The vast majority of rifts connected to this entity are very, very bad for the person who happens to pass through them, if they can even be said to be the same person anymore.

This one is... fine? A little temporal displacement, a few tiny language related changes, absolutely no trapping Asmodia in her own personal pocket dimension or transforming her into a four-dimensional monster or flipping around her values.

And now she is somewhere else.

She comes out the other side of the wood. She... kind of thought it was bigger? It's not like she's ever been all the way to the other side, though.

What does she see?

Some sort of... castle?  Fortification?  It's shaped like a fortification, but the main part of it has too many windows to make sense as one.  It's built of red brick, two stories tall, with crenellations on top.  The windows do have iron bars in them.  Past it, clearly in the center of the area surrounded by the long curved wall-building, is a giant grassy mound, much taller than the walls, with a path going up around it and nothing but a small pole on top.

She's going to veer away from the maybe-fort, aiming for the other side of the mound in the hopes that it'll make her at least a little harder to see.

The edge of the forest is strangely close to the walls, so she should be able to stay a little hard to see as she goes around it, if she opts to do it through the trees rather than on the pretty path with flowerpots on the sides.  The maybe-fort transitions into a more normal wall; outside it there are some complicated wooden beam structures with chains attached to them in various ways.  If she goes around all that, she can see the mound is surrounded by a nearly full circle of fort and walls, with some additional brick structures attached, and there's a weirdly smooth stone road going up to it.  Down the road in the direction away from the maybe-fort there are some smaller buildings visible through the trees; nothing is particularly visible through the trees surrounding the structure in the other directions.

It's mostly pretty empty; there's a man in a black uniform walking from one entrance to another.

Does it seem like he's noticed her yet?

He could have theoretically seen her in his peripheral vision, but probably not, if she didn't go out into the open?  He's not acting like it, anyway.  He goes in the door and closes it, and now there aren't any people visible outside.

Well, if he saw her, it's too late to change that. She'll keep moving, trying to move quickly enough to make good time but not so quickly that she couldn't just be in a hurry for normal reasons. She continues to steer clear of the buildings as much as she can.

She can cross the road and go back into the trees.  If she keeps veering into the forest whenever she reaches an edge, she'll still run out of forest in about an hour.   Now there's a stretch of fields, with some crops more familiar-looking than others, and the occasional scattering of houses in the distance.

Also the sun is getting close to setting, and it's doing it more ahead of than behind her.

...She was trying to go east. She's not really sure how she managed to get turned around, she's only even been walking for a few hours. Has she somehow spent her whole life being wrong about which way east is — no, she's seen the sun set before—

Probably she should try to figure that out tomorrow. For now, is there anywhere that looks like an even slightly reasonable place to sleep, assuming she doesn't want to risk the houses?

Is a stand of trees between some fields a reasonable place to sleep?  It's cloudy and looking like it might rain, but it's not very cold, so it probably can't go too badly.  Or if she's willing to get closer to the houses, she could try sneaking into a barn and have a roof over her head.

A barn would probably be better if she can manage to get into one without being noticed, if she's just lying out in the open it'll probably be easier for anyone who's chasing her to see her. (...And she'd rather not get rained on, that too.) How close would she have to get to the houses to sneak into a barn?

If she's picky about it, she can find one that's on the far end of a big courtyard, looks pretty unused, and she can crawl in through a half-missing board in the back instead of having to go anywhere within view of the house.

It's full of... things.  Some of them make sense, shovels and buckets and so on, and some are very large complicated spiky metal shapes.

...Well, now she's kind of worried that the local priest stores his torture implements in a barn for some reason, but probably she's more likely to get caught if she finds a different barn.

She finds whichever part of the barn looks most concealed, eats some of the bread she stole from back home, and then curls up very small with her rucksack next to her and tries to sleep.

They're pretty dusty and don't smell like blood at all, so if they're torture implements they're not the ones he uses every week, at least.

She gets woken up by the rooster crowing, as they generally do on a farm.  Unless she's used to sleeping through that, in which case she gets woken up by something making a confusing and unpleasantly loud noise, out in the courtyard.

She's sleeping pretty lightly, under the circumstances, and wakes up when the rooster starts crowing. If she peers out through the missing board does it seem like she can get back out again without being noticed?

Yes - nobody seems to be up with the sun, or at least not out in the fields yet. 

Alright, in that case she's going to get out of here. Can she tell for sure which direction the sun is rising from?

The clouds have half cleared up, and the sun is its usual amount of obvious!

Does it look like she's going to be backtracking straight through the woods, or something more complicated than that? She's really not sure how she managed to get turned around, but maybe if she's got the sun right here it'll be easier to figure out where to go. If Andoran province is even to the east, which maybe it isn't, it's not like she has any way of knowing besides what the Asmodeans said.

Approximately backtracking, yes.  Woods to the east, fields interspersed with some trees in all the other directions, not that she can see very far.

Now that she thinks about it, she's not actually sure backtracking is a good idea. It'll get her closer to Andoran, probably, but depending on how exactly she got lost she might just end up walking back home, which would be a lot worse than just not being to Andoran yet. What if she heads... north, north should be safe for now unless she somehow ended up exactly south of home, and it won't get her closer to Andoran but it won't get her further from it either.

North it is!  Fields, with the occasional person in them but rare enough to be easily avoided - it's neither sowing season nor harvest.

There's a... ??dragon?? in the sky??  It's really loud!

Why is there a dragon????

Is there anywhere she can hide from the dragon? She doesn't think it's looking for her, she's not important enough to be worth sending a dragon after, but she'd still rather it not notice her.

She can flatten herself in this wheat and hope it'll cover her (it won't do a great job of it), or dive a few steps into the bushes.

Whichever she picks, the dragon goes on its very loud way quickly enough.

Oh good. In that case she's going to head off again.

She has to cross one of those weirdly smooth stone roads (there's a wire strung along it on poles, but it's much too high to work as a fence).  In less than an hour she ends up on a slight grassy hill where she can see more of the surrounding terrain:  a cluster of villages ahead, a small lake and some bushes to the east, a very flat field with a tower next to it to the west.

Also the ??dragon?? is flying over again, closer than last time.

She can't hide from a dragon up here, so she'll have to just hope it doesn't notice her.

Her waterskin is getting pretty low by this point, so she veers towards the lake. (She's heard that pure water can make you sick if it doesn't come from a priest, but it's not like she can just ask a priest for water, so... hopefully that was just something the Asmodeans made up so that everyone would think they needed the priests around?)

The dragon once again flies away without appearing to take any notice of her.

She has to route around some houses, and part of the lake is fenced off for some reason, but if she doesn't want to jump a fence she can find a part that isn't.  It's all surrounded by reeds and hard to get to any clear-looking water though.  There are a few small wooden piers that would make that easier, but there's a man fishing off one of them and within clear view of the other two.

Well, that's not great. Can she tell anything about the man from where she's standing? A regular farmer might not turn her in, especially if he assumes she's got a legitimate reason to be traveling. 

He's wearing weird clothes - they're just cut completely differently from what she's used to, and there's something odd about the fabric too, and his shirt and hat are brightly colored in a way you wouldn't expect a regular farmer to be able to afford.  But then again, most of the people she's seen here were wearing weirdly bright things.  Except the black-uniformed man near the castle.  This guy here is clearly not wearing a uniform, at least.

He's old, his hair mostly grey, and acting pretty much like a normal farmer?  He looks kind of bored, isn't particularly alert.  He has some bags and baskets arranged like he's been here for a while.  Occasionally he takes a drink from a glass bottle.

Old is good, if he decides to make an issue out of her being here she might be able to leave faster than he manages to tell anyone. She'll head over to whichever dock is farthest from the one he's on and fill up her waterskin.

He watches her for a moment, frowning vaguely. 

"Good morning!  What're you doing with that water?"  He has to shout a bit because of the distance, but he doesn't sound annoyed or look like he's about to move from where he's sitting.

That's a really weird question, it's not like there are lots of different reasons for people to dip their waterskin in a lake. It's going to really suck if it turns out that the local lord has forbidden people from drinking from the lake on pain of death or something.

"Filling up my waterskin!" she shouts back.

(He will hear her speaking Polish.)

"Your what?"  Confused squinting.  "You know you shouldn't drink that, right?"

"This is my first time passing through this village, where do people around here get water to drink?"

Probably the answer is 'from the priest' but if he tells her to talk to the priest she can just pretend she's going to and not actually do it.

"From... the tap?  Or the well, I guess, if they haven't got a tap.  But if you want water to drink right away you gotta buy mineral at the store.  Your parents not teach you that?"

What's a tap? ...The priest here makes people pay for water?

Probably that's less important than figuring out how to answer his actual question without sounding incredibly suspicious.

"I'm not from around here, we didn't have a lake back home." She's pretty sure there aren't that many lakes in the area, so it shouldn't contradict anything else about her story, and she already admitted she wasn't local.

"It's not about--" he makes a frustrated noise and gives up on explaining the multiple levels on which one should know not to drink unboiled lake water.  "Where are your parents, anyway?  Or your teachers or whoever you're here with?"

"I'm sixteen," she lies.

"Sure, fine, and you're doing what exactly?"

"I've got business at the markets in Dekarium." That one she did have planned in advance.

... He doesn't know where that is, but he's not going to admit that to the weird stranger girl.  Sounds far away, though.  Maybe she's foreign?  She doesn't sound foreign, but what does he know.  And the airport is right there.

"Well, go get your train or whatever, and don't drink fucking lakewater!"

He turns back to his fishing, but looks over at her again a moment later.

Well, in that case she's going to leave, and hope he doesn't decide to tell the priest on her.

He doesn't look to be about to do anything any time soon. 

Where does she go next?

She's heading north-ish again, heading a little bit east to avoid the village if necessary.

...If she just eats the food she brought with her she's going to run out pretty quickly. Is there anything growing around here that looks like she could just eat it, without needing to do a bunch of extra work to it that'll slow her down? Like, apples or something, she's not going to start eating random plants she doesn't recognize.

Avoiding villages is getting increasingly hard, but the first problem with going north is that there is a large road with... fast noisy incomprehensible things... going along it, not constantly, but frequently enough to be kind of frightening.  There's a stream that the road goes over - she could go in it and under the bridge, if she doesn't want to get too close to the things?

Before that area there are some fields with young corn at the stage where it's pretty edible raw.  (You can kind of eat young wheat too, and there's more of that, but it's really a lot of work.)  No apple trees or anything of that sort around here.

Alright, in that case she'll take some young corn when no one's looking and head on her— what the Abyss are those??? She didn't know ??constructs?? like that even existed.

Well, she's definitely not going anywhere near the weird constructs. Going in the stream also seems like a bad idea, though, she doesn't have another set of clothes if these ones get wet. Is there room under the bridge to squeeze past the stream without actually getting wet?

It'll be a tight fit, but she can squeeze through the bushes on the bank where they go under the bridge.  (It won't be great for her clothes, but at least they'll be dry.)  The stream is also very small, she could take her shoes off hike and her clothes up to her knees and just get her feet muddy.

Either way, the ??constructs?? zoom past noisily and leave her alone. 

The little stream keeps going north, and following it makes her life easier - there's really rather a lot of villages here, one on the right before the big road and another one after, and a large one on the left, but they leave the stream with enough empty grassy space that she can walk along it and not have to get too close to any houses.  (Maybe it floods sometimes?)

It gets worse after about an hour's walk - a road along the west side of the stream, then another on the east side, and then a place with two big road-bridges going over it and some large buildings next to them.  Does she want to risk getting through there, or backtrack a while to the stripe of forest that went from the east to the west?

... One of the bridges has an even worse ??construct?? curving over it, like some kind of giant and disturbingly fast metal millipede, making a truly incredible racket!

Oh, if it's shallow enough that she isn't going to get her clothes wet, walking in the stream is probably a good idea — it'll be harder for anyone to follow her if she's not leaving a trail. ...She thinks. 

How late is it when she gets to the big buildings? Would she even have time to make it back to the forest without it getting dark?

It's maybe a little after noon, or maybe not even that, and it'll be maybe half an hour to backtrack.  She hasn't gone very far, really, it's just that weird stuff keeps coming up and interrupting her travel.  This whole area is really surprisingly dense in weird stuff!

Alright, in that case she's going back to the wooded area. 

Sure!  And east or west from there?

East, but if she starts to recognize anything that looks like the area near her home she'll reconsider.

No, it's all pretty unrecognizable!  But it's not long before she comes out of the forest onto a grassy area that's pretty much surrounded by a village, with no way to get further east (or north or south, without backtracking west first) without either walking the village road where anyone can see her, or attempting to sneak between the houses.

How are the houses spaced? Does it seem like sneaking between them might actually work, or only if she gets really lucky?

