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 don't remember the self-defense specification from my interrogation."
"They might be getting twitchier." Sigh. "They have an unforgiving job even when they're not dealing with -" handwave - "this. Almost all of the time they've just wasted someone's time and then sometimes they might've just endangered the whole country."
"Does it come up often that people might be inclined toward violent self-defense around here?"
"I noticed. I offered to give him money to go live somewhere else but he pointed out he doesn't know the language."
"As adults? Some will be fluent in a couple of months with intensive practice and continual exposure and some never quite get to fluency."
"Well, if you don't have a portable magic translation option maybe I should learn it, and his language too - whenever people stop falling on our laps - shouldn't take more than a couple of days apiece to get conversational if I can keep Fe-Anar from getting sidetracked in the process though that may be optimistic - and then I can go with him until he's competent enough at it to be comfortable? And translate the book when he doesn't require help."
"We don't have good portable magic translation to spare, no. That sounds ...fine...in Osirion it'd be inappropriate to be living with a stranger of the opposite gender, but I don't know the norms where you're from?"
"Because if people are living with someone of a different gender they might betray their spouse, or it might look like they did, or someone else might say they did and this would be difficult to rebut."
"...well, if the locals are really curious about whether I'm sleeping with Cor for some reason I can swear to it that I'm not but perhaps this doesn't work well when people don't know Elves to have this feature. I'm not sure why the locals would be really curious about that. Rúmil certainly won't waste a moment wondering about it if we ever see each other again and his is the opinion that would matter. I don't think Cor has a spouse but I suppose I did not get his complete life story."
"I wasn't really worried about the local opinion, just your husband's. I guess locals will consider both of you disreputable sorts of people but I wouldn't expect that to harm you."
"As long as they don't refuse to rent him an apartment or sell us groceries I can cope with it if they're rude, I don't know whether Cor's own mores will care about the object level or the social backlash though. Do people really marry people who they'd expect would just... fall into bed with someone else they are around for unrelated reasons... on a routine basis, enough that there are customs around it -"
"I think that lots of people might make one bad mistake once. It would be awfully tragic if they had to go their whole lives alone, instead of just abiding by some rules that ensure they can't make a bad mistake once."
"About thirty percent of normal humans in monogamous human marriages cheat at some point."
"Feels like a long time to us. I think the rate's much much lower than that in Osirion, but that's because we put a lot of effort into lowering it."
"It searches for something roughly analogous but can be off by a factor of two."
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