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.
"Might be reflecting. They sing a lot. Anybody ever told you slavery is bad, just tossing that out there."
"Beautiful voice. I would liked to have gotten any clarifications in but I imagine it's a lot to take in from - from the world that she described starting out in.
Slavery is pretty bad. Most punishments for serious crimes are pretty bad, though."
"What do you know, she didn't mention the mind control. Mind control is illegal here without an advance agreement with witnesses."
"'mind control' explains a lot about Valinor as described, actually." Sigh. "It sounded very nice. No crimes and no need for security and no one ever dies."
"If I go around swearing to things falsely I lose my afterlife and my powers, you know."
"I have a spell called Tongues that permanently gives me the ability to understand, and be understood by, anybody. Someone also cast it on you for the interrogation, probably, but yours will last about an hour."
"Well. The obvious loophole is that there could just be some thing already around fucking with my magic that you're taking advantage of. Nobody acting on your orders, just something that was already here when you showed up."
"They would, I assume, have moved you outside the dome to try to go home?"
He asks this of someone.
"That's the only plausible candidate."
"Plus, like, the other obvious loophole of you just wholesale bullshitting me. Elves do binding oaths, but you're not an Elf."
"But they have lawful gods - I guess they don't have any clerics." Shrug. "I can't persuade you. Do you want a guest room in the palace or enough spending money for a year?"
"Still don't speak the language. The Elves just all learned mine starting with this one ridiculous language genius guy on top of being telepathic, but if you've got humans instead I'm going to probably have some kind of issue and it'd be very embarrassing to come crawling back."
Blink blink.
-
"We've got mostly humans and no Quendi at all. We'll make arrangements for you here."
"If my friends show up on purpose looking for me they'll be the ones with blood and ashes doodled all over themselves and I'd rather you didn't terrify them."
"I would also rather not terrify them! We have made arrangements to have sleep spells on hand in addition to the paralysis, will that be any better?"
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