"Do you want me to kick all the video game music off the playlist for this trip and double the amount of country? Because I can still do that. Privileges of being the driver."

"You live in a matriarchy and you listen to country music? Isn't that like, treason?"

"I like the sound, I'm very picky about the lyrics."

"By which she means," says Lauren with an eyeroll, "she's too woke moralist to enjoy any violence that isn't righteous enough for her."

"Hey, I concede the ones where mortal women kill their abusive husbands are righteous, the weak do what they must and all. It's just upsetting to think of having so little power you have to resort to killing such a pathetically damaged individual."

"There's country music that isn't either that or just outright treating women like objects?"

"There's plenty of country that isn't about gender or relationships at all! Admittedly a lot of it is instead about God or America, which some people find just as bad."

"Look, I acknowledge the practical advantages of starting world unification here and of American patriotism to that project, all I've said is that I personally don't feel any particular emotional attachment to it over any other future province of our empire."

"And all I've said is that if capital-G God exists then he's a monster and no amount of cutesy tunes about what kind of guitar he plays can change that."

"Based and true!!! It's like, what's god's chosen species? Humans. The only species that has both war and menstruation. Who're God's chosen people? The Jews. I shouldn't have to explain this one. It sure seems like having his attention correlates pretty heavily with being miserable."

"Hey, at least in our lands where people have their priorities in order, we're doing our best to lock menstruation back in Pandora's b—Pandora's jar, sorry Raven. I'm certainly not giving out any nonsense 'week of placebo pills' in my birth control prescriptions, and that's before you even start getting into the drugs you can only make on base."

"Good catch!

And, you know, to be fair to menstruation, when you get into the evolutionary psychology of it it's a fascinating case study in how our trials can make us stronger, in a less obvious way than just 'motivating us to make a pill to fix it'. Hundreds of thousands of years of selective pressure for psychological functioning while bleeding monthly and giving painful birth is probably what gave the female sex the resilience to seeing damage to the human body that makes us so much more fit to be warriors, once Olympus and Samuel Colt obviated the muscle strength issue."

"Yeah, easy for you to say, when you don't even have to remember to take a pill to stop your periods cause you can just magic them away."

"You can do that? I haven't gotten birth control, I'm afraid of side effects and hate doctors and anyways pain for me is easier to ignore the further away it is from my head, so it's not that bad anyway." She just barely thinks fast enough to stop herself from mentioning her ripping out her own toenails.

"Using magic on a human body is never without risk. The magic wants to turn you into a toad, it takes practice and willpower to make it do anything useful. But yes, if you're not a coward like certain people I can fix that for you."

"What else can you do?" Katie has some requests but even if Raven was into her, vocalizing them would still probably weird her out.

"I did mention the mind control, right?"

"Yeah. Can you like, do that in combat, or are there too many limitations?"

"Oh I can so do it in combat!"

"Wow, that must be really powerful. Why even bother carrying a weapon?"

"With sufficient training and raw willpower, one can resist the hypnotic voice. I'm not the only one with the ability, either, it's a common blessing of Venus and Hecate for their descendants and some people have it more strongly than me."

"Huh, that's gotta cause some problems. Does this explain any historical figures I'd know of, Hitler, Jim Jones, maybe even some people who are around today?"

"Jim Jones was entirely unrelated to us, sometimes things are just mortal-on-mortal violence. Hitler was a son of Hades, and charmspeak isn't a usual blessing of his but isn't unheard of."

"Wait, like, if belief changes shit, then is Hades actually evil now because of how Christian audiences assume he's just Greek Satan?"

"Nah, the weight of tradition blocks that off in this case. Hades's kids were acting roguely in WWII, I heard they got some pretty nasty fates in the Underworld."