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It's an ordinary, quiet night. The . . . patrons, or whatever they are, of the lab equipment shop downstairs, took off about forty-five minutes ago.
There's silence, mostly. You can only be out at night in Sothis if you have business. But there's some business. Every so often a party passes under Katie's window. Their conversation is mostly what Katie has become accustomed to thinking of as "focused", though occasionally some is just downright tense or revelrous.
Wind. Distant insects. Dogs.
Something shuffles downstairs.
And continues to shuffle.
"Are we good?" The voice is insistent, alto, and right underneath Katie. And it's female.
"Yes, fine". Higher. If Katie knows what female halflings sound like, it sounds like that.
The shuffling moves deeper into the shop. A glass clinks. Laughter starts, whispering at first, then merely hushed.
"Oh my god." A third voice.
"All this stuff is fake, you know. This and this and this used to be one bespoke fixture."
"Fuck."
Whoever it is is going through the merchandise.
Expensive, heavily regulated merchandise. Katie's parent have only been in Ulunat for two weeks, but she's picked up that the proprietors of this place have gone to a moderate effort to secure it against thieves.
If Cayden Cailean wants to be the main god of anything He should be able to fucking feed Teg properly. Why is Katie so appetizing?
"I thought She . . . cared, at all, about happiness winning, I suppose." About love winning.
She doesn't know how much more she should say. How much does Katie know?
"And she doesn't? What does she care about, then? Must be something. Totally apathetic people don't tend to become gods."
"If you're asking me what the former-mortal part of my Iomedae-model cares about, that part wants people to acknowledge that She had no other choice than, effectively, mercilessness. And She doesn't want people to do anything else, ever, really, other than acknowledge that, because doing anything else sort of invalidates Her obsession with not being at fault for having become who She became.
But there are other parts of Iomedae, that are less human, and some of them were there before she actually became a god. She made herself that way deliberately. Or you could say the god is reflected in Her own mortal past."
"I suppose so. It's funny to think of it that way, since of course She doesn't think of Herself as feeling or certainly being particularly guilty at all. Rather the opposite. She thinks She's minimized Her actual and subjective guilt impeccably.
But yes."
"That's fucked up. I can imagine what it would be like to be subject to that sort of emotional manipulation. You deserve better. Do you like your new surroundings, new companions, new circumstances?" That's it, give her opportunity to bring up the fat thing if she wants to while maintaining plausible deniability. God, Katie really wants to talk about the fat thing though. She's so big and hot and Katie really wants to know what it felt like to balloon up like that.
"Well," she stands closer and whispers, "i can understand why you wouldn't want to badmouth your comrades within earshot of them, but whatever you don't like about them, feel free to talk to me about whenever you feel comfortable, and i aim to do better. you deserve better."
"they're all blood donors" FUCK WHY WOULD SHE SAY THAT SHE KNOWS WHY SHE WOULD SAY THAT, KATIE IS STANDING REALLY CLOSE AAAAAGH
God, she tries to be good about it in her thoughts but Teg is just so hilariously disgusting sometimes. What an oaf.
"uh, no, I'm insulting you by unfavorably comparing you to them" JUST BE INEPT ENOUGH AND IT'LL DRIVE HER SAFELY AWAY, IS THAT YOUR PLAN?
"i can feed you. does it- who am I kidding, I don't care if it hurts, being pressed up against your big soft body would be elysium anyway."
What, like it's her job to understand and control the Teg? Like she's the goddamn Teg whisperer? The Teg wrangler?
"fuck, are you freezing because you're shy or because you're creeped out, i can back off if you're creeped out."
"Katie, I can't make out what you're saying, but—sorry—Teg's not actually safe to feed on you without you having emergency self-defense training first. Even then . . ."
"Okay, apparently you guys can hear me anyway so I'll drop the whispering. Teg, regrettably it is apparently not safe for you to feed on me yet. I am sorry and I will do my best to fix that as soon as possible. In the meantime, now I'm curious if different people's blood tastes different."
"Is there any observable correlation between people's appearances or personality traits and the way their blood tastes?"