Someone is curled up asleep in the temple in the floating starscape that normally holds Chaos. She's nestled in a blanket made of a different set of stars, looking as still and peaceful as death is supposed to be, for people that actually find that debilitating or something. Her hair is long and loose and a brilliant (and somewhat unnatural) shade of red, and she's almost unnaturally beautiful. Not quite up to Aphrodite levels of impossible, overwhelming beauty, but the sort of thing that would put paintings to shame. If a little inhuman, and not in the ways the denizens of the Underworld usually are.

And with little warning, a peculiar young man arrives. The sclera of his right eye are as pitch-black as his hair, and his right iris glows red. He wears laurels of red and orange, flickering leaves floating away like embers from a bonfire. His feet are bare, and one could be excused if they believed they were made of molten magma, although the effect fades to normal (if somewhat more faded than usual) skin up his ankles, which are mostly hidden by iron shinguards topped by an iron skull at the knee level. A long piece of cloth, blood-red and dark grey, is carefully wrapped around his torso in a chiton, attached to his body by a belt of skulls and a similarly macabre shoulderpad. He has a red, faintly glowing sword attached to his hip, and his gait as he regains his composure after whatever event transported him there belies intimate familiarity with the weapon.

He takes a couple of steps towards the sleeping figure before he notices her and stops in his tracks as soon as he does. "Well, you're new," he says, furrowing his eyebrows. "Uh, in the name of Hades, who... are you?"

A single white-gold eye opens on the blanket, to look at him. Then the blanket flits away into nothingness beneath the woman like a shadow confronted with light, and she opens her eyes and sits up. Her eyes are a much more ordinary hazel, though still subtly more inhuman than the recently dead, or someone from Elysium.

"Hello. I'm Yvette." She tilts her head and looks at him. "You're not of this place, you're... from further up."

"I... suppose you could put it that way. My name is Zagreus."

"Well, it's nice to meet you. How did you get here? I highly doubt it was the way I got here." She looks around, and spots the portal. "Oh, I see. That hadn't been there earlier. .... Why is it so sharp."

He looks up at where she's staring then back at her, blinking. "It looks pretty round from where I'm standing."

"No, I mean, it bites. It doesn't even need to! Someone just made it that way because they could! That's very rude."

"Oh, yeah. That would be Chaos. I believe the little trinket they gave me would let me bypass that inconvenience."

“Biting should be opt-in, not opt-out,” she sniffs. “That’s how consent works, Chaos!”

He laughs. "I opted in when I decided to step through the portal."

Her eyes flash the same white-gold of the earlier eye on the blanket. “Yes, but you’ve done this before. Did Chaos explain the mechanism of the portal biting before the very first time you hopped into it?”

"Well... no, but somehow I knew anyway," says Zagreus, furrowing his eyebrows again.

She considers this, looking a bit petulant. Then she crosses her arms and huffs a sigh.

“... Fine. I guess that counts as informed consent. I apologize for my incorrect assumption, and I’m sorry for raising my voice.”

She gets the understanding that she is forgiven, with a slight undertone (that would be amusement if amusement were the kind of thing Chaos was wont to express) that it's harder to offend them than calling their portals "nonconsensually sharp".

And from Zagreus's snicker he received the same memo.

“Well even if I didn’t offend you I was due to give an apology anyway. Out of principle.”

No response seems forthcoming this time.

"It is probably a good idea to err on the side of being too polite when dealing with gods," Zagreus says, nodding. "Even when one is themself a god...?" he adds, tilting his head in Yvette's direction.

She furrows her brows.

“Do I seem like a god? Well. I suppose I might be. I don’t know. I’m not the same kind as you, though.”

"More like Chaos? Or the Titans?"

“... Closer, but I’m still not like them. I’m not from your world at all. And most of me isn’t even here. Not that I’d come, the place above seems so sticky.”

"Sticky."

“It’s not nice to poke fun at people who need more practice at talking,” she sniffs. “Yes. Sticky. It doesn’t want to let anything go.”

"That it doesn't. He... doesn't... Anyway."

“You sound aggravated. Are you trying to get out?” She squints at him, her eyes flashing gold again. “Oh, no wonder, that’s offensive. You were just born here!”