A second ago she was at work in the temple of Erastil in Sothis, which was actually going pretty okay, all things considered. Now she's in a grassy field with a couple fruit trees and a table and chairs and some notebooks and pens.
This is unexpected and requires a ton of power and is therefore sort of inherently terrifying. And she's alone, and defenseless, and she doesn't know where Verita is.
She mills around in steadily increasing amounts of distress until Hagan appears, just as suddenly.
"I mean, even if she was, almost no one likes ending an interaction with someone they're going to have to keep interacting with on an angry note. The thing to do is to gracefully walk it back so that everyone can more readily pretend it never happened."
"Osirion is a desert, horses mostly can't handle it. I've ridden a camel?"
"Maybe archery is a better analogy? Some things sound like they are lots and lots of effort and distinct thought and precision when you're describing them, but once you've practiced at them they're instinctive."
"'I'm going to blame my upbringing. It was amazingly deficient in people who'd actually argue with me.' And then 'this is what I liked about Fazil when we first met', or something like that, to establish it's a friends-category thing."
"You can't do that with a woman. And - I don't actually want anything with her except for her to stop being mad at me. I'm not going to marry someone who worships Asmodeus. I'm not - trying to get anything. I just wish I didn't keep offending her."
"You can absolutely have female friends-with-benefits in societies that don't fuck up women's lives over it. Just so you know."
"I mean you can get them to do it, especially if there's no men worth marrying around, but it's not good for them."
"Nah. But that's because she's, like, insecure and doesn't understand why anyone would like her and expects to feel stupid if she ever trusts anyone and wouldn't really enjoy herself, and also because I'm not totally sure you wouldn't think less of her for it."
"Hmm. So - my world has a kind of guy who repeatedly feels himself to have fallen in love with sex workers and wants to save them, because in his worldview they are obviously victims, and I do not think you are making exactly this mistake but it seems like a category of mistake you might want to be aware of -"
"I'm pretty sure I don't want to date her because of the Asmodeus thing and the thing where I cannot even talk to her.
I don't think less of her for doing the thing that's normal in her society except insofar as I do think that the Chelish way of thinking about relationships is actually bad for people. I don't really care at all who she's been with. If someone doesn't share your values around sex you cannot marry them into sharing your values and it'd be stupid to try. I don't actually know that she doesn't share my values around sex, maybe she's never killed any kids. None of this matters because she doesn't like me. I would like to fix the thing where she doesn't like me and then I have no idea how anything else would work out but like - it'd be fine, if it didn't, if I wasn't making her mad all the time."
"Okay. Well, good fortune. - we all have a bunch of misfortune now, remember, makes random things go wrong."
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