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Lucien can mostly make a living off of doing divining for certain niche medical studies, but he can't do specific enough conditionals to get his grander ideas off the ground yet. Still, when portals start showing up he's well positioned to suggest to a few people that diviners like him could be useful for quickly figuring out what conditions on the other worlds are actually like.
Still, they're taking a chance on Lucien by approving his application to join the expedition, so he definitely really shouldn't be late for his first day of work. He also probably shouldn't be running along a poorly maintained trail in Bolivia, but between that and the possibility of being late he knows which he prefers.
Well, which he prefers right up until he's tripped on a branch and sent tumbling towards the portal.
"My mom and sister are not particularly awful but -" She shakes her head. "I'll go sell the simplest-to-move stuff and see if I can think of anyone who'll take the rest." Scoop. "Here's a light." She casts on a random pebble. Gestures at the bookshelf.
She's got a selection of novels and a book with woodcut pictures about various kinds of monster that exist and a book about topology and an atlas and some stuff that must not be in Drow.
Topology sure is a strange subject matter for her to have a book on.
He will glance through the atlas, and than check to see if any of the novels might be informative.
Depends what kind of information he's looking for. If he wants the information that drow are a matriarchal murder-happy mushroom-eating subterranean culture with a lot of slaves, the novels include this, and some background tidbits on what wizards and clerics and advanced swordspeople can do.
Honestly, he's now more confused than when he started. How exactly do wizards or clerics develop there powers - is there any information about this.
Wizards have spellbooks. The ink for them is expensive. They need to read through their spellbooks every day to prepare spells in advance to go off when called for. He's out of light now.
He has many questions for when his... captor... returns. He can't afford the calories to work on his powers so he will just... lay back. And fail at napping.
His captor is gone for about eight hours. She comes back without the stuff. She refreshes the Light for him.
"You're welcome." She stashes some coins in her trunk. "I need to sleep. I do not have any secret additional place for you to sleep, so it's the floor, sorry."
He wonders how much of him liking her is a result of her personality and how much of it is because she's an attractive magic alien keeping him captive as a pretend sex slave. Probably it's a combination of the two - part of her being attractive is how she's trying to be ethical about treating him well in a society that doesn't support that, so far as he can tell.
He reads a bit more of the novel, and then falls asleep as well.
By the time he's up she's at her desk studying her spellbook, not that he can tell because it's dark. She is at any rate no longer talking in her sleep, and if he listens for breathing it's there instead of hammockward.
