"How often don't you like people?"

“Does it still, like, count, if Kamin resurrects them right after?”

"Do you kill every person you don't like."

“Nah. If I got super hardcore about it I’d, like, start pinging evil, and then I’d be a devil when I died and being a devil sounds kinda okay but then you’re around other devils all the time and they’re assholes! And you can get sacrifices and stuff but I bet most of them aren’t, like, fun to be around, or they’d do that thing where Kamin was really scared of me at first all the time. All of the cool things you can be when you die kinda seem like they actually suck.”

(Kamin stares intently at Zeke; this also often happens on other occasions, but this time it’s accompanied by magical sparkles.)

"Yeah I'm definitely not going to be anything special and I'm entirely fine with this.  - Hey, can you do anything for fatigue or do I need to hold off on frost stuff in order for us to be good to go later."

“I can manage it pretty well but I’m not as miraculous with it as I am with injuries, it might be better to avoid it? - oh, um, and Jade wants me to mention that he had a dream vision last night saying that we’re going to get into a conflict with Alexander the Wolf Prince? It didn’t occur to him until just now, apparently, dreams can be slippery that way.”

"What - level . . . of vision-y.  Like, plausibly just a weird dream or definitely, for sure, this will happen; where are we on that scale."

“Jade says that if it isn’t true it’s going to be in a ‘deliberately malicious or misleading vision’ way, and not a ‘weird dream’ way. It was communicated by Madame Bakir, apparently, so that’s... a note in favor of it being some odd manipulative thing, probably, if her reputation is accurate? - it’s really very strange that these are people that we can casually interact with and I don’t understand why we’d be dealing with southerners when we’re all the way up here.”

"And here just when I was thinking maybe it wouldn't be the actual worst thing to be stuck all irretrievably tangled up with you guys."

“Harsh.”

“I - think that’s a reasonable emotional reaction to have? The past few days haven’t been a pleasant stroll and the next few days presumably won’t be either, it’s very reasonable to be upset about it.”

"I consider myself a reasonable person.  Do we have any idea why you've attracted attention from high-level adventurers from the opposite side of the entire godsdamned continent."

“Um. No? - and I don’t think that the bard would’ve gotten you involved at all if you weren’t going to be already, and that seems supported by the fact that you were then murdered - and I think that we also count as high level adventurers, although less so - and Jade says that Madame Bakir claimed to ‘want us unharmed by the attention of a rival’, that rival being the wolf prince, so if we believe her then we only need to explain why the wolf prince cares about us? 

"That's a big 'if'.  I could transmute that 'if' into like a pound of gold.  From how big it is."

“I wonder if she really eats babies. Probably there are, like, any people who think that I eat babies, and I don’t.”

“I think that every powerful goblin is accused of being pointlessly awful with very little justification and I don’t expect Madame Bakir to be an exception. Presumably she’s, um, within regular-awfulness range, I haven’t seen any verified reports of her pinging properly evil? - or, well, Jade hasn’t, he pays more attention to major psions than I do. But then people who are regular amounts of evil are also often untrustworthy, especially when they’re best known for being invisible teleporting mind control people.”

"Is there anything we should do about this this instant or can I go back to beating up slash getting beat up by your boyfriend."

“The second one, I think?”

They count off again;  Jace shoots off at an angle and dodges two of Zeke's attacks, then activates zero-grav, gets below him, and blasts him up with some wind while following a fair distance behind him until they're both quite high before doubling gravity.  She's too high for him to jump up to in doubled gravity, but he gets out of her radius and comes at her from above through the side of it, landing a hit that shatters her shoulder.

On the third round Jace flies parallel to the ground and Zeke leaps after her, landing a bone-breaking hit; on the fourth, she aims straight up again but still gets tackled immediately.

And Kamin can heal them up after each round! They don’t even need to stop by the little pillar he’s perched on, each time, touch-healing is easier but he can do it from just about anywhere in sight.

The fact that his boyfriend is extremely, ludicrously good at hurting people continues to be both distressing and erotic.

"Alright, fifth time's the charm let's go."

“I only have one working strategy here and I’m getting kinda fidgety? Like, jumping up super high and breaking bones is fun and stuff, but it’s sorta repetitive.” 

"Fair enough, yeah.  You wanna keep going with different rules or go do something else?"

“Let’s do something else. Wanna... go watch a talky, or something?”

(Kamin has, at this point, scampered over in their general direction.)

“That would work for me?”