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 know what that means to you. She is not going to try to assassinate you with her fists."
Then he can show her where the rest of her alternates are.
The palace is weird. All the men are in uniform and all the women are barely wearing anything.
"Do you want to make any addenda to Anaander's notes more tailored to our cultural perspective?"
"These people are all obsessed with gender. Like - the pharaoh has to be a boy, if anyone wants to talk to his wives they have to be a girl, they only have schooling for boys. When we discussed this a bit they attributed it to the lack of birth control but that can't be the whole story, it doesn't do enough explaining itself. I suspect the rest of the explanation is that they spring more frequently or something, because they were quite insistent that many babies are abandoned to starve on account of no one particularly wanting them, and because Anaander says you can manage human population growth rates with very very soft incentives.
The other visitors are more normal, even the one who is like the locals a human. The one who is a human suspects the pharaoh - and the rest of us, though less saliently than the pharaoh, I think - of secretly being supremely manipulative rapists, because the one he met in his own world was. That one's not here. Just Khemet, Anaander, and me."
"Wow, okay, yikes. Are they going to be weird about me for being a girl even though they presumably have very little idea that I'm a grey, I can't catch a break."
"I think the pharaoh is trying to be as open-minded as he perceives himself able to get away with but I don't actually know that that's very. They haven't been particularly insistent about their gender thing at Anaander but she is, or claims to be, one body of a hive mind with a million hosts that rules over a thousand-planet empire, and maybe their laws about women are easier to waive in that case.
- I'll do what I can, if you run into trouble."
"And there are your alternates. I'm going to leave; Cor understandably would rather not have us around being reminiscent and aware of his existence. The pharaoh has cameras - well, magic cameras - here."
"Magic cameras? How much coverage has he got with the magic cameras?"
"- hello, welcome. Effectively wherever, it's actually an ability to remotely view wherever he likes. I'm Mirelótë, that's Cor, that's Cam."
"My magic doesn't work here and a disturbing number of people around here have my rapey ex's personality."
"I meant for me, I'll miss my family but I wasn't doing anything important."
"Hereditary social construct signaled with hair color that limits what jobs we can do. Mine's cops and soldiers and athletes and sex work. It lets you specialize your education system."
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