She is slower than the mirror-faced snake, and for some reason it is choosing to chase her, and she is not in dense enough forest to lose it by going up a tree or between a couple too narrowly spaced for it. So it catches her before emergency services can turn up.
And then she is somewhere else, in a not particularly attractive room next to a person who looks sort of off somehow.
"Excuse me," she says, taking a step out of his personal space.
"...I mean they need food and water and conversation and a way to productively employ themselves if it's going to be a long-term thing but for a short term one, yes, they are."
"We can have him released onto the streets of Sothis if we want to but we can't bring him here."
"I think he probably isn't. But the law is that palace security doesn't go off my personal judgments, it goes off whether they are willing to affirm some facts about their intent."
"Said he might be more sure he didn't intend to hurt us if we hadn't attacked him. Which is fair, but means we can't meet him."
"I guess it must seem that way. I wouldn't expect anyone from my plane to parse it that way. Law enforcement arresting you is not doing the same sort of thing as you are if you attack them. And teleporting into someone's home, even accidentally, is the sort of situation you had better be willing to resolve with a lot of reassurances about your intent."
"If you'd decided to throw me in prison over some initial confusion I would have died."
"We do ask first. What species someone is, and if it's a familiar species whether they need their magic either to live or to care for themself. If we didn't know the species we'd ask you what was safe."
"Do you want to? We'll send someone, and you might be advantaged by not working for the people he's annoyed with."
"Maybe it'll be easily cleared up but supposing it's not I'm happy to try."
"Thank you. And perhaps we can think of something more reassuring to do for the next person, if there's another one."
"How'd you choose what magic to try, it was different between me and him."
"The spell we tried on you was much more dangerous. If you'd been unlucky it might've killed you and if you'd been an enemy it would hopefully have made you unable to fight the guards. Nothing like this had ever happened before so I was reacting to it as an extraordinary threat. When he arrived we had some reason to think it was another random accident, so we used a spell that couldn't possibly have hurt him but that would've been a worse choice if it was an attempted assassination."
"We could get an arcane caster in here to put people to sleep. We could use spells like Dictum which will kill nonlawful people. We could get someone in here who can use nonlethal force rays. We could...turn them into toads, which I'd expect to be far more threatening than Hold Person but which I mention for the sake of completeness."
"Well. Given your options the thing you did makes sense but if another Quendi shows up maybe prefer sleep to the immobilization thing."
Nod.
An attendant leaves, presumably to implement this.
"Are all Quendi going to be lawful good, they sort of sound it."
"The alignment system that sorts us into afterlives also characterizes people who are still alive. You parse to it as lawful good, which is imperfectly reassuring but somewhat reassuring about your intentions and motives and so on. You describe a whole species of people who worship good gods and never break laws, which sounds like maybe they are all lawful good like you. If they were, then it'd be entirely safe to use spells that only harm lawless or evil people on them."
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