Most of them are close-ish or have fences around the yards; she can find some reasonably sneakable-between pairs, 20-50 yards apart with unfenced bushes or trees between them.  But even if it's pretty likely to work for these individual houses, how likely is it that she can through the whole village like that?  Probably not very.

(Looking around does also find her some apples, although they're green and probably won't taste great.)

That's really annoying. If she backtracks far enough, can she just go around the whole village?

A couple hours' backtracking around the area shows that the forest+field area about a mile across is very solidly surrounded by the village-blob, with the only ways out being back south along the creek toward the farm she spent the night at, back the other way to the spot with the multiple big roads and bridges and buildings, or the band of forest going west where she hasn't been yet.

(Is that going to lead her to somewhere less weird and hard to get to?  Recent experiences point to no, but maybe it's just the right around here that's so annoying and if she picks the right heading she can get back to a more passable area.)

While she's coming to this conclusion just inside the edge of the forest, she gets hit by a pinecone from above.  (Unless she's pretty good at looking up into the trees, in which case she notices there's a boy sitting pretty high in one of them with a book, and can avoid the surprise if not necessarily the pinecone.)

Her heart starts racing as she realizes she's been spotted. Awfully nice of him to warn her he's spotted her, really, but she should get out of here quickly.

There's got to stop being weird big villages somewhere. She'll try heading west.

The boy cackles victoriously at her running away.

That turns out to be a better direction!  She can head more or less west, veering away from villages a few times, and not run out of forest until the sun starts to set.  (Of course she's not making as good time through the woods as she would walking along the road, but they're not too bramble-y or monster-infested or anything.)

Oh, that makes more sense, he wasn't warning her, he was being smug about how he's going to turn her in and get her killed. She picks up the pace, as much as she can in the woods, until he's well out of sight.

(she can't die here she can't die she can't)

Can she find a barn to sleep in overnight while the sun is setting?

It doesn't take her long to find the edge of another village, and there are plenty of barns, although none quite as convenient as last night's.  Rather a lot of these places have dogs which object to her sneaking around - in one of the houses someone comes out the door to see what the racket is about, but if she has any sense she's out of sight by then. 

Also-- are all these people lighting their houses with magic??  All the windows are so bright.

She can eventually find an abandoned-looking shed that's not very near anything, and doesn't even have creepy metal spikes in it.

A shed is fine. Maybe someone'll have their dogs track her down, but she's not going to get very far in the dark, so — she has to just hope that they won't, she guesses, and plan to do her best to fight back if they try.

She curls up with her rucksack and tries to sleep. It's longer before she manages it than it was last night.

It starts raining sometime in the middle of the night, pretty heavily.  The shed roof does not stand up to this very well.

She misses the torture barn, which is probably kind of pathetic. ...Also if her clothing soaks through she might catch a chill, which is an actual problem that isn't pathetic to care about. Is there anything in the shed that she can use to get more cover from the rain?

It's pretty empty - mostly there's some wooden planks and a couple of large rusty cans.  She can kind of prop up some planks against the wall at an angle to keep the worst of the leaks off her, but it's not going to keep her actually dry, just kind of soggy rather than soaking wet. 

If she catches a chill and dies it's not actually worse than getting tortured to death for the glory of Asmodeus. She curls up under the planks and tries to sleep. (It doesn't really work.)

The downpour gets less bad in an hour or two, but the morning is still grey and rainy.  It's not terribly cold, at least, but still a very unpleasant night.

Ugh.

If she tries to walk through the mud she's probably going to leave tracks, can she find any of the weirdly smooth roads?

Not that she can see from here - she's still pretty near the edge of the forest, and the couple of roads she saw were normal dirt.  Is she going to walk through the village looking for the weird stone ones?

No, that's probably even riskier. Hopefully anyone chasing her already lost her trail, she doesn't think people are just randomly going to start following her tracks if they aren't looking for her.

Back into the forest and west, then, or is she planning something else today?

(Also she's definitely hungry. And thirsty. And cold, but maybe walking will help with that.)

Ideally she'd find a well, but it sounds hard to do that without getting spotted.

...It's still raining a bit, can she fill up her waterskin that way?

Probably she could've done that by leaving it right under one of the big leaks overnight, but now it's not raining hard enough to fill anything up without finding something wide to collect the water and then waiting a long while.

... Some of the houses have metal gutter pipes that collect water from the roof - she could get a decent trickle from one of those if she wanted to risk getting that close to a house.

...She does not really want to risk that. She'll head back forest-wards, keeping an eye out for any water sources or edible crops that she passes along the way. Drinking lake water might be a bad idea, but it's probably not worse than not drinking any water.

Probably not!

She finds some old fruit trees near the forest edge.  About half an hour into the forest she finds a rock formation that has a small hollow filled with rainwater, and if she goes over to examine any other large rocks visible from her route she can find more.

Oh good. She fills up her waterskin and keeps moving. Heading... west, she guesses, and she'll just have to hope she was wrong about which way Andoran province is, or about which way west is.

She has to go around another village, then the forest runs out and she needs wait for a horrifying noisy construct to leave before she can cross some fields, but then there's more forest and she can have an uninterrupted, if still wet and unpleasant, several hours' walk through it.  Sometimes there are even trails going in the right direction, if she's willing to take those.  (Nobody else is out there hiking in the rain.)

She'll take them if they're the weirdly smooth kind but not otherwise, there's no reason to make things easier for whoever's chasing her.

They're pretty normal forest trails and not weirdly smooth at all!  Going through the forest with no path is slower, but not by that much, if she's used to it.

In the afternoon, when she comes to a clearing and happens to look up, there turns out to be a castle on a rocky hill looming really rather close by.

She's guessing that's the baron's. She'll backtrack a little bit so she can give it a very wide berth.

She can do that.  She needs to veer away from a village a couple of times, but doesn't run out of forest at any point, and soon ends up in what feels like a larger chunk of forest again, judging by how she's no longer running into villages.  Is she going to actively look for some when it's getting close to sunset?  How long in advance? 

It's gradually stopped raining, but it's still cloudy, and everything is still pretty wet.

She'll start looking for somewhere to sleep when it gets close to sunset, but it's a little hard to tell how close it is to sunset from under the trees, so she's getting kind of a late start. It doesn't have to be a village, a cave or something is also fine, as long as it has something resembling a roof. ...Ideally a roof that doesn't leak.

And it's too cloudy for it to be much of a sunset as opposed to a gradually-getting-darker, anyway, which doesn't help.

She's not going to have much luck with caves - she left the rocky part of the forest behind a while back, and is now in a very flat area.  She hasn't run into any villages yet either, and it's definitely getting dark now, but she can hear dogs barking from one direction?  That's probably going to be a village, right?

Well, it could be a village, or it could be hunting dogs for hunting down runaways, it's hard to know without getting closer. If she really can't find anywhere else to sleep, she'll head towards the barking with her knife out, prepared to run if she gets any indication whatsoever that it's a hunting party.

She can't find anywhere else to sleep unless she's interested in piles of leaves under fallen trees, which don't seem like much of a roof. 

... Yes, it's a village with some dogs getting annoyed at each other.  A kind of weird village though - no fields, and all the houses look pretty new, each one on a little plot of land with a fence around it, and really not much in the way of old barns.  This is going to make it hard to find a place to sleep here...

There's someone walking along a road with two leashed dogs - does that qualify as a hunting party?

Does it seem like they're looking for anyone, or following a trail, or anything, or literally just walking?

Well the dog seems to be following a trail?  But the man isn't paying much attention to it and tugs it away when he wants to follow the road and the dog doesn't.

That's... probably fine. She hopes. Or at least, more fine than hanging out in a forest would be. ...She's still going to steer clear of that road, though, if there's any other way to find somewhere to sleep.

If she investigates the edges of the weird village for a bit, she can find a house still under construction (made of weird large square grey kind-of-bricks-maybe) - an empty shell with walls and a roof, and just holes where the doors and windows will be.  Might make a decent place to sleep?

The lack of doors and windows isn't great, but at least it has a roof. It'll do, she hopes. She misses the torture barn.

It has walls dividing it into several rooms, so even without doors she can find a spot that's not visible from the outside, and out of the wind.

The floor is hard - the same weirdly smooth stone as the roads, maybe? - but it's dry.

Wow, this house is so big for a normal-person house. ...Probably because it isn't, that would explain why it's built out of the whatever-this-is. She'll see about arranging the edge of her rucksack to be a bit of padding between her and the floor. 

It's still really uncomfortable but it's kind of pathetic to care. At least she's not being rained on.

It's not comfortable, but it's dry, and after the previous awful night she's tired enough to eventually manage to fall asleep properly.

She's woken up by two male voices echoing inside the building, talking about incomprehensible construction details.

Can she tell where in the building they are? From what she remembers of the layout, is there a way out of the building without going past them?

It sounds like they're probably in the central hallway somewhere, but it's hard to tell where exactly, with the big place echoing like a particularly complicated cave.  If she comes closer to check - maybe they'll turn out to be past the room she's in and she'll be able to get out behind their backs, or maybe they're standing where they'll see her before she can be sure.

Does this room have anywhere to hide, or any way to leave without going in the central hallway?

Nowhere to hide at all.  There's a window hole in this room - it's near the hallway door rather than in the back where she is, so still a bit of a risk, but might be the best option she has.

In that case, she'll try climbing out through the window.

It's one of the windows that face the road rather than the forest.  A third man is walking up to the house, carrying some long wooden planks.

"Hey, what're you doing there??"

Rather than answering she's going to try to run away!

He drops his planks and goes after her, but she's clearly much more invested in this chase than he is, and by the time he reaches the house he gives up on running after her and looks in through the window she came out of to check the state of the room.

The other two show up at the noise, and the three of them end up having a loud and rather baffled-sounding conversation, but she probably doesn't stick around to try to listen to it from the forest edge?

She is absolutely not going to stick around! She is running the Hell away from here as fast as she can!

She doesn't hear any sounds of pursuit. 

After ten minutes or so of running she hits one of the big weird-stone roads with some constructs moving along it.

She really needs to hide her trail. Is there enough space on the weird stone road for her to run alongside the constructs?

In theory yes!  Depends on how she feels about getting really pretty close to the constructs.  They're all going straight and following the same path, so they don't look likely to run into her even if she does, they're just large and scarily fast.

She doesn't want to get close enough that they'll touch her, obviously, but last time they didn't try to chase her down and follow her, it doesn't seem like they've got minds of their own or anything. Still, she probably wants to head in the opposite direction from the one they're going in.

They're going in both directions, but all the ones close to her side of the road are going one way, if she wants to stay on this side and run in the opposite direction? 

Sure, she'll do that. If it seems like they're getting close to a fortress or a wizard tower or something she'll stop and cross the weird smooth road, her tracks should hopefully gone by then. Or as gone as she can get them, at any rate.

One of the constructs makes a sudden and really loud noise!

Change of plans, she's getting out of here before whatever reinforcements it just tried to call for show up! Can she cross the weird road without touching the constructs if she tries to run behind this one and then across? 

She can, they're not coming that densely. 

Alright, she'll do that, and then she'll sprint away from the road as fast as she can go.

There's a bit of trees, and another village right behind them.  Is she going to run through that, or go along the road in one direction or the other to avoid it?

Both options seem pretty bad, but unless it looks like anyone in the village is running out to the road to attack her she'll run through the village. Farmers are probably safer than whatever that construct was summoning.

The villagers look surprised, some frowning, but nobody threatens her.  And old woman shouts "The <something> left already!" at her as she runs past.

She's not really listening to them, she's trying to run as fast as she can.

She can only sprint for so long, though, depending on how big the village is her legs might start to give out before she can actually make it through.

It's not very big.  Five minutes of sprinting, and then she might want to veer off the (smaller but still weirdly smooth) road into the fields on one side or the other before she hits the next village.

Yeah, she'll head into the fields, veering in whichever direction looks easier for her to stay hidden 

Neither looks great, but east there's a band of some sort of bushes, only half her height but thick enough that she can at least hide in them if she stops and gets down.

Doesn't take long for the fields and bushes to change to forest, but if she keeps going east she'll just backtrack compared to yesterday.  Does she have a plan for the day besides staying hidden?

...Not really. She'll stop going east once she gets to the forest, though, and she'll try to keep an eye out for places she could sleep in the forest, rather than needing to risk a village again.

Some investigation of this particular patch of forest finds a forested route west again, if she wants to keep going that way.  (She could also go north and cross the big road back into the other forest, but she presumably doesn't want to do that, since she was seen there.)  It also finds a clearing with a large cross and a metal figure of a man hanging from it.

No places to sleep around here - it's still pretty wet and devoid of caves - but she has most of the day ahead of her if she wants to keep looking further out.

... She's done a lot of running after a sudden wakeup, hasn't been eating much, and is running out of water again.  She kind of wants to sit down on a fallen log and rest, even if it's wet and not at all a useful sleeping spot.

