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.
"Pretty sure there are no laws at all here. I'm not enjoying it as much as I'd have expected to but I can at least have this."
"Well? What do you think? - I didn't have any sudden revelations or anything but when I thought about what to do next I thought of 'ask Matt what the country and city he and Elizabeth are from is like so I have more context on what they consider appropriate and acceptable' instead of 'kick the grass a lot', so."
"Um. I - feel like when Elizabeth gets back I should maybe talk over her plans with her and see if they make any sense, and get a better sense of her power set and priorities and - the ways in which we're similar, and what she can be relied on to do and what we need to be keeping track of ourselves. And determine whether I have any skills she doesn't have and whether I should be, like, nurturing those so I don't remain almost entirely useless. I guess."
" - you observably have a buncha skills she doesn't have and are also taking care of all of the other ones. You're not useless."
"The other ones'll probably calm down and stop acting like scared rabbits in a couple days. Dunno what I'll do with myself then."
" - you can have it back, if you want. It seems like a really important thing to have."
"Yeah. Thanks for letting me try it."
She hands it back.
"Learn anything super interesting from Matt?"
"Their city is nothing like their planet, it's kind of weird. Their city has all kinds of nonsense - Connor was saved from some zombies by Elizabeth, thus the weird slavery situation; my family is fairies; Elizabeth's sister is a ghost, Elizabeth's niece is a werewolf -
- the rest of the world, as far as Matt knows, doesn't know about any magic or any other species and doesn't believe zombies, ghosts, fairies, or werewolves exist. No gods, either. - well, lots of people believe in gods but the dominant religions are all pretty inconsistent with the stuff that has been going on and no gods who choose clerics or do the kind of predictable miracles you might show a skeptic or anything. They dunno if they even have an afterlife."
"It seems to be working out all right for them! They're very - most places've banned slavery and they have democracies that have actually been around long enough you can't say 'democracy is a cute idea but Andoran sure looks like it's going to crash and burn' anymore, and they gave women the vote a while back and that worked fine, too. Very rich. Lots more technology than us. They mostly have the usual sexual liberalism divorce-is-fine dump-your-babies-overboard thing except until very recently they loathed same-sex relationships, which were banned most places and deeply scandalous in all the rest of them, and which are now banned in only about half of all the places. There's a big liberation movement featuring rainbow flags."
"Matt was funny. He prefers men, right, and plans to never ever act on this in any way outside of fairyland until it's clear if the swing in public opinion is sticky. I thought that was ridiculous but it's - it's the don't-make-medium-sized-mistakes instinct without the divine power and enhancements and advisors to actually get somewhere sane with it.
- fairies don't have any taboos about sex whatsoever but I'm cutting them a tiny bit of slack since they also can't bear children while in fairyland so they're, you know, going to be more like outsiders than like us about that kind of thing."
"I guess that makes sense. By 'none whatsoever' you mean - literally none?"
"I mean I am a nice sheltered Osirian and there might be kinks I have not heard of and didn't think to ask about."
"Right, sorry, I'm just - trying to accurately adjust my impression of how worried about Cecelia and her kids I should be."
"Did ask about that. Got 'I've asked some fairies if they were sexually attracted to kids and none of them were so I suspect it's kind of unusual'."
"Yeah. I dunno what to - I know they're not now, but I'm not very confident the fairy's not going to accidentally make more terrible decisions."
"Yeah. -'s part of why the pharaoh left, she looked terrified the whole time and she desperately needs some people to talk to who don't have terrifying amounts of power over her."
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