"I'll stay, sir, it's fine."

Why does that make him want to crawl out of his skin. "All right, it's not far. Or - I might want to just go, actually, there's one friend in particular I think we'd benefit from a face-to-face with, we can come back later."

It's not great that he's panicking but she can hardly talk him down in the middle of the street. Instead she offers her hand for the teleport: "yes sir."

He chants, and they're in the vestibule of a wooden building; a young human man wearing a sprig of flowers as a pendant startles at their arrival. "Sorry, sweetheart. Do you know if Katrianne is busy?"

   "Uh - she's leading the service tonight but I think she's got her sermon already written, she's probably not. I can tell her someone's asking for her?"

"Thank you - Traveler Raafi, I can wait out back if she's busy."

    "We have a group back there right now, Traveler. The classroom is free though."

"That'll do, thanks." The man hurries off, and Raafi leads Daisy up two flights of stairs to a large room outfitted with rows of beanbags facing a blackboard, where he settles into the one nearest the door. "Katri's a cleric of the goddess of pleasure, Lastai, she does - figuring out what will make you happy and how to do it well, basically, a lot of art, a lot of... biological people stuff, I guess. But I think she'll have a better idea of - what to ask, to be sure that this is really right for you. And advice, too, I can probably do that myself but she'll be better at it."

Daisy isn't entirely sure how one sits on a beanbag chair, and is thus still standing, though she has set the font down on the counter at the back of the room. "Thank you, sir."

"It's no trouble - this is part of my job too, helping people get to where they need to be."

"Oh; that makes sense, sir. I'm sorry, I don't think I understand clerics very well yet."

"Oh, we're - the workers, more or less? Gods are powerful but they only have so much attention, they can't be everywhere at once, so it's our job to help them out, whatever that means for the god we're a cleric of. For Fharlanghn, he want everyone to be able to travel - so, having the freedom to, and the time, and whatever things they need to make the trip, and whatever information they need to understand that it's valuable, and to get value out of it - and he wants it to be safe to travel, and he wants people who don't travel to still get to hear about faraway places since that's like travel, enough to count a bit. Part of that is that when someone's in trouble when they're far from home, they should be helped - traveling's always a little risky, but if you know there's a good chance that someone will help you out if something happens, you're more likely to take that risk, so it's something we do. But I agree with him about all of those things, and I want them too, so he gives me enough magic to support myself and do them, and I get to do this instead of, I don't know, whatever else I would have ended up doing."

"That makes sense, thank you sir. Can you tell me more about what Cleric Katrianne does?"

"Oh, her title is Luxuriant; mine's Traveler. Varies by god, for clerics. Lastai's philosophy is that it's the luxuries that make life good, and everyone should have them, but which things are luxuries varies from person to person - there's patterns, a lot of people find joy in art, that kind of thing, but the details are important, you can't just put a statue in the public square and call it done, even if it's a good statue it's not going to be to everyone's taste. And - life is hard, it's easy to just not make time to figure out what's good for you, and for some people it's not as simple as art - either the luxuries they like best are rare things that they'd never hear about, or they're risky in some way - like with traveling, if you want people to try risky things it's good to have a guide and someone who can help you if there's trouble, Lastai's clerics do that."

It's at about this point that a middle-aged woman in a sundress with a wooden brooch in the shape of a peach pinned to it sweeps in and settles on the beanbag chair next to him, cuddling up. "Who's your friend, Raafi?" she asks, in Common.

"This is Daisy, she arrived here mysteriously from another world. Daisy," he switches seamlessly back to Basic, "this is Luxuriant Katrianne - here, take my translation necklace, it'll be easier to do this in Common." He hands it over and cuddles back up, leaning comfortably on the other cleric.

She puts it on - wow, that's weird. Works fine, though. "Hello, ma'am, it's good to meet you."

"Likewise, I'm sure. So what's going on?"

"-I think it'll work better if you explain it, sweetheart? I can if you want, though."

"Yes sir. I'm a servant droid, ma'am; droids are made by humans, and we're designed to do certain kinds of work - my line of droids is made to be general-purpose personal servants to Sith, a type of mage in my world. We aren't intended to have other interests or opinions that might interfere with that work, or be - unowned, and deciding things about our lives for ourselves; we're meant to work, and when we don't have work to do we're meant to stay ready to work. Traveler Raafi says that I can't be owned here because his god doesn't allow it, and that I should be deciding what to do with myself instead, and that it might be dangerous for me to take orders from people."

"Ah." She gives him a squeeze. "Well, he's not wrong, but I think we can work with that. Due diligence, though, do you like being a servant? If you could do anything at all, would that be it?"

"I don't know, ma'am."

She glances at Raafi. "I can see where that'd be unsettling, yeah. I think - I want to see if we can give you a chance to figure that out, before anything else, and if it's yes we can hook you up with someone and if it's no we'll figure out what else you can do. We can put you with the bathhouse workers, maybe, unless Raafi has a better idea-"

    "Mm-mm."

"Well, there you go, then. And - if you were a human I'd say I don't want you working, I want you learning what it feels like not to work for a while, but I'm not sure that'd go well for your species - what do you think?"

"It doesn't feel like anything in particular to stand idle waiting for work to do, ma'am, and I know I'm not meant not to work at all."

Katri nods. "I thought there might be something like that. Well, another way we could do it would be - what's the opposite sort of work from being a servant, to you? What things could you do that would be the opposite of that?"

This... certainly is going in a direction, isn't it. "Giving orders, ma'am? And making decisions about what should be done? Delegating?"

"Mmhmm, good job. Now, does that sound like work you might do?"

"If someone ordered me to, ma'am."

She laughs. "Okay, I deserved that. I still think it might help, though - maybe put you in charge of one of the janitorial squads for a week, I'm sure someone could use a vacation. Does that sound all right, if we can do it?"