She forces herself to keep running until the — incredibly weird way of threatening people off breaking the law? Demon cult meeting place? Inexplicably metallic unquiet spirit? Whatever it is, it really doesn't seem safe — is out of sight. And she really should keep running, she can't afford to stop in the middle of the day for stupid pathetic reasons like the way her legs feel, but — maybe just for a couple minutes, and she can eat the last of her food, and then she'll get up and keep going. If they were going to catch her in the next few minutes she was probably doomed either way.

They do not catch her in the next few minutes. 

She runs through the forest for another hour, stumbling on the uneven ground and veering away whenever she sees fields or houses through the trees.  Sometimes there are trails, but they inevitably lead toward the edge, which is not what she wants at all, so even if she was willing to risk them they wouldn't do her much good. 

She nearly runs into another castle, because for some reason they let the forest grow almost up to the walls.  (Maybe it's abandoned?  It doesn't look in good repair, if she stops to look, but she probably doesn't.)

She is absolutely not stopping to look. She is getting away from this castle as fast as she can.

...It might not be very fast. She knows her legs can move faster than this but for some reason they aren't.

She trips on a root hidden in the undergrowth and falls, scraping her hand bloody against the sharp bit of a fallen branch. 

Ow!!!

She should... probably do something about that... but she doesn't really have anything to do it with. In school they wash off injuries with salt water, but she doesn't have very much water, or any salt. Can she find... a leaf or something... to at least wipe off some of the blood, so she won't be bleeding everywhere?

Plenty of leaves, yes, but new blood keeps welling up as she wipes it.  It's slow bleeding, not enough to be dangerous, but enough to mark her trail if she doesn't wrap it up in something absorbent.

She has her clothing and her rucksack and nothing else that would remotely qualify. She doesn't really like the idea of cutting up either of those, but it's better than leaving a trail of blood. She takes out her knife and cuts a strip of fabric from the top edge of her rucksack.

That works.  And then?

She wraps up her hand and attempts to keep going in the same direction she was going before.

She can do that.  She has to cross another road, but a smaller and currently empty one.  There's another big cross next to it, this one without anyone on it, with some containers of flowers underneath.

She's still pretty confused about the crosses but she's not inclined to stick around and try to figure them out. (Maybe they aren't even related? ...Maybe this cross is for actually executing people, and the other one was a threat?)

It does seem weirdly... nice?... with all the flowers, but yes, probably not the place to spend much time in. 

She crosses the small road and keeps going through the forest, although it's a pretty small bit of forest, given how often she has to bounce off villages on one side or the other. 

After a couple of hours there's a another small road and then a large stretch of sand covered with tracks that... were probably left by wheels even if they look uncannily like it may have been giant worms.  It stretches for a long while along the road, so she can't see from here how long it might take to go around.  There are trees on the other side, and a big sandy hill.

Well, that's really not great, but if there's no one else in sight she'll try to cross the sand area to the trees on the other side.

She leaves clear tracks in the sand, unsurprisingly. 

Past the trees there's a cliff looking down over a rather lovely view of a blue-green lake and more forest on the other side.  It would be pretty hard to climb down, but it looks like if she goes left there's a slope down to a rocky beach by the shallow side of the water - further that way there's another lake surrounded by trees.  To the right there are some constructs and people far off in the distance, on another large sandy stretch on that side of the lake - she can hear some muted noises, but they're busy doing their own incomprehensible things, and too far to be able to see her against the forest backdrop.

She'll go left down the slope and around the lake, then. She's mostly staying within the wooded area, but she'll duck out for a minute to refill her waterskin in the lake. (It'd be better if she could find a well or something, like the man at the other lake suggested, but it's hard to do worse than dying of thirst, and the water looks clean.)

It does look very clean, although it tastes off in a hard-to-define way.  But yes, it's better than dying of thirst.

Once she's filled up her waterskin she'll duck back into the treeline and keep moving past the lake.

There's another road soon after, and she has to search a little to find a place to cross it where it's not surrounded by houses, but after that there's more forest and she goes for a good couple of hours without running into any more villages, although it's still not a very deep forest and she crosses the occasional dirt path.  That brings her to midafternoon of this rather exhausting day.  She's not thirsty any more, but she's definitely hungry and tired, and generally not feeling very well.

She keeps an eye out for more apples, or anything else she can eat. Apart from that she can't really think of very much else to do. Offer extra prayers to Desna, maybe, she's not sure if Desna does 'helping travelers not starve' in addition to 'helping travelers not get attacked by monsters' but it can't hurt.

No apples or anything similarly straightforward in the forest.  She finds variously suspicious berries sometimes, but she probably knows eating those is a bad idea.  There's also plenty of acorns!  (She's probably heard that acorns can be edible, but she may have also heard that it's not entirely straightforward.)

She briefly considers taking some of the more familiar-looking berries in case someone catches her and she can't get away but decides against it. She doesn't really have a good way to keep them separate from everything else in her rucksack, and if she gets captured alive they'd almost certainly be able to stop her from eating them anyway.

If she goes long enough without passing any farms she might have to start looking for them instead of actively avoiding anywhere vaguely close to other people but her best guess is that that won't be a problem, she keeps running into them even when she's trying not to.

She does run out of forest before sunset, but the thing she runs into is another lake rather than a farm.  A huge one - she can see the other side but without any detail, and from where she's standing on the bank she can't tell how far it stretches in either direction, but it looks to be miles.  At least there's a road running along the shore, roughly north-south, and hopefully it leads somewhere.

She'd rather not backtrack if she can avoid it. She heads down the road, keeping a look out for anything she can eat and anywhere she can reasonably sleep.

Half an hour down the road the lake ends, and so does the forest, giving way to fields.  Most of them not immediately edible, but some searching does yield a stretch of corn just about when it's getting dark.

She'll take some corn, then, and plan to come back for more in the morning when she's eaten what she has. Is there any sign of shelter, ideally without any people? She's willing to take some extra risk of getting eaten by forest-beasts if it means that she definitely won't run into any humans. She hasn't even seen any forest-beasts.

This is another more newly-built area, with nearly all houses having fenced yards, and nothing in the way of abandoned sheds.  If she's willing to hop a fence she could sneak into a barn, or if she spends some more time looking she might be able to find another unfinished building?  These people do light their houses and even their streets bizarrely brightly, so looking around after dark is not as bad an idea as one would usually think.  But it's also been long enough since the rain that she can find a dry and decently comfortable patch of grass nearby.  (She's cold, but she'll be cold no matter where she ends up.)

She's definitely not going to risk an unfinished building after what happened this morning. If she can find a patch of grass with trees or corn or something around it to keep her out of view she'll go with that, otherwise she'll try to jump a fence and sneak into whichever barn is the farthest from any of the houses.

None of the barns are particularly far from the houses, is the problem.  But she can find a screened off patch of grass just fine, on the edge between a corn field and a patch of trees and bushes, a decent distance from the houses and roads.

It's not great, but she doesn't really expect to find anything better. She curls up in the little grass patch and tries to fall asleep.

She's woken up in the middle of the night by something poking at her rucksack.  It sounds like a large animal, but it's too dark to really see anything.

She forces herself to her feet and takes off into the patch of trees, or at least a direction that she's pretty sure has trees.

The large something chases after her!  

That direction does have trees, and shortly after that a precipice - not a very tall one, but between the darkness and the tangle of fallen branches at the bottom it's enough to break her leg.

(On the plus side the animal decides to stay on the top.)

OW OW OW OW OW

It hurts as badly as anything they ever did in school but she needs to find a way to keep running or she'll die. She tries to shove herself to her feet and it — doesn't work, it's not even just that it hurts, it won't work.

They're going to catch her and torture her to death and that will probably hurt more than this. If she leans her arm like that — no. If she sets down her sack first — no. If she tries to stand on the leg that hurts less — that works, for a second, and then she tries to take a single step and her other leg collapses under her, or something, she's not really sure what's happening except that it hurts a lot.

She's sobbing, which is stupid, it's not like that's going to help and someone might hear her.

Unless she gets really loud about it, nobody hears her until morning.

Not long after sunrise she can hear someone walking through the trees nearby.

She holds very very still and tries not to make any noise.

The trees aren't very thick here.  The girl, about her age, still nearly walks past her only a few steps away, but then a bird draws her eye in the wrong direction and she startles. 

"Hey! What-- did something happen to you?"  Asmodia does not exactly look all right.

Does that girl think she's stupid or something. No one is going to just admit to being basically defenseless. "I'm just heading to the markets in Dekarium, ma'am. I'll be on my way in a few minutes." 

(This would probably be more convincing if her leg were not visibly broken.)

The girl looks deeply confused, and isn't trying to control her expression at all.  Well, that or she's massively over-acting.  "Where?  Through the woods at sunrise?  Is your leg broken??"

"It's fine. I'm sure the priest'll be able to fix it right up once I'm home." Wait, what if the priests in other towns are less willing to fix up injuries and the girl thinks she's lying — too late now.

Judging by the girl's face there was definitely something odd about this sentence.

"Uh.  Home being where?"

(they're going to kill her—)

"Sofrituró," she lies.

"I have no idea where that is," she looks suspicious now, instead of just confused, "and you sure aren't going to get there like this.  I'm going to go get a doctor."  She backs away a few steps, watching the strange girl like she's not sure what she might do.

No, seriously, does that girl think she's stupid, even if there were somehow someone who actually wanted to help out a random stranger in the woods they wouldn't get a doctor, everyone knows doctors are useless — actually, maybe the priests are just lying about that? So that everyone thinks they have to go to them for healing? But either way, this girl is Chelish too, it's not like she'd know either.

She nods. Maybe once the girl leaves she can figure out how to get out of here, somehow.

The girl goes and - well, first she goes and tells her dad about the weird probably-Gypsy girl with a broken leg in the woods, and her dad explains the doctor is probably too busy to come out to the woods, doctors don't really do that unless someone's dying, and besides it'd take forever, so really what they should do is just get her to the clinic, except... how exactly are they going to do that... Really it seems like police business, almost, except the station is way further than the doctor so that's not going to do any good... All right, how about first she takes him over there and shows him what's going on, this sounds pretty weird and he'd rather get a look at this supposed girl before he does anything else.

They're back in about fifteen minutes.  The girl can't find the right spot immediately, and yells "Hey, are you there?"

She has managed to scoot about twenty feet from where she was by using her arms to slide herself across the ground. Probably this was bad for her leg but the alternative is getting tortured to death sooner or later, so. 

She doesn't say anything. Maybe if the girl can't find her she'll just give up?

She does not give up, although her dad is starting to sound like he might by the time they find her. 

He stares at the stranger dragging herself across the forest floor.  "What the devil are you doing??"

"Trying to get to the market in Dekarium, sir." There's really no lie that'll be convincing here.

He sits down on the ground, not too close.  "I've never heard of Dekarium, and you sure as hell aren't going to get anywhere like this."  His brusque voice softens a bit.  "Are you in some kind of trouble, girl?"

Oh, he's threatening her, that makes sense. That... might actually be a better sign than if he wasn't, if it means there's something she can do that'll get him not to turn her in. (Or maybe he's just planning to get everything he can out of her and then turn her in anyway, but it's not like there's much she can do about that.)

"No, sir, but I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong impression, I'd gladly repay you if you help me get this sorted out so I can be on my way." (So, yes, and she's given up on trying to be particularly subtle about it.)

"O...kay?"  He wasn't expecting a teenage girl crawling around in the woods to pay him anything, but what does he know.  (Maybe she's a witch. Or a witch's daughter or something. She does look like it. Of course he doesn't really think there are witches, but... she does look like it, and she's not acting like anyone normal.) 

Well, in any case she doesn't sound like she's - well, he doesn't know, chances are she is on the run from someone, and she's definitely hiding something, but she doesn't sound like she objects to him doing the normal sort of thing about her broken leg.  (He's not sure what she means about anyone getting the wrong impression.  When people here aren't being subtle they are much less subtle than that.)

"Well, I should get you to the doctor, anyhow."  He eyes her leg dubiously.  "Think you can sit on a bike if I splint that?"

She has no idea what a bike even is. "Yes, sir."

"Marysia, go get the bike."  The daughter argues for a moment - she wants to see what happens next! - but then goes off at a run, to at least miss as little as possible.

The man cuts a small branch off a tree and sets about splinting the strange girl's leg with it.  "Hold it out straight and I'll immobilize it that way so it doesn't get worse, yeah?"  He doesn't have training or anything, but he has the general idea, and he's pretty sure if he wraps an old blanket around... hmm, first the stick, actually two sticks so there can be one on each side, and then more cloth around her leg and the sticks all together... and ties everything around with twine until it's pretty well stiffened, that'll do her less harm than it would to try to get anywhere with it dangling broken like that.

He'll pause if she screams or protests, but he's really rather hoping this part can go without extra complications.

She can be so quiet and still and cooperative about his weird stick-blanket ritual.

