“DEMON!” Lucy yells, pointing at him.

Well, that’s not great.

Yelling “demon” in Kenabres is a lot like yelling “fire” inside a crowded movie theater. People immediately adjacent to her start panicking, people in armor carrying weapons head in their direction—

Okay yeah time for the demons to teleport out.

This does not reduce the amount of panic, to be clear.

“What exactly happened?” Prelate Hulrun asks, striding forwards, frowning deeply at the abandoned stretcher.

Lucy sways, pressing a hand to her still-bleeding chest wound.

“I got very badly hurt—worse than this, I think—and not near here—and I passed out, and when I woke up I was on that stretcher.” Deep breath. “I have some abilities that I don’t understand very well yet, but one of them is that I can see people’s names. And those guys’ names were Suture, Foulrot, and Tripegarter. I think the demons got their hands on me while I was unconscious—I don’t know why—I don’t think they expected me to see through their disguises.”

“Hmm.”

“You’re Hulrun Shappok, and he’s Graham Twirth, and that’s…” once she runs out of guards she starts naming random people in the crowd.

He holds up a hand to stop her. Knowing his name isn’t evidence of anything, but that is in fact enough names of random people to suggest that she has some kind of name-knowing power.

(Which doesn’t mean the rest of her story is true, obviously.)

“Um. And the weird abilities I don’t understand aren’t only the name thing. I—it’s not a vision exactly—something happened that was sort of like having a vision—there are more demons coming. I don’t know how many. A lot. And one of them was really big and powerful, and killed—would kill—counterfactually killed—Terendelev.”

Okay so obviously this is suspicious as fuck, right.

“How?” he asks skeptically.

“Uh, decapitation. With a scythe. She called him Deskari?”

…

“He looked like a horrible bug centaur and he had wings made of smaller bugs.”

Claiming not to know who Deskari is is one of the most obvious, ridiculous, exaggerated, “oh I’m definitely not a demon cultist, don’t worry” ploys he’s seen in the past week.

“Arrest her,” he tells his men.

“Hey!” The guys he has manacling her are much much lower level than him but they’re still each level five versus her level one. She doesn’t try to physically resist. “What did I do?”

“Collaboration with demons.”

“I. What? No.”

“You seriously expect anyone to believe you don’t know who Deskari is.”

SIGH.

“I don’t suppose you would humor me about that enough to tell me the publicly available summary of who that is.”

“No.”

“Fine. Load game.”

“What does that mea—”

Well.

Since she never got healed that time, this transition to the save screen actually results in a reduction in pain! Hooray.

She creates a new save and exits the screen.

Lurching up and half-off the stretcher, she seizes Suture. “Who’s Deskari.”

“—What?”

“I am extremely not from around here and I need basic context like who Deskari is.”

“I’m not sure this is a conversation best had in public?”