"You two are flipped too, everyone's flipped, it's weird. Anyway. It's not Isabella, it's me, and I know I should have gotten the Valar to fix it but I didn't and I don't want to now -"

"Oh, dear, no, you shouldn't have -"

"You wanted to be Queen that badly?"

"...yeah kind of but also I'm testing you for being Maira, it's not really very fair of me -"

"Okay."

"...did she have some kind of consistent reaction to this sort of thing or what?"

"Not consistent but - things being horrible for some reason was likelier than everything being great once I was home -"

"Ah."

"...can I tell people that, or -"

"Yeah. Things not being horrible stops being evidence now that I've said I'll take it as such, but on the other hand now things won't be horrible."

"We love you, sweetheart. We want you to be happy."

"Yeah, everyone wants me to be happy and I want to not have been a net negative part of their lives, it's sort of annoying how that works out."

"It would, I'm sure, be very suspicious if you woke up one day to discover that no one cared about your well-being."

" - it'd be more suspicious than this, but it'd also mean a closer alignment between 'what I do if this is real' and 'what I do if I'm not sure?' I could just - leave, and go get citizenship somewhere badly managed and make friends and fix things and eventually run for office -"

"Ah. I mean, you could also do that now but we'd miss you."

"Yeah exactly. If this is real the thing to do is to be the best daughter and sister and girlfriend ever, to make up for what I've put everyone through, I owe people that -"

"I don't actually hold you responsible for anything I've been put through, if that was unclear."

"My alts do. At least partially. And they'd know, so-"

"It is not up to them what you owe me."

"But they know what I can handle."

"They do have the advantage of me in not needing to hope to be informed one day, I suppose."

"I'm sorry. I told you all I know."

Sigh. Hug.

"You can ask them if it helps."