Wow, he wishes his children were this well-behaved.  ...Or maybe he doesn't really.  It's a little disturbing.

He sits there, considers asking her name, decides not to.  Then realizes he's going to have to take her home before the doctor's office opens, and his family will definitely ask all sorts of things about her, so if anything... weird... it's going to come out, it better happen now, without his kids here.

"What's your name?  Where's your family?"  He sounds hesitant about his questions.

She had lies prepared for those, not that this is really the sort of situation she'd been picturing for using them. "I'm Nessa." (A totally normal name, where she's from, but not one with any connection to her apart from the meaning.) "My parents are back home in Sofrituró."

He's pretty sure there's no Nessa on the nameday calendar.  So she's either odd or foreign - or pretending to be, for some reason, but that's a strange thing to pretend.  "I've, uh, never heard of any Sofrituro.  Should I have?  How far is it?" 

It's really weird how he's just admitting that. "It's a few day's walk that way." She points vaguely back in the opposite direction from the one the man came from. 

"What... sort of place... is it?"  Maybe he should just stop asking.  But it keeps feeling like they're talking past each other, and - it's not that he minds if she's lying, it's just it would work better if she was saying things that made sense.  And maybe she's just telling the truth, only he's not sure if it's the sort of truth he's better off not knowing too much about.  It makes talking difficult.

"...The normal kind? It's just, like, a little village, it's not like Egorian or anything." It's a real village, though, she was pretty sure it'd be safer to pick something that actually exists and just isn't that close to home.

"Huh. Weird name, but all right."  He has his doubts that there's really a village like that around here, but it's not like he's seen every little place within a few days' walk - maybe it's one of those old German names or something.  And in any case she's clearly not inclined to say anything his children will get excited about.

It's not much longer before Marysia is back pushing a large-wheeled metal contraption - the man helps Nessa stand up, then helps hold the contraption steady and looks at her expectantly.

She's not really sure what she's supposed to do with the unstable-looking wheeled thing. Probably she's supposed to sit on it, but she's not really sure how it's supposed to work, it seems like it'll just fall over no matter how she does it. She ends up trying to perch sideways on it, with both her legs sitting awkwardly on the left... whatever this is. Some sort of boxy piece connected to a circular part of the contraption.

Grzesiek wouldn't be that surprised if she couldn't ride a bike - most kids learn, if only from friends, but some probably don't - but that she doesn't even seem to know how to sit on it??  "No, no, you have to get one leg on the other side-- don't worry about the pedals, I'll walk it, just hold on like this--"  He tries to get her to sit on it the normal way without touching her inappropriately (which should really be a lost cause after all that work on her leg, but in a first aid context it feels like it doesn't count and in a helping-someone-on-a-bike one it does) and eventually manages.

It's not very far to their house, and walking the bike works fine.  "The doctor's not in until eight, so we have to wait a while anyway. You want some food?"

On the one hand this is probably a trick or a trap or something. On the other hand, it's not like he couldn't do basically whatever he wants regardless, and she's so hungry. "Yes, sir."

Then she gets to come into the house and be a little fussed over by his wife and fed breakfast (bread with butter, scrambled eggs, ham, fruit preserves, milk, tea with sugar) along with the family.  It doesn't particularly seem like a trap so far.  There are two younger children, a boy and a girl, who want to know what's wrong with her leg and what happened to her.

Wow, he's really rich, which makes it way more confusing that he hasn't turned her in yet but it's not like she can just ask about that.

"I was running away from a monster, but I fell." That's even true, and not more suspicious than being in the woods with no travel pass in the first place.

"Ooh, what sort of monster??"

"Well, I was running away, so I didn't get a great look at it" and also it was the middle of the night, but she's not going to admit to that part if she can help it, "but I think it might've been a bear, or a really big worg*, or something."

*"Worg" comes through as the Chelish term.

"What's that??" 

The two younger children are fascinated.  Their mother is looking on with a fond smile.  The older girl is frowning uncertainly but not interrupting.

These people care weirdly much about the story, and she's not sure why the older girl is so upset about it, but the lady of the house seems to approve, so probably it's safer to keep answering than to stop.

"Like a wolf, but bigger and smarter and more dangerous."

Well, they're children!  Are Chelish children not like that?

"How come it didn't get you??"

Even a child isn't going to show that much emotion just over a story!

"I think it lost track of me when I ran away?"

There's a bit of an argument about whether that makes it a stupid monster they don't need to worry too much about, or if maybe it didn't really want to eat her anyway.  Then they run off to draw monsters.  Their father, looking a little relieved, lets her sit quietly in the yard for a while before telling her to get back on the bike and taking her to the doctor's office.  There are a few people waiting already, but plenty of empty chairs left.  "You want me to wait with you?"  He'd rather not, and he's guessing so would she, but you do have to ask.

If the doctor decides to go to the priest, is it better or worse for this man to be with her? ...probably worse, he came inside with her so the people working here have definitely seen him, if he doesn't stay with her they'll have to guess after whether they'd be angering the rich man who brought her here. She shakes her head.

He nods.  She'll be able to say what she likes, that way, and he won't be around to answer any questions.  He's noticed that she doesn't really want to tell anyone anything.  "All right. Good health to you, then."

She sits in the waiting room for a while with nobody bothering her.  Eventually a nurse comes by to ask everyone in turn what their name is and what's wrong with them, and write it down on little pieces of paper.

Her name is Nessa and what's wrong with her is that her leg is broken. 

"Surname? And age?"

"Martorell. I'm sixteen." 

The woman frowns.  "Nessa... Mart-what?  D'you have documents?"

Probably this is the part where they find out she doesn't have a travel pass and torture her to death. 

There — isn't actually anything she can do about it, if they'll arrest her the moment they find out. She can't run, can't even really walk. She's still got a knife, and if they try to arrest her she should use it, but even if she's lucky enough to get a solid blow off before whoever she goes for can run away, even if it's enough to kill them before the priest arrives, it won't save her.

Her chest feels tight, which is stupid, it's not like she's actually been safe at any point. Her heart is trying to pound its way out of it, which is even stupider, someone might notice that. She keeps her breathing normal, that she can do.

If they're going to kill her no matter what then it's too late for anything she does to help. So — she should give her excuse, even though it's not a very good one, just in case it's somehow enough to save her.

"Martorell, ma'am. I dropped my travel pass running from a forest-beast. I'd've gone back for it, but..." Gesture at her broken leg.

A baffled look.  All these people do so many expressions.  "...Uh, write down your name and address and date and place of birth here.  And your parents' names down here.  Do you know your PESEL?"

Is she... expected to know her birthdate? Is that a thing around here? She could make something up, but it's also possible this is some sort of test to try to trick her into lying, especially since she's also asking her for a ... pessel... whatever that is.

Headshake. "No, ma'am. ...Uh, for the date of birth, do you just want the year? As far as I know we count up the same time as everyone else."

"Where are you from, child?  What are you doing here?"  She doesn't sound angry, but there's a lot of exasperated confusion in her voice.

(She is vividly picturing the sort of things they're probably going to do to her once they realize but that's not an excuse to not answer. (She hasn't made it that far from the crosses, she doesn't think, maybe they'll drag her to one of those.) 

"I'm from Sofrituró. I was going to the market in Dekarium."

"I've never heard of any such places!  Just write down what you can, I don't have time to deal with this.  Don't make anything up!"  She leaves Nessa with her pen and the piece of paper, which is divided into very straight and very neatly labeled rectangles for the different pieces of information (apparently a PESEL goes in 11 little squares) and disappears behind a closed door.  She raised her voice enough that people are staring a little.

It takes her a little while to figure out how to use the pen, but eventually she's able to fill out the form. Her name is Nessa Martorell. She lives in Sofrituró, at the house with the light brown shutters. (She doesn't know if there's any such house, but apparently she's made it far enough that no one else knows either.) She was born in 4696, also in Sofrituró. Her parents are Iridelia and Siweri. She leaves the other boxes blank.

The nurse comes back to call someone else into the office, takes the paper, shakes her head at it with a frown but doesn't say anything.  A few more people get called in, in unclear order.  It takes a couple of hours before it's Nessa's turn.

The nurse calls her in and watches, wondering how she's going to act about her supposedly broken leg when she has to walk somewhere.

She ends up kind of hopping on her non-broken leg, supporting herself heavily with the wall. (It's kind of humiliating, but all the other ideas she can think of are worse.)

Well that makes the nurse feel a little guilty, but it seems to be working well enough, and it'd just be awkward to start looking for crutches at this point.  She does hold the door open at least.

The doctor is a relatively young man with a cheerful sort of face.  "Good morning.  I have no idea what's going on with all this," he waves the piece of paper, "but first let's see if you've really got a broken leg.  Lie down over there," there's a high narrow bed with just a sheet on it.  "... You don't look very good, do you."   She's pretty grimy, to start with, and has a hungry and tired sort of look to her.  And her hand is bandaged rather badly.  Well, that'll have to wait its turn.

...That request feels incredibly suspicious. She will lie down as instructed but she's clinging to her rucksack.

He gives the rucksack a look but lets it be.  He cuts the string off the blanket contraption on her leg - with scissors, not a knife - then cuts through the blanket as well.  Feels at her leg, which of course hurts, but not nearly as much as if he was trying to hurt her.  "That's broken all right.  Ouch.  So, how did it happen?  And who wrapped it up like this?"  (Why do people keep doing these kinds of things instead of just asking him to come to a girl with a broken leg??)

"I was running away from a forest-monster but I tripped and fell." 

She... doesn't actually want to get the man who brought her here in trouble with the law, even though that's a really stupid way to feel. ...Although she doesn't know almost anything about him, so it's not like she could turn him in even if she wanted to. 

"The man who brought me here wrapped it up, but I don't know his name."

"Uh. You were alone in the forest and a stranger helped you and left you here?? I... suppose it's not like there was a better thing to do under the circumstances... but that sort of thing is not really supposed to happen!  Mrs Jadzia, can you ask if anyone saw who brought her?  Or if anyone knows her at all, for that matter?"

The nurse goes out to the waiting room, and comes back looking embarrassed.  "You've already seen everyone who was here before her, and nobody knows who she is. We could... go look for the people who are out, probably someone saw, but I'm not sure what we'd do with the information anyway?"

"Well, what are we supposed to do without it??"  There's a teenage girl in his office who appeared out of nowhere and probably has nowhere to sleep.

"Girl, I'll straighten your leg and put a cast on it," the government pays for him to do that no matter who shows up, "and look at whatever's going on with your hand, but you need to stay off the leg for two months and then come back to get the cast off.  So someone needs to come get you back home.  Do you know anyone's phone number?  A neighbor, the school or the police station?"  Somehow he gets the feeling the answer is no.

Two months is long enough that her lord's men will catch up to her no matter how bad a job they do at looking, unless they give up completely before they find her, and she doesn't think she made it far enough for them to give up completely. She's going to need to be on her way before that happens, somehow, not that she's going to get much of anywhere on this leg. Maybe she can find a wizard, a proper one, not like her mom, who can do a wizard-healing spell? That's probably safer than a priest, but that doesn't make it safe, but staying isn't safe either — none of that helps her with answering this man's questions, she can figure it out later.

The safe answer would be "yes" if she had any idea what a "phone number" was or how to make up one that sounded real, but she doesn't. She shakes her head.

"Do you know how to get back home, by train or by car or anything? 

--Do you not want to get back home?"

...Wow, the trap there isn't even trying to be subtle. "I know how to get home by... walking? That's how I got here in the first place. I was just planning on heading to the market in Dekarium and then going back home but I guess that might be a little harder now."

He could find someone with a car and a map who has the time to try to figure out what villages she could possibly be talking about with those strange names - he's an educated enough man to know you can't have anywhere that's legally named something that foreign-sounding, but of course if people are used to an old name they might keep using it even if their village has technically been renamed for some Soviet hero or another - but really none of that is his job.  There are other people whose job it is, to deal with confusing children far from home and likely not being cared for very well by their parents.  His job is to fix her leg, and her hand, and whatever else might be going on. 

"We'll figure something out.  I'm going to set your leg now - it's going to hurt but just for a moment, hold still, all right?"  He does that, then has the nurse clean up all the scratches and grime and put antibiotic salve on, because you really don't want any infection risk underneath a cast, then prepares a weird bandage with wet white stuff on it and wraps it around her leg from the foot to the thigh so many times and tells her not to move at all for an hour.

Oh, this is the part where they start hurting her—

—that was over way faster than she'd have guessed, she didn't even have time to think about whether to go for the knife. And it's stopped, and... it wasn't actually as bad as the worst things they did in school? So... maybe he just really sucks at hurting people, but maybe it actually was necessary for some sort of mysterious doctor reason.

If doctors take two months to do anything and can't even manage that without hurting people that definitely explains why people say they're useless, but given that even if she wanted to she couldn't just grovel in front of the priest until he healed her up to be a good little fucking Asmodean she'll take what she can get. 

