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.
"Yeah, it seems like one of the better things to do if you're a drow. No mortal race is inherently evil, of course, you can just design societies that make almost everyone in them do evil things all the time."
"I was born a little too late to have a really good test case of my moral iconoclasm available."
"Okay, so who knows how we'd do in an evil society, but they could just in fact be asleep."
"It's kind of complicated and I'm getting the sense you don't have the kind of social context in which it'll make any sense and I don't want to ask questions about who cleans your sewers because I suspect the answers will distress me."
"'It's kind of complicated' means he's very proud of it and doesn't know how to spin it well. Sort of like the pharaoh with the slave reforms, he put an astonishing amount of effort in and they've improved things immensely and he hasn't said anything because most places just don't have slavery and he doesn't know how to frame the reforms to properly impress you. Khemet saw the analogy and -" he glances questioningly at his husband.
"I think I probably would be impressed, since I had the analogy, but figured we could talk about it later. Anaander - inferred more than me -"
"They've got a caste system, they've got purity laws, he doesn't think you have anything analogous because you probably let people clean your sewers and then walk around your streets, in another couple catastrophic pandemics you'll evolve better instincts but you evidently don't have them yet - they had a caste for sewage. Your slave reform was a pretty good analogy, really. They had a caste for sewage workers, maybe related work, and they have colonies, but not FTL, which means they should've had robotics just starting to get good enough they could get rid of the sewage caste."
"We weren't that close. The reds noticed the obvious implications of robots getting usably good."
"We would've gotten there in my lifetime but there would've been - there already was, actually - enormous bloodshed about it."
"One answer to my question - why involve yourself with something risky and messy and with the potential for backlash of that - would've been that it was a high stakes bet because he wouldn't have had a chance at power otherwise, or that he expected the bloodshed to destabilize the country. I found his answer interesting because it wasn't those. Almost the opposite. He was going to be in charge anyway and he thought through how he'd have to do it and - decided it'd be better to die trying not to."
"Have you got one of his cousin Isel here, she did stuff, I hear there's a statue of her."
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