"Yeah. I guess I am."

"Thought I'd head south first. No real reason to expect the gate to be in any direction but they thought it'd be safer than north, and I'm not much good in a fight right now."

"Makes sense. I imagine we'll want to give fights a wide berth for at least the next decade or so. Presumably eventually Verita will be able to defend herself from something stronger than a housecat, but I'm not counting down the days."

"You, too, if you keep up -" handwave. "Dunno what the progression is like for whatever you are."

"Yeah, I guess. Pretty unclear on what that is."

"Maybe it's got Regenerate on its spell list."

"Maybe so. Don't hold your breath, but - I'll see what I can do."

"Course. 

I'm mostly not, uh, moping. Just came up recently, I guess."

"Yeah, I know. I'd miss a hand a lot, if I lost one, and I don't even have any idea how to use a bow when I've got two of them. But you'll get along."

"Yeah."

"Yeah. 

"Anyway, uh. So long. I'll, uh, see if I can get Fazil and Mahdi set up for long, happy existences that will hopefully not end at death."

"Thank you. It means a lot to me."

They court some girls! It goes well. There are cultural confusions other than the local insistence that it's wrong to have extramarital relationships even when they're with people of the same sex, but not too many of them.

Oh good. Then eventually she and Verita can attend some weddings, since Osirians and the locals are both, by her standards, weirdly quick about this?

Well, if you wait longer than it takes to establish compatibility and mutual interest and so on then you might be tempted to do something stupid. And what is there even to wait for, at that point? 

You could, like, want to determine that the person has generally good judgement in a lot of different situations, or have to know someone pretty well before you feel comfortable moving in with them or spending all of your time around them, or want to make it harder for anyone to fake their entire personality for long enough to marry someone? But obviously this is not her call and they can all do whatever they want.

She'll attend their weddings and wish them well, and then she and Verita can set off with Hagan.

"Do you worry about that? People faking their personality for long enough to get married?"

"I mean I didn't very much in Cheliax? But in Cheliax people can leave. And also we usually take several years to entangle each other in terms of finances and social ties and offspring, so it's a lot more infeasible."

"Some people here leave. Not - it doesn't seem like they've totally stopped believing in commitment, like Cheliax, but - it's not Osirion either."

"Yeah, no, I was just thinking - if I lived in Osirion I think I'd worry. But maybe I'm just a kind of paranoid person. It's just - it'd be really scary to think you were marrying one person and then find out that they've been aggressively cultivating which parts of them you saw, and actually they're really very different when they're not doing that."

"I guess. I dunno, I feel like most people aren't that good at lying."

"They're not. But if you spend enough time with someone, then eventually there are so few people who are good enough at lying that it isn't worth worrying about it at all, and I'm not sure a handful of chaperoned dates meets that bar.

"Anyway, the way we do things isn't mostly about this. I just remember older people telling me not to marry anyone until I'd dated them for a year, both because that lets you look at their judgement and behavior in a fairly wide variety of life circumstances, and because it's basically impossible to fake your entire personality for a year."

"I guess that makes sense. I definitely - wouldn't like someone if I hadn't seen them handle themselves well in combat situations. But that's not about time exactly."

"Yeah. I think the time thing is just a proxy for - you should know and trust someone, a lot, before you start planning to spend the rest of your life with them."

Nod.