Or maybe this is part of a setup where he tells her not to move for an hour and then it turns out breathing counts as moving and he punishes her for that, or something, it's hard to know one way or the other. She... is not actually feeling inclined to go maybe get herself tortured on purpose to prove a point.

She will be very very still just like he said and if it turns out that actually this is setting up for him to torture her she can always go for the knife later.

He doesn't seem inclined to punish her for breathing.  He does however contradict his own order after a while of writing things down: "All right, now show me your hand, what happened there?"  He can see it's bandaged, and about as grimy as the rest of her, which is not ideal.

...Or he's just doing the thing where you give someone two orders that contradict and then punish them for whichever one they break, and he's just... not very good at hurting people, or something. Probably it was stupid to think he could have been doing anything else.

...She feels so tired. Which is also stupid, she's been doing a lot less walking than she had been most days, it's just — she keeps waiting for the part where they torture her to death, and they keep dancing around getting closer to it but not quite getting all the way there, and it's not that she's looking forward to it, it's not that she wants it to happen any sooner, but as long as there's a chance she might live she has to keep going along with their stupid games like it has a chance of making a difference.

"I scraped it up when I was running away from the monster." It's not like he'll be able to tell when exactly it happened, and this way she doesn't have to come up with a separate excuse for why she was running through the woods.

(She doesn't move her hand.)

Unfortunately she's too Chelish for the doctor to be able to tell she finds this interaction terrifying rather than mildly unpleasant.

He just grabs her hand himself, not even roughly, and unwraps it.  "Mhm, no you didn't, that's had a day or two to get messy. You couldn't have at least cleaned it?"  That last sentence is clearly a reprimand, with a frown, but he doesn't wait for a reply, just tells the nurse to get a bowl of water and wash it properly.  The girl doesn't seem either very inclined or very competent to do it herself.

"I was travelling, sir, there wasn't a priest around."

"A priest?"  He stares at her blankly for a moment.  What does that have to do with anything?

"...to make the water, sir. There weren't a lot of rivers on the route from Sofrituró."

Does she... believe in some kind of superstition about how you can only wash wounds in holy water?  Well, he's heard weirder things, but then the bit about rivers doesn't make sense.  It almost sounds like she thinks priests are where rivers come from??  There were some miracles about springs, he recalls vaguely, but surely nobody can really be that confused...  No matter, and definitely not his problem.  He sighs.  "You don't need a priest* for any of that, but you really shouldn't travel without clean water.  No wonder you look awful.  ... Uh, have you gotten food and water today?"  Maybe she's just too hungry to make sense.

*he uses a different word from the one she used, one specific to his religion instead of a generic one, but I don't know what the translation does with that - in a lot of languages including English they're the same word, Polish just happens to have kapłan vs ksiądz.

He's claiming to be — some sort of heretic against Asmodeus, working with some sort of underground priest? That's obviously some sort of test, only she can't see what the right answer is supposed to be, even if she were a perfect little loyal Asmodean it's not like she could turn him in when she can't even walk.

"I had breakfast before I came here," she says, which is easier than figuring out how she's supposed to answer the loyalty test.

Oh good, he's glad he doesn't figure out how to feed her on top of everything else.  And all the confusion about priests can be someone else's problem.  "Great. I'll give you some vitamin pills just in case, once you can sit up."

And in the meantime the nurse will come over with a basin of water and some soap to get her hand properly clean, acting somewhat annoyed about her continued unwillingness to move at all to help in the process.

Well, she's not stupid, she knows how this sort of "act mad that someone is following orders, then punish them when they break them" game goes. (That one wasn't all that popular back home, no one who could get away with that really needed that much of an excuse, but it's not like it's complicated.)

The next thing that happens is the doctor pouring some sort of dark intensely purple liquid over the scrape on her hand - again with a cursory warning that it'll sting, and it does, but nowhere near badly enough to feel worth it as a punishment by Chelish standards.  She gets a normal clean white bandage on top of the purple-stained skin, and the doctor looks her over thoughtfully.   "Does anything else hurt?"

Well, she's kind of sore all over from the running through the woods and sleeping on the ground and so on, but she's not going to just say that. She shakes her head.

"All right, wait there until the cast sets, and we'll try to figure out what happens next."  He turns to the nurse.  "Mrs Jadzia, can you find the phone book, or maybe the government agency listings I'm pretty sure we have someplace, and see if you can find who in Kraków we should call about a child who needs somewhere to stay?"  He doesn't want to say 'abandoned' in front of her, but, well.  "Not the police, I don't think."

He glances at the girl to see if she has any reaction or questions about this, but - he might as well let someone more qualified explain what's going to happen.  (Yes, yes, if he was a better person he'd sit down and talk through it with her himself, but she's hard to talk to, and so quiet that it's easy to just not do it.)

Is the idea here that maybe she's just really stupid, and somehow didn't notice him admitting to primary worship, so they need to make their stupid test of loyalty even more obvious by having him talk about how he won't go to the town guard? They know they can just kill her, right, it's not like they have to go through all this effort to justify it. The names are — probably not part of it, she thinks, it's not like he called the woman Heavenia or something, they're probably just names she hasn't heard before.

Mentioning going to the government, but not the town guard is... she doesn't actually have a good explanation for how that fits into the loyalty test. Maybe it'll get more obvious once someone else actually shows up, they're probably not expecting her how to figure out how to report him without there even being anyone to report him to?

Calling her a child could be part of it, she did tell them she was sixteen, if they think she's lying about that maybe they're hoping to trick her into just going along with it? And that's the only part it would make sense to bring up to him, or at least the only part that she's noticed. For all she knows it'll turn out that Kraków is secretly a barony in Andoran province, or something. Even if she's wrong, they probably aren't going to punish her specifically for pointing out that she's an adult if she didn't have to, unless they've already decided to torture her to death and they're just trying to come up with as many different reasons to tack on as they can, in which case nothing she tells them actually matters.

"I'm sixteen, sir."

"Yes, you said."  He has the politely incomprehending look of someone who doesn't understand why he's being told something.

Maybe as part of the loyalty test he's pretending to be a heretic and also kind of stupid? Or something?

If he doesn't have any other questions for her she'll wait quietly until someone else shows up.

There are some long phone conversations, the outcome of which is that a few hours later an impatient-looking woman shows up at the clinic and starts asking her questions, starting again with her name, age, date and place of birth, and so on.  She looks at the nurse's piece of paper, but apparently wants to hear it all again herself.

She repeats everything she wrote on the paper, including the part about not knowing exactly when she was born. (...Now that she's thinking about it she thinks she might've been born in the spring, but she's guessing from her mother's stories about wizard school, and the person she's pretending to be wouldn't have heard those, so she's not going to mention it.) She doesn't have any particular trouble telling the same lies the second time.

"There's no such place.  And I'm pretty sure that if we call the demographics office it'll turn out there's no such name registered either.  So, are you an uneducated Gypsy girl, or are you just lying?"  She makes both options sound pretty contemptible.

If they've got a list of everyone's name in the whole country then she's just going to die, even more than she was already going to die, it's really the sort of thing she should have thought of, obviously the Asmodeans would want to be able to keep track of that sort of thing, and it makes sense why they wouldn't tell anyone—

—but Sofrituró's a real place, it's not really where she's from but it really exists. So they're lying about something, and maybe they're lying about that too. She doesn't know if it's likely, but — if they're telling the truth then she'll die for sure, and if they're bluffing then maybe there's still a chance she can survive this.

Probably if it's a bluff it's the sort of bluff where they're accusing her of lying to see if she admits to it. 

"I'm not lying, ma'am. You can check with the demographics office if you want."

A sigh.  "I will, but there's hardly a point."   But maybe she is just unregistered and uneducated and confused about everything.  There's something off about her clothes, and about her reactions too, really.  "So, this place you're from.  Where is it?  What's it like?  Who lives there?"

"It's a few days walk that way." She points. "...I think. I could tell you for sure if we were outside and back by the woods. We're... I mean, as far as I know we're a pretty normal farming village, but I guess if they do things differently out here I might not know? And then there's the laundry wizard, and he also runs the school, and sometimes a priest comes through on circuit. I live with my parents and my little siblings and my grandma, and my uncle used to live with us too before he died."

"The... laundry wizard?  What is wrong with you, girl."  All right, yes, she's wildly making things up. 

Maybe she's just weirdly insistent on wildly making things up but will go home without a fuss if they can figure out where that is?  "Could you find your village on the map for me?"  She has a weirdly bound book of maps, looks through it, finds the right page.  "We're in Chełmek, here."

?????

They have a whole book of maps? And they're just showing it to her? Presumably they're not totally accurate, but she didn't know anything like this even existed. (And that must have been so much work, her mom can hang a Scrivener's Chant if it's the only thing she hangs that day but she couldn't do a drawing...)

She peers at it. (Is it even pretending to be a map of the whole country, with Andoran too, or just the... whole county? Whole barony? Something else?)

It looks like this page is probably just the local region, but there are so many pages, and they all looked kind of similar when the woman was flipping through them, like it's one giant map of quite possibly the whole country cut up into small pieces to fit into an evenly bound book?

Also just this region has so many villages and towns and roads in it.  Which matches what it looked like when she was walking around and kept running into them, really.  There isn't a big forest anywhere on this page, either, just patches of little woods.

The village and town names are so dense they cover most of the page in small letters.  She can't find any she recognizes.  (And they don't really sound Chelish, either.  Czernichów, Przytkowice, Libiąż...)

Maybe this is another test, and they're showing her a map that's just totally made up to see if she goes along with it. Except what sort of person has that much money to spend on a book of fake maps, and can't just hire a Detect Thoughts wizard if they really want to know? And the foresty parts and the rivers right around here line up with where she's been, it's just that the parts around where she actually lives look completely wrong.

Maybe these people are faeries, and she accidentally ended up in a faerie town, and when she leaves it'll turn out that a hundred years have passed and everyone she knows is dead. Except they look like normal humans, apart from being weirdly tall, and she's not sure if faeries ever take people who'd like it if everyone they knew was dead.

Maybe these people really are a bunch of secret heretics against Asmodeus, and the names are all Celestial or something, except then the area around her lord's manor should still look right, it should just be the names that are wrong.

(Maybe she's just totally misinterpreting the map, it's not like she's seen one before.)

"I think it'd be around here," she says, tracing a circle around a town marked in what she thinks is vaguely the right area for Sofrituró, "but the name's wrong, so I'm not sure."

Hopefully that's enough that if it is yet another test it won't seem like she's just going along with their story. (She's trying not to get the location exactly right, if they actually drag her back to the town she picked out it'll be obvious that no one there knows her, but she wants to be close enough that if they do know where it is, it won't be clear that she's lying about where she thinks it is. This would probably be easier if she knew any geography.)

"Mmhm.  Well, that's on the train line anyway, we can get out once or twice and check."  But it doesn't sound very much like the girl is willing to admit to a specific place, so that'll probably go nowhere. 

"Well, we should stop taking up the doctor's office - I can make some calls from the police station and then we can get on the train."  The nurse finds some crutches for Nessa - they're designed for someone taller but they do more or less work.  The doctor smiles at her, a little guiltily, and wishes her courage and good fortune.

It's a short walk.  The road and the houses all look strange.  Where the roads cross, there's a pole off to the side with two signs at right angles to each other, one of which says Whippings*.

*it's a genuine street name in the village I was looking up on the map for this!  (Baty, which could also just be Whips but I figured her mind would jump to the more expected meaning, and they're both ominous anyway.)  I have no idea why they have a street named that, but I couldn't not include that.

Nod nod.

If they're going to the town guard, probably that's part of the loyalty test from before, and they're going to see whether she turns in the doctor for primary worship and conspiring against the Crown?  But probably that means they're not just waiting to see if she tells the woman right away, if they're going to the town guard anyway. And the part about 'courage and good fortune' is... well, courage could be a lot of gods, really, there's loads of gods that want people to be brave and fight monsters and so on, but luck is probably... well, back when she was little, she used to pray to Nethys for good luck on tests, that's not even illegal as long as you're still treating Asmodeus like he's the most important, but outside of school luck goes with... Gorum for luck in war, Desna for luck on the road, Pharasma for luck in childbirth... well, probably it's not Pharasma... really there's kind of a lot of options for luck too, and if he's pretending to worship someone who's outright illegal even for secondary worship it might not even be someone she's heard of. That's probably not the important part, anyway, it's not like it'll be suspicious if she doesn't know that much about other gods, as long as she's not telling blatant lies like claiming she doesn't know which god you pray to for good harvests or something.

It takes her a little while to figure out what she's actually supposed to do with the crutches, but eventually she's able to figure out how she's supposed to use them, more or less. She's guessing from how big some of the houses are that she must be in a fairly rich part of town The pole with the sign is too small to be a whipping post, but she can see tall wooden poles all up and down the street, with some kind of rope connecting them, so probably they just use those. It's weird there's so many of them all over, you wouldn't think they'd need that many, but maybe there are a lot of people here who break the law?

