"Well, I suppose I hope you find it enlightening. If you have any further questions I am usually glad for conversation. - who was the other woman with you, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Korva was pulled through in the same magic accident; we didn't know each other prior to that."

"Huh. Well, let her know that if she has any questions I'll be glad to answer hers, too. Although if she doesn't speak our language I  suppose that might take more translation work. I can try helping her learn enough of ours to get by, too."

"I can give you ours, tomorrow, if you'd like that, but long-term she should learn the language, probably."

"Oh? How does that work?"

"I did it for the Archpriestess. It shares my knowledge of a language with you. I can do it more often but I have to prepare it, first, I don't have it prepared right now."

"Instantly? How do you achieve that?"

"I am not sure what you mean by that. I'm a wizard. It's a divination. It uses a page from a dictionary as a component but I carry one, because I talk to people from other countries a lot for my work. It's - we classify spells by their complexity and power, and it's second circle, which means that novice wizards can't cast it, but a good student of five or ten years would usually be able to."

"Where does the power come from."

"From - the world? Arcane energy's just there, it's in every living thing and there's a little bit of it in the background in most places, and you learn how to hold onto more of it as you become a more powerful wizard. There are kinds of casters who made a deal with something but wizards didn't make a deal with anything, we just study how to use it until it does what we want."

"Hmm. I'll try learning it the slow way for now, I think. Thank you for explaining. Perhaps I can learn more about what you're doing later."

"Of course." She is so curious what the woman is thinking but she's not going to do that, these people act like they couldn't identify a spell to save their lives but she should not bet hers on that. "Thank you."

And she goes looking for Korva.

Korva could not find anything to do with herself, and then got nervous about that, and now is spinning thread next to Ýrr.

She wants to bounce her understanding of the weird local god situation off someone, but now that she's thinking what to say it sounds kind of dangerous to say it. She chews her lip for a while, thinking.

"You and Catherine look alike."

"Yeah."

"She wanted to maybe learn the language, and teach you, if you're up for that."

"I guess I don't have anything else to do. Or - guess I can always do that and spin at the same time anyway.

"I was lying, before. When I said I couldn't think of any reason I might have been brought here. I did think of something. It's a very stupid thought, but I had it. And it seems less stupid now than it did."

She looks unsurprised. "Oh?"

She keeps looking down at her work.

"I know someone who's an aasimar. Not - actively an agent of Heaven, or anything, but obviously there's the potential for it. And I wondered if it was related, but - why, right, why randomly bring someone who knows an aasimar somewhere and not bring the aasimar themselves?

"But she's an aasimar who looks exactly like the Archpriestess. And I don't know what that means."

" - huh. 

Catherine had - some interesting things to say about religion here." She feels more comfortable saying it now that she unequivocally has more on Korva than vice versa. "She worships - secretly, I think, it's not one of the legal gods here, this Lawful Good god who did some kind of shenanigan involving having and sacrificing a son whereby all His followers go to Heaven even if they're not good. And they think they're going to beat Hell, and I want to ask them why but they don't have any clerics here, maybe far south."

"Huh.

"That's - I don't think I really know what to make of that."

"Me neither. It - I guess if this is some plot of Heaven it's promising if there's some agent of Heaven who wants to smuggle Evil people in instead of destroying them. 

And - maybe they could win, right, if they could do that - because probably most people'd choose to go to Heaven if you didn't have to be Good for it, because the biggest advantage Evil has is that people are Evil -" 

" - I guess so. I'm trying to think who - and why us, if it was intentional, it seems like it must have been intentional, given - if there's some kind of connection - maybe they can only do it to people who have some kind of - bizarre interplanar connection to the Archpriestess, I don't know, I don't know much of anything about how high-level magic works - 

"If that's the case, what do we - do, about it?"

"I don't know! And I don't know any aasimar, either, so I'm still not sure why I'm here. Maybe just to make sure you don't get killed?"

"Maybe? I - guess I wouldn't have had any way of finding this place alone - "