...and then a general clamor.

It doesn't work on everybody.  But the PHO announcement was mostly right, and people mostly didn't let their hopes outrun their reading comprehension, and so Samora is surrounded by happy, grateful, and rather startled-looking Brocktonites.  Everyone wants to thank her, smile at her, or shake her hand, and it takes a few minutes for the crowd to clear enough for her to see a short, dark-haired woman staring intently at her from the periphery.

Once the center of the square is down to just Samora and her minder, she'll approach.

"Samora?  We met on the Rig, earlier today.  I had some questions about -" she swallows.  Keep it together, now of all times! "- about the things you told us.  Private questions," she adds, not looking at the woman from the hospital.

The height, the low voice: even without the mask and monsters, this is clearly Pride.

It's good that Pride mentioned them having met before; she's not totally sure of the etiquette for admitting to having met people in their other identity. 

"Certainly, I'll just be a minute." And she wraps up the handshakes and the "you're quite welcome"s and extracts herself and Pride to a meeting room they can speak freely in.

Good news, there are a bunch of unused patient rooms right now, you can have one of those.

Pride perches on the edge of one bed, fingers knotting and unknotting in the sheets. "Those things you said, about Good and Evil and Law and Chaos." She takes another breath, and quits stalling.

"Am I Evil?"

Samora is relieved to be able to say, "No, and I expect I would be able to tell if you were."

"Fuck!  I thought - fuck!"  She claps her hands to her face and bends over, shoulders shaking.  After a few moments her breathing steadies, and in few moments more she looks up, seized by a fresh anxiety.  "How long does it take to, uh, update?  If I did something evil right now would you see the difference, or does it takes time?"

"Uh, I've never seen it happen but if it was really Evil and you were already Neutral it would probably show up immediately? I think?" She needs to say the thing about not being sure her divinations are any good until she knows her memories are real but this is not the moment.

She throws herself back on the bed so hard she bounces a little. This is the news she wanted, right? Why is it so hard to accept? She does her breathing exercise, and it works well enough that after a few moments she manages, "Sorry. About just now. And about almost killing you, earlier." It wasn't on purpose, she doesn't say. Who gives a shit?

"I should explain. My power lets me make creatures out of my emotions. I don't really control them but they know what I want, what I was thinking when I made them. Different emotions make different kinds of creature. But there's a, a, a feedback loop. The emotion I use gets stronger, its opposites get weaker, and when I use a strong emotion I get a better creature."

"I was doing search and rescue in Denver. I never did an Endbringer fight before. I made these little anxiety scouts, they were working pretty well, but then the building I was in - " her breath hitches " - collapsed, and I was trapped. I tried anger first, those creatures always come out really strong, but they couldn't shift the pillar my legs were under. It didn't hurt that bad, but I could tell I was pretty fucked. So I tried fear instead, those usually have poison or acid or something like that, but I couldn't melt it either. The fire was getting closer, it was getting hotter, I kept coughing," she's shaking a little now, like an echo, "and I kept pushing fear, burning hope, trying to get something big enough to help. And then I died."

"I could tell it was happening, was the thing. And I kept summoning, I knew it wouldn't work but I couldn't think of anything else to do, and then suddenly I was somewhere else but I was still" she makes a jerky gesture with one hand. "You saw what happened next. I summoned, sort of by reflex," that tastes just as bad as it wasn't on purpose "it attacked Armsmaster of all people. I thought I was Birdcage bait for sure. If you hadn't talked me down...you basically saved my life in there. Again."

She tries a smile. It doesn't look at home on her.

"You're nowhere near the first person to accidentally hurt someone because they thought they were still in danger when they weren't. It would be silly for Armsmaster or anyone to hold that against you." 

"You don't GET IT!" she shouts, then flinches back. "Sorry! Sorry. You wouldn't know. The rules are different for me, because. I used to be a villain. Switched over about a year ago."

Samora doesn't twitch at the sudden volume. "You're right, there's a lot I don't know about Earth society. I didn't mean to imply that you were wrong to be afraid of retaliation. Only that it would have been wrong to retaliate against you for an accident, no matter what your past is. And I know that changing sides takes a lot of courage." She puts a friendly hand on Pride's shoulder.

She's not freaking out. Why isn't she freaking out? She still doesn't get it.

"Courage? I dunno, I was just sick of...I don't know. Of being who I was.

My job was to scare people, or to hurt them when scaring them didn't work. I liked it, some of the time. I'd get mad and yell, and instead of getting mad back they'd flinch, they'd cower. Big guys, tough guys, and they'd do anything I wanted. But afterward I'd remember and then I'd hate it, and myself for doing it, and them for being afraid. Isn't that nuts? But I was good at it. I moved up the ranks. Had money, a nice place, but I was so tense all the time, always pissed off or scared or sad. I couldn't stand it. So finally I went to this Protectorate cape I'd fought before, who'd cleaned up some of my messes, and I turned myself in. I thought I was gonna get the 'cage, I deserved it by then, but she said she thought I could make a deal, if I gave them the rest of Los Buitres. And so I did, and it turned out she was right.

There were a bunch of rules, this long contract they made me sign. I had to join the Protectorate, of course. Get a new name, a new costume. No drugs, no alcohol, which made sense, and that wasn't really my problem anyway. No using fear or anger. Had to see a therapist, practice emotional regulation, take these blue pills. It helps a little. I got religion, or at least I try. That wasn't in the contract, it just. Seemed like a good idea. And of course it was all zero tolerance. If I fuck up even one time the deal's off. I don't think it literally said not to use lethal force on Protectorate leadership, but. I feel like it's implied.