...Which could mean the doctor there actually was a heretic, and that part wasn't a loyalty test after all, and if she tells the town guard about him then he'll die. Which — obviously it'd be stupid and contemptable to care what happens to a random stranger — but it wouldn't be something that was just happening to him, it's not like she's just choosing not to help him, she'd be turning him in — but if it is a loyalty test, they'll torture her to death for sure, but they might do that anyway—

Well. She's not actually talking to the guard yet. She still has a little bit of time to figure out what to tell them.

Nobody asks her anything at the police station, so she can continue not talking to them, if she likes.

The woman (who introduces herself to the police as Aneta Wójcicka) does indeed make a call to some governmental office asking them to check if anyone named Nessa Martorell is known to exist (she will call them back later for the answer), and to the orphanage to tell them there is indeed a very confused sixteen-year-old girl with a broken leg here and she'll be bringing her in on the next train. 

They get offered tea while they wait.  (Aneta accepts.)

Well, just because they haven't asked her anything yet doesn't mean it's not a loyalty test. The safest thing to do would be to turn him in. But—

If they're actually using a Wand of Sending to talk to someone who works for the Crown and check if she really exists, then she's going to die no matter how loyal she pretends to be. If they're bluffing about that, which is also pretty likely, then... she is still almost certainly going to die. She doesn't have a travel pass, they already know that much. Even if they decide that's not enough to kill her over, even if they actually care what else she's done, a town like this has a decent chance of just having a wizard who can pluck the truth out of her head, or a priest who can force her to say it.

Her chest feels sort of twisty and tight, which is stupid, it's not like she didn't know she was probably going to die.

Probably the doctor wasn't the sort of secret heretic who outright admits it to a stranger he just met. Probably that was just another stupid Asmodean game, and if she doesn't say anything they'll take that as another reason to kill her, and maybe add in some extra torture while they're at it.

But they're going to kill her anyway. If she turns him in, probably it doesn't make a difference, but maybe, possibly, she get someone who's actually trying to fight Asmodeus killed too.

That's the sort of thing she really would deserve to die for.

Her hands keep trying to start shaking and she keeps having to tell them they're not allowed to do that. She's — well, she's going to die either way, but she'll die sooner that way.

She shakes her head about the tea, there's no sense in making whatever they want to do to her any easier, then repositions her rucksack so that her knife is right within reach. 

Nothing happens, and continues to happen. 

Aneta chats with the policemen a little - tells them the girl, "supposedly Nessa," showed up in the woods with a broken leg and is either lying about everything or incredibly confused, do they know any... Gypsy communities or anything like that... around here who might have raised a weirdly-named and very confused child?  No, they don't, although one of them remarks that the clothes she's wearing look hand-woven, not just hand-sewn, so she'd almost have to come from somewhere strange, right?  Well, yes, but she's still lying and she should just stop doing that if she wants Aneta to put any extra effort into figuring her situation out, says Aneta somewhat pointedly.

As opposed to... woven by magic? Probably a wizard could do that, if they weren't stuck with just cantrips, but it'd be weird to spend spell slots on that when it can also be done by hand. Maybe they're closer than she thought to one of the academies, or something, and so here it's normal? That kind of makes sense, now that she thinks about it, they had some Lights up in the office, only in that case it's confusing why no one's even suggested she pay a wizard for an Infernal Healing. Maybe the priests really want to control all the proper healing, or something, so that it's easier for them to keep everyone else under control?

In any case she is not five years old and is not going to stop lying just because they're pointedly accusing her of lying. "I'm not lying, ma'am. If Egorian's got a list of everyone's name then maybe they can also tell you what Sofrituró is called on your map." 

"What Egorian?" asks one of the policemen confusedly.  (Aneta has decided on a policy of ignoring anything said to her about stupid made-up places.)

"................the capital?"

"The capital of where?"

"Cheliax????"

Are they claiming to be, what, some sort of... barony in rebellion, like Andoran Province, or something, and to emphasize just how much they aren't part of Cheliax they have to... pretend not to know what Egorian is? 

That doesn't actually make any sense. Probably this is just another confusing loyalty test but she can't think of what they're testing.

He looks around at everyone with clear confusion.  "I know I was crap at geography, but, uh..."

Aneta sighs tiredly.  "I told you she's making things up."

"She sounds so convinced though!  Do you think she's, fuck, I don't know, crazy or hypnotized or something?"  He stares at her, as if he could somehow tell.

.......If this is another test of her loyalty she doesn't actually have any idea how to... pass it. Probably a loyal Asmodean subject would keep... saying that Cheliax exists... but so would anyone else, so it wouldn't be a very good test.

"...the strongest country in Avistan?"

"I haven't heard of that either!"  And, half in case she really is hypnotized or something and half just because that seems like the obvious next part of the conversation: "This is Poland, we're in Europe, the capital is Warsaw.  Uh, the year is 1993?"  And he is not touching the question of what the strongest country is, thank you very much, especially at work.

.........Did she somehow go back in time? She doesn't actually know how long Cheliax has been around — or, she knows what they told her in school, but for all she knows they were lying about that too. For all she knows whatever country was here thousands of years ago was called... whichever of Poland and Europe was supposed to be the country. She thought there were fewer wizards back then but maybe Cheliax was also lying about having the most?

Or it's still a loyalty test but if it's a loyalty test she's going to die no matter what and if she's somehow travelled back in time maybe she won't—

"Is, uh, this might seem like a weird question, but is Aroden still alive? Like, as a god, not as a human?"

She's pretty sure the years are named after him, so he'd definitely been a god by 1993, and she's pretty sure that wasn't made up, if they were going to make something up they'd say the years are named after Asmodeus or something. Or, well, if he's not even a god yet then probably they counted their years some other way, but she barely knows any history from before Asmodeus killed him and definitely doesn't know what people were doing before he ascended.

"Who? What are you talking about??"  How does she sound so-- well, sane maybe isn't quite right, but-- so self-assured about all this, while saying things that don't make any sense??  Is that really what crazy people are like?  He's never met a crazy person, but he always imagined more wild-eyed yelling.

"There are no gods," says Aneta with finality in her voice.  The two policement look awkward at this but don't contradict her, since she's in charge of the orphan girl.

...She really thought that everyone knew about the gods?? Even Cheliax doesn't try to pretend they don't exist, they've got no reason to tell people about a bunch of Good gods that aren't even real. She thinks there's a country, she doesn't remember what it's called, where it's illegal to worship any gods, but she's got no idea if anything she knows about it is true — the priest said they made it illegal to worship any gods because they rejected the rightful dominion of Asmodeus, and that he punished them all by blighting them with disease, but probably if he could do that he'd just do that to everywhere that rebelled against Cheliax? But she didn't think they tried to say that the gods don't exist, just that no one should worship them.

Actually, now that she thinks about it, the doctor knew about the gods, so it can't just be that no one here knows about them, and the town guards are giving the woman a weird look too. So probably they do know about them — maybe not Aroden specifically, it's not surprising if there's some gods they haven't heard of, although if they're counting the years some other way then she doesn't have any idea when it is. (Maybe the no-gods country is closer than she thought and she wound up there somehow, and it's just that they count from... something that happened 1993 years ago. She doesn't actually have any idea what.)

If they're going to torture her to death for not rejecting every god then it's probably too late, but she should pretend she agrees with the woman. If it's actually the woman who's the heretic, like the other two people seem to think, then she shouldn't, though it's probably not a good idea to mention Asmodeus, in a lot of countries they'd torture anyone who worships him to death and not even let your soul move on. If she's still in Cheliax... it's not really worth making plans for that, if she's still in Cheliax then she has thoroughly failed the loyalty test and just about the only way her words might change things is if she gets the doctor tortured to death too.

...Probably the town guards are less likely to be heretics than the ?wizard? who's acting like she doesn't know about the gods.

"Yes there are! Maybe they aren't all the same as the ones back home, that'd explain why you haven't heard of Aroden, but I've never heard of anywhere that doesn't know about any of them."

"Wait, do you mean like there's the Christian God and the Jewish one and... well the Orthodox one's the same, right..." 

"I think the Jewish one's also the same, in theory?" chimes in the other policeman.

"Okay yeah... Oh, the Muslim one! That's different, right?  ...Anyway, do you mean it like that, or do you actually believe in multiple gods, like in ancient Greece or something?"

...As opposed to what? Thinking the rest of the gods are devils or demons or angels or whatever the other types of outsider are? 

"I don't know which ones the ones you just said are so I don't know if I worship them or not. I — if there's only one that people are allowed to worship I don't mean to break your laws — but there's" Asmodeus, but if she went back in time naming him will be suspicious, "Erastil for farming, or Pharasma for if you're having a baby, or Desna for safe travels, or..." Dispater, Mammon, Moloch... "lots of other ones, Nethys for wizards and schoolwork, Gorum for battles..."

Probably she should stop naming them, she doesn't know which ones are legal here. There's also Calistria for whores and other people who are too weak to defend themselves but try to fight back and hurt the people who wronged them anyway (actually, now that she thinks about it, that sounds kind of great?), and Norgorber for bandits, and Cayden for getting drunk and sleeping around, and she has the names of all the archdevils memorized. Oh, and Abadar, like Mammon but Lawful Neutral. And Aroden, but Asmodeus killed him, before that he was... in charge of Cheliax? And Iomedae for killing demons. And probably a lot of others that she'll think of in a moment.

"I've never heard of any of those!"  It's a good thing it's not his job to figure out if she's making all this up or what.  He has no idea, and trying to think about it was making his head hurt.  "It's not illegal to be a weird pagan, but..."  He's clearly uncomfortable about it.  "Well, the orphanage'll take you to church and they'll straighten you out."

Aneta sighs, because yes, they will, and she disapproves of all that indoctrination of children.  "You don't have to go to church if you don't want to."  She keeps telling everyone that, and it is technically true, but somehow it never ends up happening.

So they have a required god, with what sound like are probably normal punishments for disobeying, but they... pretend it's not actually required, as a local type of loyalty test? Or maybe it even technically isn't, and it's just that they've got a bunch of other laws that are hard to follow if you don't follow their god... but probably not, it seems like it'd be hard to make it so no one's heard of any of the normal gods with just that. Even Asmodeus didn't try to stop people from praying to Erastil and Pharasma and so on. 

"I'm happy to go to church, ma'am. What god do people worship there?"

"Just God - there's only one, so there's no need to name him," says the more talkative policeman. 

"The Christian God, if you need to differentiate," Aneta clarifies, sounding like she'd be rolling her eyes if she was less professional.  "They call him Yahwe, but nobody ever says that, because like he said, what's the point if there's only one.  And his 'son' Jesus Christ, who doesn't count as a different god because he somehow simultaneously is and isn't the same person.  Nobody's ever going to explain to you how that makes any sense, because religious people love to make up complicated nonsense to make you feel stupid."

... Oops, she got so annoyed about religion that she forgot that 'Nessa' is probably making everything up and already knows all this.  Ah well.

"... And the Holy Ghost," adds the less talkative policeman.  Both of them look SO awkward, but arguing with communists about the Trinity never goes anywhere good.

(They have a god who's undead??)

"And, uh, what is each part of that god" who are definitely different gods, but apparently she's not supposed to say that "the god of? And what alignment are they?"

"How about we catch the train, and you get your religious education from someone who's paid for that?"  Much good may it do her.  "Or don't, which is what I'd recommend, but I know people are going to be pushy about it."

Aneta gets up and says goodbye to the policemen, not particularly waiting for the girl's input, and continues the conversation on the street.  "You do need to realize, it's all made up."

She's not really sure how she's going to catch anything with a broken leg, but sure, she can follow. 

"Like... you think their god is actually an angel or a devil something, not a real god?" She's not sure if that's legal to say, but it seems like the sort of thing that's important to know. If she's gone back in time she probably can't avoid saying things that'll get her punished but if she's lucky she can figure it out fast enough that it'll just be a whipping or something.

"There aren't any angels or devils or gods or anything.  People make them up so they can tell everyone what to do, and it works depressingly well, but they can never prove any of it."

"....who do you think is giving priests their powers???" Does she think they're, like, really weird kind of wizard or something? Maybe that's why she got mad when Nessa brought up laundry wizards, if it's insulting to priests or something, except she's also acting like she doesn't think very much of priests, so that doesn't really make sense.

"What powers?  They say they're turning bread into flesh, but you can't tell it's any different.  They say they're forgiving your sins, but how exactly are you supposed to know?"

Aaaand once again she's having this argument even though the girl can't possibly believe anything she's saying...  Ah, fuck it, why not.  It's a better way to fill the time then constantly trying to not have the argument.  And maybe it'll do some good anyway. 

