerie kingdom, or something. —Uh, that's a bit ahead of things. Anyways. 

So yesterday, when I went to the second doctor, he said he needed to look at my blood, and I thought he might be going to steal it to do Evil rituals, so I made him promise to keep it where I can see and give it back after, but then he hid it. So I tried to" stab him, and she can't pretend that she didn't, but she can choose how she talks about it "get it back, but he took my knife and had me shut up in here, and some guards came to talk to me about where I grew up, and they left me here, and right now they're trying to figure out whether to torture me to death."

She squints at him. He's dressed in the same sort of weird clothes everyone else is, and he's tall like a nobleman — or really like most of the men here. The obvious reason he might be here is if they brought him in to cast a truth spell, but she's not sure if she's actually supposed to guess.

That's so many things.  She sounds like she means it, but he knows he can't really tell.  It doesn't matter that much, from his perspective - he's not the police looking for a hidden cult in the forest.  He's dealing with a clearly scared and confused girl, and he thinks she needs to be taken seriously even if her story isn't true.

He looks visibly upset at her last words, but controls his expression before speaking, makes his voice calm.

"...I'm really confused, and you're probably even more confused than that.  But - nobody's going to torture you to death.  That's not something that happens here."  ...She's very confused and she's not a child - he needs to be clearer than that about what he is and isn't claiming.  "Of course it's not that it never does, in the entire country.  But it's a grave crime and a mortal sin.  There's nothing about you that sounds like anyone could possibly want to do something like that."  Of course she won't just believe him, if she's really afraid of it, but that's no reason not to explain it as well as he can.  Although it's not easy, really, to explain why he thinks something won't happen when it would've never occurred to him to consider it in the first place.  He gives her a searching look, wondering if he's getting through at all, or if she's just going to - not unreasonably, really - ignore any large claims by people she has no reason to trust.

"I'm sorry nobody told you anything.  But I don't think it even occurred to any of them that you might be afraid of something like that."

That's not something that happens here.

...That sounds like it's obviously a lie? Good countries still need some way to punish people for crimes, they're not going to execute people for worshipping gods that aren't Asmodeus too much but that still leaves lots of crimes that basically any country would punish people for. *...Maybe Lastwall wouldn't, if what she's heard about Lastwall ensorcelling everyone to follow Iomedae is true, but clearly they didn't ensorcel her not to stab people.) Even somewhere that hardly executed anyone and just sent lots of people to hard labor for the rest of their life would still need a way to punish people who did more crimes after that. 

Of course it's not that it never does, in the entire country.

That could be true, it wouldn't be that surprising if some places torture people to death for murdering a bunch of people but not just for trying to stab someone more important than they are.

But it's a grave crime and a mortal sin.

No, now she's confused again. It's a serious crime and... an Evil deed that kills you? That definitely can't be right, people don't die just from torturing other people to death. An Evil deed, but only if you're a mortal? That doesn't make sense either, no one thinks it's wrong for mortals to torture people to death but fine when devils do it. An Evil deed but only if you do it to a mortal? That could be it, maybe, no one thinks it's wrong for Evildoers in Hell to get tortured, except then they're still claiming they never torture criminals to death, and that seems really unlikely! Maybe they... think she's more likely to admit to crimes if she thinks they won't punish her as much for them, or something, except she'd have to be really stupid to just assume they were definitely telling the truth. She doesn't actually think she can pretend to be that stupid and be believed, even if it would make them more likely to trust her.

"...What sorts of things do they do to people who break the law here?"

That's a fair question.  And a good sign that she's asking him anything.

"Mostly prison.  About ten to twenty years for murder, fewer for assault, even fewer for theft.  For minor things you just have to pay money.  We do theoretically have the death penalty, but nobody's been executed for the last five years," he did look this up, when his father went to prison, and periodically still checks, "and it's only for particularly awful cases of murder and treason.  And it was a quick execution, when it was still done.  Nobody gets legally tortured, to death or not."  Legally.  No doubt all sorts of things happen in prisons, sometimes, but that's really not relevant to her.

"... All of this being for adults. Sixteen-year-olds can't get sentenced to death at all, and can't get sentenced to prison for almost anything. There are youth correctional facilities, where they try to teach you to do better and let you go when you're 18, but what's going on right now is that nobody really wants you to end up in one."

Why... would they just keep people locked up for a couple decades... and then let them out again. That doesn't make any sense?? What would even be the point??? It especially doesn't make sense for murder, obviously people who murder innocent people should be executed, but it doesn't really make sense to have to keep someone in prison for years and years rather than just cutting off their hand or something. It feels like he has to be making things up but she doesn't have any idea why he'd make up something that obviously fake-sounding.

Also he left out whippings and she know they do those, she already saw. ...Maybe they let people choose between getting whipped and paying money, and so rich people never have to get whipped? That would be... kind of messed up, actually, people shouldn't have the right to get out of being whipped just for being rich... but a totally normal thing for a country to do, as opposed to randomly locking people up for years instead of just giving them a normal punishment.

Also sixteen-year-olds are adults but she guesses it's not that weird if other countries count some other way.

She really doesn't see why anyone else would care about her ending up in a 'youth correctional facility' but that makes sense as a lie, if he's just trying to trick her into confessing to things. Probably it means he can't do a truth spell, if he can do a truth spell he could just check.

She nods. "And you're here to... decide if I need to go to one anyway?"

He indeed cannot do a truth spell, and isn't taking any remotely magic-looking actions.  He looks rather nonthreatening, sitting on the floor like that, for all that he's tall and strong and could quite clearly be threatening if he wanted to.

"Not quite.  All right, let me backtrack a little."  It's really impossibly awkward to ask a sixteen-year-old girl to come live with him, especially when she doesn't seem to understand how anything works.  "Normally you'd just stay in the orphanage, and it'd probably be fine.  It's a decent place, just crowded and understaffed.  But you stabbed someone, and for reasons that don't make sense to anyone here, so they don't think they can trust you not to do it again.  Not that they really think you would, but - you might, they can't be sure, and if you did it would be their fault.  So they can't have you unsupervised, and as you can see," a gesture around the empty basement room, "they're really not set up for guarding people."

"The correctional facility is set up for guarding people, but - it's also full of children who stabbed someone, or who have a habit of stealing things, or who otherwise can't behave well.  It's not a good place," he looks unhappy about this, "and you probably wouldn't do well there.  It's just that you're really very strange, and nowhere is set up for kids like that.  So - I've had a few children from the orphanage live with me, for a while, when they were having trouble here.  It was good for them.  The director asked if I'd take you in, and - you're old enough that I wanted to ask you.  So, what do you want to know?"

...She would really feel a lot better about going with a strange man if she still had a knife, but she's pretty sure there's no way to ask for her knife back without making them think she's going to stab someone.

"Why do you, uh, want kids to live with you?"

A wry smile.  Yes, that one's a good question, and most people think he's odd for it.  "I like the company, but mostly it's just - I like to help people.  To feel like I'm doing something useful.  And this is easy for me - there's room enough in the house, I have the time.  I ended up with the sort of life it's easy to fit more people into."