Armsmaster was nice about it. He said he thought it was an unexpected power interaction, between yours and mine, not anything anybody could control. Said he'd write that in his report, and he didn't think I'd get in trouble. But it wasn't that. It was me, doing the same shit as always.

So you can see. Why I'd wonder. What Good is. And what Evil is. And how Good a job I was doing."

Oh shit that was not at all what she wanted to say next, it just slipped out. For like five straight minutes.

...how's she taking it?

With the same kind, reassuring smile. "Sounds like you had money and power and not having to change things down one path, and following a lot of rules and trusting people you had reason to be afraid of down another path, and you looked past all of it and chose being the person you wanted to be. That's Goodness." She wants to know Nirvana is real so she can talk about it, but instead she adds, "I don't know if my magic would say you're Good or Neutral, and I don't know if it agrees with you or me on everything. But I know that you always get to choose who you are. Other people can see you as being one misstep away from doing Evil, but you are the one who gets to wake up every day and choose to do Good. And it will get easier with practice."

There's a part of her that hears that and says, You left some things out. Tell her about your trigger, and see how much mercy she has for you then.

For a moment she's tempted to. But, like Samora said, Pride's whole deal now is that she doesn't have to do the first dumbass thing that comes to mind. She can have impulses, urges, and inclinations, and then do something else. That's what she did in the morgue -- not as fast as she'd've liked, but fast enough.

In this case what that means is, she can think about this with her brain instead of her anxieties for a minute. And when she does that, it's sort of stupidly obvious that her trigger doesn't conflict with what Samora said at all. She started in a really bad place, yeah. But it doesn't change where she is, or where she's going.

All this thinking emerges as only a thick-voiced "Thank you." And then: "There was actually something else I wanted to tell you about. I know some people who'd be really interested in hearing about your goddess, and Good and Evil, and everything else you told us at the morgue. The church I joined - it's smaller than some, but it has a congregation in Brockton Bay. There's a service tomorrow morning. I was going to go, and you could come with? If you wanted?"

"I would love to, but--there's something I need to tell you first. It doesn't affect anything I've said to you here, just some of the things I said this morning. Apparently there's a collection of stories that resembles  my world, and Armsmaster thinks I might have been created based on the stories, with a lifetime of false memories. We have some tests planned for tomorrow morning that should tell us whether that happened or not. And I don't want to tell a bunch of people about the afterlives if it might turn out to be false hope. So I might need to put that off until next week's service, or I might--start trying to find out the truth about gods and everything. But I really appreciate the offer and I really hope I'll be able to take you up on it soon."

"I - what?  That's not - created?  Like by a Tinker?"

Can that happen?  I mean, making human beings, sure, some capes can do that.  Blasto could, and if he did it carefully he might not even get a kill order.  Nilbog could, probably, though he doesn't seem to want to.  But making someone with powers like Samora's would be...

"What stories?  Could I read them online?  I don't - can they make more?"

This would be completely insane, but, maybe not bad?

"So I have these papers—" she gets out the papers "but I can't read English, so if you wanted to look at them and tell me things—the interesting bits are yellow—that would be really convenient." Now that she thinks about it, not being able to read is evidence that either she's actually from Golarion or that her creation was an accident, since probably anyone who could deliberately create her literate in two languages could also do at least one Earth one, and the spoken language situation is convenient enough that they surely thought about it if they thought about anything.

Pride makes more incoherent confused noises, as she reads them over.  She's never heard of Dungeons & Dragons, but she'll read it all aloud to Samora, sure, why not, and after a whlie she gets the gist.  "Someone on Bet wrote this, years ago, and then just now you showed up on Bet, with spells and things just like it says.  So people think you're made based on this.  But couldn't it be the other way around?  I think that would make sense.  I think - "  she shouldn't try to explain the theology of the Third Dispensation, she doesn't really understand it all herself, but she feels like this rhymes a little, in a weird way.  Against her will, she's getting excited.

"I really think you should come tomorrow.  You don't have to talk about alignments and afterlives if you don't want, just come listen to the sermon and talk to the pastor."

It's really good how Pride gets so interested in things. "Alright. As long as it isn't at the same time that Armsmaster is available for doing the experiment I would be happy to come and listen." If her memories are real it will be good background for talking to them later and if they're fake she can learn about how churches that can't rely on divine intervention do things.

"Great! It's at 11am, I'll text you the - wait, no. I'll call you tomorrow, and you can tell me whether you can make it, and if you can I'll come get you and we can go together?"

"That'll work! I'm looking forward to it."

The next couple hours are, not exactly uneventful, but empty of major surprises. She checks with the hospital people on where they'd like her to use her Remove Diseases; she should figure out a less ad-hoc system at some point once she has a better sense of how she'll be splitting her time and spell slots between various problems. She casts Comprehend Languages twice and reads through the Dungeons and Dragons papers; they say what Armsmaster and Dragon said they say and don't mention Golarion geography or any gods Samora has heard of. 

And then, since she still has most of the second spell left, she experiments with her phone until she finds Parahumans Online. The spell doesn't let her call to mind any English words she isn't currently looking at, but she can copy and paste and eventually get the hang of the search bar. Where to start . . . what does it have to say about Dragon?