They say what? That's... actually a pretty good idea for an Evil god, if you can get people to believe it, just convince them all the bad things they've done don't count and won't get them sent to Hell. So probably at least one of their gods is Evil, at least if this woman explained it right (which she might not have, it doesn't really seem like she knows much about the gods).

"They make water? I've seen them do it, wizards can't do that. And sometimes they heal people, or make them start bleeding, or things like that, but some wizards can do that sort of thing too, not exactly the same but kind of close." Is that heresy — well, this woman is clearly some sort of heretic, so probably it doesn't matter, unless this is some weird 1993 loyalty test.

"Yes, sure, they make holy water, you can't tell that from normal water either.  They don't heal people, they just brainwash them into thinking they feel better."

There's something off about how this conversation is going, but she can't figure out what it is well enough to do anything about it.

"... And there aren't any wizards, either.  But you know that."

Wow, there are so many things wrong with that. Her mom is a wizard — well, she can't say that, she's pretending that's not true, but her mom still exists. She thought there were still enough wizards in other countries that people would know they existed, even if the Asmodeans were telling the truth about having the most? And the water priests make isn't holy water — actually, no, now that she thinks about it, she's not sure, maybe when Good priests make water it comes out holy? Probably it would be hard to tell the difference between normal water and holy water (she's heard that archers at the Worldwound sometimes dip their arrows in holy water, but even if that's true, it's not like there are demons around to test), but whether or not water is holy, it's pretty easy to tell that there's water in the cistern that wasn't there a moment ago. A priest might be able to use magic to make someone think they'd been healed when they hadn't, and maybe they could do that to everyone else too, but if someone thought they'd been healed when they actually still had a giant gash across their chest or whatever, they'd still bleed out.

It kind of seems like Ms. Wójcicka is just stupid but maybe that's an act. ...Actually, maybe the test here is that she's pretending to be stupid to see where she contradicts her? Only she doesn't have any idea what the answers are supposed to be in 1993, or Poland/Europe. 

"There was a wizard back where I grew up, I saw him do magic loads of times. ...Who do you think cast the Lights in the buildings we were in, if it wasn't a wizard and it wasn't a priest?" Technically she guesses there could be a lot of sorcerers around or something?

"Oh will you stop that already!  I can argue about religion, at least that's a real thing, but I'm not arguing about wizards."

Instead she buys them tickets at a booth, and then they wait on a stone platform next to some metal and wood lines on the ground.  Some other people are waiting as well, so apparently whatever is going on here is a fairly common thing.

What does her ticket say?

PKP       TICKET NUMBER  402706      DATE OF ISSUE  07.07.93       STATION OF ISSUE  Chełmek       TICKET OFFICE  1      TRAIN  P08     FARE  0 N 1 50% 0 80%

FROM     Chełmek               TO      Kraków Główny             THROUGH

VALID FROM            TO                CLASS  X             VALID FOR DAYS   2         DEPARTING ON DATE  07.07.93        KM  62      PRICE GOLD  5000

(it looks about like this)

These people sure like filling out forms.

It cost 5000 gold???

...Okay, no, there's no way that's true, they probably just have really tiny coins or something. 

Also, now that she's looking at the date, she thinks she forgot to actually explain that she might have time traveled, she was too distracted talking about the gods. Unfortunately she can't think of anything else to ask about that was definitely true in 1993 and not in 4712 besides Aroden being alive. Though actually, if they don't know about Aroden, it might not be 1993 at all, and even the guardsmen didn't seem to have heard of him. 

"What are the years counted from here?"

"The supposed birth of Jesus."  Siiiiigh.

Blink. 

"...we count based on Aroden but I'm not sure what specifically. Are there, uh, other really important things that pretty much everyone has heard of, that you know when they happened?"

Why is she getting a history quizz from a confused 16-year-old?  Whatever.  "World War I was 1914-1918, World War II was 1939-1945, I don't know that there's anything else everyone has heard of.  The fall of Rome?  I can't remember when that was, I think around 400."

"...and the world wars had all the countries in the whole world? Or are they called that for some other reason?" She doesn't know of any wars like that but maybe the Asmodeans talked about them some other way.

"Not all of them, I don't think - I have no idea what was going on in China during WW I, or in South America during WW II, I think probably not much - but most of them, and all the ones that count. Where are you going with this?"

"Well, back home it's 4712, and when the guardsman said it was 1993 here I thought maybe I went back in time and that's why all the towns have different names. Except if you don't count from Aroden I don't know how to tell what year it actually is, so I'm trying to figure out if you've heard of ... anything I've heard of... that we could use to compare. But I don't really know much history from... uhhhhhhh... two thousand eight hundred years ago, so I'm still not sure."

"You're wearing handspun clothes and think lights are magic, you're not from two thousand years in the future," Aneta answers flatly. 

"...Unless there was a nuclear apocalypse or something."

"...I don't know what that is."

...Augh, why does she keep getting pulled into arguing with this stupidity?  "It doesn't matter, you're not from the future, time travel is also not real.  If you seriously grew up thinking it's four thousand whatever, it's because whoever your people are count time from something else and were keeping you isolated enough not to know anything about the rest of the world."  It might be true.

Well, to be fair, they were definitely doing some of that. But also, Ms. Wójcicka doesn't believe in wizards, she clearly doesn't have a great sense of what is and isn't real.

"I've met people from other parts of Cheliax, and they all knew about the things I've been talking about." Not a lot of them, but some. Her mom went to prep school in Egorian.

"Then I guess they were in on the thing where everyone was lying to you."  Maybe that's the point of this whole weird thing?  She's pretending she was raised by people who were all focused on lying to her about how the world works, because it makes her feel important or something?  ... Well, better than most ways of kids trying to feel important Aneta has to deal with, honestly.  At least she's not beating anyone up.

There's a giant fast noisy metal thing coming up on the tracks.  Nobody pays it any mind.

What the Hell is that???

She tries to stand still, but not too still, she doesn't want to look suspicious.

It stops right by them, with a horrible squeaking noise.  People start opening doors in it and going in and out - Aneta goes in and looks like she expects Nessa to follow.

Okay, she'll follow into the huge scary construct.

It has a narrow metal hallway lined with windows on one side, and doors on the other, leading to little metal rooms with padded benches on both sides.  Aneta picks an empty one and points Nessa to a seat.  "Look out the window and tell me if you see any familiar places, we'll be passing by the one you pointed to on the map. We could get out there, but I don't want to waste time if it's not going to get us anywhere."

Sure, she can watch for that. (If she sees anything that looks like home she absolutely isn't going to say anything about it, but it'd be good to know.)

The train takes off, with more unpleasantly loud noises.  It feels very strange to sit in a chair in something going as fast as a galloping horse, and the window makes it very obvious.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Aneta can't read emotions off a controlled Chelish face, but she can tell the girl is sitting stiffly and holding on tight to the armrest.  "Do you get sick on trains or something?"

Probably it's kind of pathetic to get all scared just because she's stuck in a wizard construct going really fast and making a loud noise. She shakes her head. "I'm not sick, ma'am."

Aneta, entirely calm and relaxed about the wizard construct situation, squints at her like she can't decide whether she's pathetic or not. 

"Look out the window, then."

If Nessa doesn't start a conversation, they can have an hour's quiet train ride (well, metaphorically quiet) before the view out the window fills with huge stone buildings.

Well, she doesn't recognize anything, but some of it is... trees. She's pretty sure they aren't all the same sorts of trees that were right around home, but those were mostly for lumber anyways.

Those are really tall buildings!! She didn't even know it was possible to make buildings this tall.

Well, if she was from (or was willing to admit to being from) anywhere they'd be likely to find by getting off at the train station and walking around, she'd probably see it from the train, so if she doesn't say anything, Aneta figures there's no point in wasting her time.

They get off in a large open area with many of the metal constructs stopped or coming or going.  The things really seem to be all over the place, and everyone acts like they're normal even though Nessa had never heard of such a thing before.

Aneta takes her on another smaller construct and then to one of the less tall buildings, where multiple people mostly ignore Nessa while talking about her and how strange and confused she is, and filling out more paperwork.  She's asked to write down her name and town again.

If she's not actually in Cheliax anymore she's kind of regretting picking out Nessa as her fake name, it's not as bad as Asmodia but she was still trying to imply that she was from a family of perfect loyal Asmodeans, but it's too late to change it now. She repeats her "name" and "town" for the form.

One of the men frowns at it.  "Is that even a legal name? I guess if it's really her name she should keep it, but it's really not doing her any favors. Hmm... Nesia... Niesia..."  He thinks for a moment and puts Agnieszka in parentheses next to Nessa, as something normal that could plausibly although weirdly have that as a nickname.  "Here, that's a normal Polish name, in case you end up wanting one."

"What does it mean?"

"What, the name? Names don't mean things. Well, I guess a few do, but this one doesn't."

Well, that's still an improvement. 

Do they have any other questions for her?

Not really.  This doesn't seem the sort of place that cares about its inhabitants' opinions very much. 

The director tells her that at some point someone's going to have to sit down with her and have a serious conversation about where she's from and how she got here, but they're going to give her some time to get used to things, wait to see if anyone reports her missing, and so on.  They put her in a room with five other girls around her age - the room is upstairs, which is complicated on crutches, but at least there's a bathroom in the same hallway.  Meals are downstairs three times a day.  Sometimes they have to wash dishes or do other chores, there's going to be a schedule.  Here are a few changes of clothes for her - they fit pretty badly but the fabric is really smooth and the seams are bizarrely even.  Right now it's the summer holidays, but after a month and a half she'll have to go to school.

Oh, and she needs to see a doctor again. The doctor wants to take her blood, with a syringe and a needle.

She needs weirdly many things explained to her, like "flush toilets" and "light switches" and "how to read a clock", but she's willing to cooperate with... being a servant with bizarrely few job responsibilities?... in exchange for room and board, at least while she physically can't just run off somewhere. She keeps her rucksack with her in case anyone tries something.

It's nice of them to give people the summers off, though, in practice a lot of people took summers off for the harvest but they always got punished for it. (It was spring when she left, but if she traveled in time there's no reason it would have to be the same season.)

......She does not want anyone stealing her blood!!!! The needle is — fine, she's not a little kid, but she doesn't want anyone using her blood in Evil demon-summoning rituals, or whatever other kinds of rituals use human blood.

The doctor is both grumpy and baffled about this.  "God, where did you grow up??  I'm not going to summon demons, I'm going to check if you're healthy!  This is completely normal, sit down and stop panicking."

"I'm not sick, sir."

(Agnieszka doesn't see what stealing her blood has to do with seeing if she's sick. It's not like it looks any different from anyone else's blood. Maybe he's planning to use it for a divination, or something, but that's still pretty suspicious.)

"You don't know that.  You might have low vitamin levels, you apparently fell over in a forest and you might have the tick disease or tetanus - are you even vaccinated for anything - you probably haven't been eating right, I can tell all those things by looking at your blood, now sit down and hold out your arm."

"...You can look at it as long as you keep it where I can see it and give it back when you're done." This is almost certainly going to get her whipped, or however else they punish people around here, but she really doesn't want her blood to be used in horrifying rituals.

"And I don't think I'm vaccinated at all." (Mostly because she doesn't have any idea what that means.)

"Yes, fine," by which he means he wants her to sit still for the blood draw and after that her weird hangups won't matter.  Does she in fact sit still for it?

...She will be still and quiet for the blood draw but she's positioning her rucksack where she can reach her knife if he tries to take her blood for Evil rituals.

He takes a big syringe-full, and if she doesn't interfere, distributes it into a few different tubes, in some of them he mixes it with something.  Wow, she really is watching him like a hawk.  "All right, now that needs to sit and dissolve before I can see the results."  He puts them down right there and hopes she'll get distracted in a bit.  "In the meantime, show me your shoulders."

It's pretty suspicious how he's putting things in her blood!! He didn't say he was going to do that! She's going to watch her blood extra carefully now, and try to pay attention to how she's feeling so she notices if he's cursed her or anything.

...It is also really suspicious that he wants her to show him her shoulders. It — it could be nothing, lots of people here dress differently than she's used to, but — well, back home it would've been a bad sign. Is it possible to pull up the sleeves of the shirt they gave her to show her shoulders without revealing anything  else except her arms?

She doesn't feel particularly cursed.  

Yes, she can pull the sleeves up past her shoulders - it's a bit uncomfortable, but the material stretches enough. 

"No smallpox vaccine mark, and if they didn't vaccinate you for that they didn't get anything else either. Well, you won't need that one any more," a flash of a grin in his generally grouchy face, "but I'll have to get you all the rest.  Tetanus first, I hear you've got an infected scrape already, but really we can just start all four of the important ones.  I'll write you a note for the vaccination center.  Have you had any serious illnesses? And stay like that, I need to take your blood pressure."  He wants to put an uncomfortably tight thing over her arm and count something for a minute.  Then he wants to weigh and measure her, while grumbling about how it won't be good data with the cast.  Then he wants to look in her throat, and her eyes, and her ears, still acting like all of this is completely normal.

