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.
"Not just rude. Disgusting. Better if the floor's magically perfectly clean but it's still an insult, see? - I'm not reading your mind. I'm just you, and very old."
" - we are here to try to solve a mystery, the mystery being who sent you all here. We'd rather you feel free to mention anything you think of, on that front. What we know so far is that Anaander here, I, a friend of Mirelótë here, and an acquaintance of another man who arrived here earlier today all have interesting similarities in personality and abilities, adjusted for our species and life circumstances and so on. Do you have six younger siblings -"
"Good at music, hates civilization, good at economics, strikingly like your mother or your father, twins -"
"Aww, there's no need to be formal with him, he's too confused and overawed to exercise any authority anyway."
"Silence," he says, gesturing at a spot behind Anaander with his holy symbol.
"She's being obnoxious," Mirelótë tells the new one, "because she's been cut off from her hive mind and doesn't feel like accomplishing anything here instead."
"We don't have hive minds. We don't have truth magic, or - silencing magic, or cleaning magic. We don't have faster than light travel, we do have colonies on our moons -"
"She's got enhancements that make her effectively telepathic with a lot of other bodies she has so they can coordinate as though they're one distributed entity. My impression is that she's the only person doing this even in her own world."
"We're a little worried maybe the hivemind thing has concerning side effects."
"Well. I will not attempt it.
Is there some commonality greater than the interests of siblings -"
"We think so. Not very obvious because of the different life circumstances but - Mirelótë, you said you noticed some similarities when you were looking?"
"If I compare you to the other humans around the ways you look individual as a member of the population are the same. The wanting to know people's names. The occasional turn of phrase."
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