"...No?" (She is implicitly thinking of 'serious illnesses' as something that kills you, or that would have killed you if it weren't for magic or for the gods saving you on their own. Even her lord's family wasn't important enough to have a third-circle priest, and she's never been sick enough to need a miracle.)

He can tie his weird thing around her arm and shine his tiny Light at her and take her measurements. She's only a little on the short side for a Chelish woman, but by Polish standards she's really surprisingly short for someone her age (or "age"), not even 150 centimeters tall. She's a little underweight, too, but less than one might expect given her height.

He looks at her skeptically about the illnesses, but leaves it alone, to avoid another lecture about demons or something. 

"You're short, I bet you haven't been eating right, we'll have to work on that."  When he's organizing all his various devices between one weird test and another, he also puts the blood vials in the fridge.

He is stealing her blood. He's not even being subtle about it. (Does he think she's, like, a stupid child? Even someone who totally believed the "it's not for summoning demons, I just need to look at it" story would still have noticed him hiding it away after saying he wouldn't!)

She grabs the knife and lunges for the fridge. She probably can't win the fight, especially not with the broken leg, but she might be able to get back her blood and make him really regret trying to steal it for Evil rituals. (Blood first, though, if she can get back the blood it'll at least stop him from, like, binding her soul to use as fuel for a construct of Hell. Unless you can still do that sort of thing with dead people's blood, she's not sure—)

(He does in fact think she's a stupid child.)

His first instinct is to lean against the fridge to keep it closed - she's a small girl, she doesn't register as a real threat, and there's a lot of important supplies in there.  "What the hell are you doing, put that down!"

In that case she's going to try to stab him!!

(This would probably be more effective if she didn't have a broken leg.)

He was treating this as a panicking girl situation, not as a combat situation, so she does succeed in stabbing him.  (He's going to feel like such an idiot about it later.)  That's enough for his long-unused combat instincts to kick in, so he has her pinned on the ground and the knife tossed in a corner only a few seconds after he shouted for help.

A few people run in.  He yells that the mad girl stabbed him with a knife, which sure explains the otherwise pretty bizarre situation.  One of the other men takes over holding her down; someone takes care of the doctor's bleeding while discussing with him whether this is an ambulance situation or a normal ER one.  A minute or two later the director comes in and takes charge - Agnieszka gets searched, not particularly gently, and they take away any objects they find.  Then a man picks her up over his shoulder, carries her to an empty room in the basement, and locks her in there, without the crutches or her rucksack or anything else.  He does turn the light on.  Nobody particularly hits her in the process.

They look through her rucksack and anything else she had on her, listen to the doctor's baffled explanation of how much she objected to things being done with her blood, and try to figure out what the fuck to do next, but it'll definitely take them at least a few hours.

She keeps trying to attack the people who come in to help the doctor-ritualist. She's fighting like her life depends on it, because as far as she knows it does, but there's only so much she can do once they've got her hands and functioning leg pinned, at least if they're staying out of biting range.

(Her clothing has no unexpected objects. Her rucksack has a waterskin, a couple of rolls of bread that look suspiciously similar to the bread they serve in the orphanage, and a few identical pieces of paper with a woman's face stamped on and — random squiggles? foreign writing? whatever it is, it doesn't look familiar — on both sides.)

They're going to kill her. If she's very lucky they'll just torture her to death, and use her blood for a ritual that's Evil but not damaging to her, but she probably won't be lucky. When it was just the doctor there was a chance that it was just him, that he had somehow kept it secret, but if everyone else is also in on it she's going to die. 

Is there anything in the basement? Ritual equipment she can try to destroy, or anything like that? It won't save her, but anything that hurts the ritualists is better than nothing. (Presumably they didn't leave her with a means of suicide.)

If she's fighting that much then it takes two or three people to get her down to the basement, with a lot of swearing, and probably someone does hit her in the process, just to get her to stop for a moment, not that it works.

All the effort is not great for her leg, either - it definitely hurts now, in a different way than whatever surface bruises and scrapes she picked up in the process.

There's nothing at all in the basement room, except a rounded light attached directly to the ceiling (not dangling down from it like some of the other ones she's seen), with some thin metal bars around it.  She could probably jump up to it if she tried, it's not a very high room.  The lightswitch is outside the door and she can't get to it.

... Well, that's going to be a longer conversation involving several people, some of them also with scratches and bruises.

"What the fuck just happened?"

"I don't know!  Andrzej said she thought he was stealing her blood for satanic rituals or something, and it's not like I don't believe him, but... what??"

"Either she's just crazy - she probably is, she bit me, the little bitch - or... she really did grow up in some kind of horrifying cult out in the woods?"

"If she did then why won't she just tell us??"

"If you grew up in some kind of horrible place and just got out and had no idea what the rest of the world was like, would you tell random strangers the truth?"

"Yes!!"

"Okay, maybe you would, but I sure wouldn't.  I'd be scared that everyone else is horrible too.  She's acting about like that.  She fought like she thought we were going to murder her or something!"

"I still think she's probably just crazy, but... yeah, you have a point."

"You both have a point, but that doesn't tell us what we're going to do with her!"

"Juvie, of course, she stabbed a man with a knife!  He's in the hospital, for fuck's sake!"

"Yes, I know that's really what's supposed to happen, but... can you imagine that going well?  I sure can't.  She's just going to stab someone there too, probably sooner rather than later given how the place is, and then what?"

"And then they'll put her in isolation and she'll be even less our problem!"

"Yeah, they will, and she'll go crazy if she isn't already, and - if she really is some abused kid from a fucked-up cult, I'm going to feel guilty about it when I retire, you know?  She doesn't need discipline like all those criminal kids in there, she needs - I don't even fucking know, she needs to make sense."

"Well, we sure can't keep her, can you imagine if this happens again?  With one of the smaller kids instead of a grown man?"

"I don't think she'd go for someone who didn't seem threatening to her..."

"Are you sure enough of that?"

"No, I'm not."

A sigh.  "Well, either way I think we need to report this to the police and let them talk to her about this fucked-up cult in the woods or whatever she's talking about."

"Much good it's going to do them. But yeah, you're right, if something like that is going on then someone needs to know."

Someone calls the police.  They'll be here in half an hour or so, and in the meantime everyone needs to try to get the rest of the kids calmed down and back on schedule, and also figure out how exactly they're going to question the girl without her trying to scratch everyone's eyes out again.

She is not going to try to jump for the caged Light. Even if she can manage it with a broken leg, she definitely can't do anything about the bars. She spends a couple of minutes trying to ineffectually dig her way out but gives up when it gets obvious that the basement is made of a weird kind of rock rather than a weird kind of dirt.

Yes, it's weird rock in all directions.  She can maybe scrape some plaster off the wall before getting to more weird rock.

In that case the next thing that happens, maybe an hour later, is a voice at the door.  "This is the police. We just want to talk to you, but if you try to attack us when we open the door it's not going to go well. Do you understand?"

She absolutely doesn't believe they're just going to talk to her but she can play along until they actually try to hurt her, they're probably ready for her to just try to attack them right away. She scoots back from the door so she'll notice if they try to get close. "I understand, sir."

The one looking through the keyhole approves of her backing away from the door, since it does make it look like she'd not going to fight them.  They unlock it, and two men in uniforms come in, not getting too close.  "Well, hello.  I hear there's been some... really confusing and unfortunate... things going on with you, and I would really like to figure out why.  Can you tell me why you attacked the doctor?"

They looked at her rucksack and clothes, and her waterskin of all things, and the weird foreign-looking papers, and it sure does seem like something iffy is going on, rather than just a teenager making things up to get away from her parents. 

"He tried to steal my blood, and he said he just needed to look at it, and that he wasn't going to use it for Evil rituals or anything, and he promised he'd keep it right where I can see so I could be absolutely sure he wasn't doing anything like that, and then he tried to sneak it off into his weird chest."

Probably they're working with him so probably they already know all of that, but if they're working with him it's not like telling them a bunch of things they already know is going to to make anything worse.

That sure does sound concerning so far!  "What sorts of evil rituals were you worried about?  Have you ever seen any?"

"...The kind you do with someone's blood? So like, using it to summon a demon, boiling their blood inside them, binding their soul to something to make it your magic slave forever, I think there's some kinds of undead you can only make that way, that sort of thing. There's probably lots of kinds I've never even heard of. I've never seen anyone do any of those, I think you have to be a pretty powerful caster to make them work."

Actually, it's kind of weird that the doctor didn't just use magic to make her stop. Maybe he just works for a ritualist, or maybe there's some you can do even if you're not that strong.

The other policeman jumps in with: "Girl, what are you going on about??"  Really, weird satanist cults are one thing, but... what

The other one is still attempting to have a calm conversation.  "Have you ever seen any other kinds of evil rituals, or people's blood being taken for rituals, or anything like that?"

...She'd kind of been planning on pretending to be from a normal country, where people worship Erastil and the other Good and Neutral gods and definitely not Asmodeus, so they don't think she's an Asmodean and try to have her executed for that. Only now she's not sure how much a normal person in a normal country would know about Evil rituals — actually, she might already have said too much for her story, some of those are things she heard about from her mom. 

"Not that specifically. I've seen ... Evil people casting regular spells, and people casting regular spells that make people bleed, and the ritual for laying a corpse to rest so it doesn't rise, but that one's not Evil, and... I think Mending might technically be a ritual?" There, she's pretty sure that's vague enough that if she wants to claim the priest was an Erastilian or something she can.

That still sounds disturbing, but in a... vague way.  "What sorts of regular spells?  Who were these Evil people?  Did you see them often?"

—Wait, no, she's an idiot. She already told them her name is Nessa, and even if they've never heard of any of the normal gods, if they ask anyone educated they'll figure out that something is up. It's... probably safer to let them think there were Evildoers running everything than that her family was especially bad and somehow no one had noticed even when they named their daughter Nessa? (Or they're working with the doctor, but in that case it doesn't matter either way.)

"The priest, and the laundry wizard." (Even in a normal country, she's assuming wizards, especially wizard men, would nearly always be Evil.) "We saw the laundry-wizard pretty often, he lived in the village, but the priest rode circuits so we didn't see him as often as that."

They keep asking so many questions, it's hard to keep track of them all at once. "They did Prestidigitation for the laundry, and Mending for fixing broken things, and healing-spells if someone was too injured to" serve Asmodeus "work, and spells for making water, and spells to hurt people if they were disrespectful or broke any rules or if they did extra badly in school but they didn't want to actually kill them, or... uh, those were the most common ones, I don't remember every spell I ever saw." And Detect Poison for detecting poison, but she's leaving that one out on purpose.

"...I always knew it was wrong to serve the Evil gods, obviously, I never served them in my heart, when the priest was in town I would try to act busy in the fields." (Is that an acceptable excuse in normal countries? She has no idea, but she can't think of a better one.)

What is even up with half of those spells?  They don't sound evil or particularly... magical...  Did whoever these people are have a laundry machine and tell everyone it was magic??

The second half of the spells is much more clearly an evil cult sort of thing.  "Did they ever kill anyone?"

"...Yes?" she says, in the tone of someone who thinks this is very obvious. She doesn't know what's normal in farming villages, but obviously in any village they'd sometimes be asked to help carry out a magistrate's sentence, or take offense at something a slave had done, or take enough offense at something a normal person had done that they can get away with having them killed, or be asked to kill an unborn child, or a born child who might rise if they're left in the field.

"Have you ever personally seen anyone killed?  Tell us everything about it."

...That really sounds like he thinks she might be partially guilty of murder. She's going to pick a real story, with a few details changed to fit her fake backstory, but make sure it's one where she really couldn't have done anything. 

"One time the priest found someone's baby lying out in a field while he was riding circuit, or at least that's what he said, and he gathered up all the women and gave a speech about — if you leave a baby outside to die, its spirit might linger and it might rise again as an undead, and the Good and Evil gods and Pharasma all know that's wrong, if you want to kill your baby you should come to him while you're still pregnant, or if you're too scared for that you should kill it quickly so it's less likely to rise. And then he cast one of his spells, the one that makes people start bleeding, and usually it wouldn't kill someone right away, but babies are so small, it was dead before anyone could have done anything. And then he prayed for Asmodeus to take up its soul so that at least it could be less useless than its parents, and he made the mother, or who he guessed was the mother" not that it was hard to figure out, but it might have been for a circuit-priest "dig a grave, on top of her other work, and he brought the laundry wizard to clean up the blood."

There are so many things wrong with that!!  "That's horrifying."

"And also, to be clear, illegal! Nobody should be murdering babies!"  And people even more shouldn't be giving fucked up sermons about it!

"So, who is this... Asmodeus, you said? What's the religion like?"

(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."