The person coming through the door now carries herself like an adventurer, watching the room for danger as she enters, with a revolver and a cavalry saber on either side of her hips. She's wearing a slightly battered naval uniform, white undershirt and dark blue vest and pants with two rows of shiny buttons and gold trim and heavy boots. Stains dot the uniform and one sleeve is singed.

"Ah, Milliways! I need the break, praise be."

Her soul is, to those who can see such things, brighter-bigger-more in the way that Adventurers' souls get. It's also- Quivering? Tense? There's some sort of pressure or imbalance, at least. It also seems to be leaking slightly.

She looks around the bar to take in any current patrons.

While there aren't any patrons, Griffie's location in the infirmary is less than 60 feet away from the door and there aren't by default warded or lead-lined walls between the infirmary and the main bar area. Thus, Lenora sees a concerned-looking short plant person in leather armor darting out of the infirmary. "Ma'am, your soul appears to be leaking, please come to the infirmary!" the person says.

"-Oi, isn't that a bit personal talking about my soul- Ahh, fuck. Look, I know what that is, it's the Scorn-Fluke wound, it's not gonna kill me. Immediately."

"There's nobody here but me and Bar, being embarrassed about Bar seems unlikely and I'm currently the staff healer. If you don't want immediate medical attention that's your choice but I would recommend getting medical attention before you leave, the landlords apparently pay for it here."

"Depends on what you're going to do to my soul. It's kind of important to me you know! Your souls might work differently than ours!"

"Get out the good instruments, have a better look than I can do by eye? I have some raw life energy I can often get into the right shape to patch things but I'd of course be careful to figure out what that shape even is and whether the energy is safe to apply first."

She mutters something about buying her dinner first under her breath.

"Yeah so where I'm from the two ways to heal the soul are pretty much relaxation and rest and safety or going to a Devil or someone aligned with Devils, which makes me kind of hesitant."

"Well, Bar can certainly offer plenty of the first, and I promise I am not a Devil or aligned with same. If yours recovers with time that's good, in my world souls degrade over time, so I seem to have made an unfortunate implicit assumption about yours. Anyway, Bar can vouch for my track record as an employee and can likely also get you records that indicate I'm with the Upper Planes Alliance, which is very much against Hell."

"Probably not the same Hell either! I'm going to at least have a beer first. Sorry for being a grump but, you know, long month." She waves with somewhat forced cheer as she pivots left towards Bar.

"It's fine, people assuming a situation is more urgent than it is is a really common cause of grumpiness. Enjoy your beer." Griffie heads back to the infirmary.

Not very long later from Griffie's perspective, she knocks on the door to the infirmary in a new, clean uniform. Her soul is still pretty much the same. Slightly more settled, maybe.

"Hail the medic! I'd like to talk some before we get to healing if that's amenable to you, [polite word for a person whose preferred form of address you don't know]!"

"Sure, I can do talking."

"So where I'm from souls are... Ehhhh. Tricky business. They can be extracted, merged, burned. Fairly nasty stuff. And they're sort of not fundamental to a person? You can lose or sell yours and still be recognizable as the same person. Or have it radically altered and the same. Sometimes, at least. Some intelligent species don't have souls, just brains, and generally the bigger your soul is the more powerful you are. And of course there's lots and lots of non-humans most of whom have souls, brighter or better-crafted ones than ours, all the way up to the [stars/gods]."

"…okay. It sounds like the thing you're calling the 'soul' and that I'm seeing is … not how I would want things to translate … though really that's my native languages' faults for not having good enough case coverage. In my world, a body with a brain and no soul is just totally inert, and souls are the site of personal identity, it sort of sounds like yours are just … some kind of organ that does things but not personal identity things? And souls can be extracted and merged and burned in my world too, I have a merger of a bunch of not-really-soul-level nature spirits as part of mine, nature spirits are fluid enough that they don't mind."

"That sounds... Accurate, probably? Souls do also seem to be partly you, like, I almost get the impression that the brain has some of a person and the soul - hmm, loanword - the 'aether' that we call souls has the rest, depending on the person. You hear stories of like a body and aether fighting each other for control, or of parasitic aether-replacements, or of parasitic body-controllers being fought off by your own aether, sometimes. I'm not exactly an immaterial scientist though, I just know the stories. My best skills have always been fighting things and common sense."

"Fighting things and common sense are pretty good, I normally do those but right now I've been taking a long break from the fighting because Bar would rather I work here than Security. If you're good at nonlethally getting people into cells without being on-call for that disrupting your recovery you might be able to stay here a while just working Security, though. And loanwords are good, you can call mine a positive-energy-soul if that works."

"Yeah, I take Security shifts sometimes." Sigh. "I'm sort of wondering how much of a mess your world is compared to mine. I don't get Milliways that often, but... Hmm, how to put it... The High Wilderness is complicated in ways that a lot of other peoples' worlds don't seem to be, I guess."

"There's a lot of weird stuff in my world, some of which isn't secret. Of the nonsecret things … there's an ongoing war between the Upper Planes and some evil divine factions, namely Asmodeus, Charon, and the Abyss. Ah, none of our gods are stars that I know of. Anyway, of these, Charon seems most concerning, he wants to kill everyone, he's the cause of the thing where everyone in my world ages and with some exceptions dies of it, and he seems to be escalating a lot in his plans. I'm staying in here until I get strong enough to fight him and the other evil gods, because if I come out of here with an advantage that isn't enough to win I will definitely be attacked and lose. And I can stay in here forever because someone else in the infirmary was able to stop my soul from aging, and I can fix my body, and I can work here."

"Oof. The Judgements - stars - that's another disambiguating name since I'm not totally sure these are the same kinds of things - stay far away from each other and only ever come into conflict by proxy, as far as I know. And from what I'm getting about 'planes' I'm pretty sure we don't actually have more than one. The darkness between the stars is either freezing cold or primordial chaos. And the Judgements are also responsible for aging, the old bastards. Not that we little people can't murder each other either, but at least it's not dispassionate harvest."

"The gods in my world normally try to keep themselves to proxy conflicts, but things are heating up again. And they keep to proxy conflicts because the first godwar shattered time, destroyed some concepts, et cetera. We have several planes, but we don't go into the darkness between the stars, do you? And … the Upper Planes Alliance is an alliance of gods and of mortals, they take our advice and work to protect us, and I'd rather have a godwar than have the gods all agree on wanting everyone but them to die. I suppose I look pretty pro-godwar from here, plotting to start and finish one, but I understand that it's a really serious cost, just … if I were you I'd consider trying to start one anyway."

"I'm sure somebody does, there's a lot of people out there, but the darkness between the stars is pretty damned inhospitable. As for god-wars... That's so far above my pay grade I could be exploded just for thinking about it, to mangle a metaphor. Even with my soul so..." She grimaces. "Murgh. It seems probably bad for my health to get involved in that, you know? It might sound selfish but if I die on some crusade there's nobody to protect convoys and hunt down pirates and grave robbers and all the other nasties. I kept trying to find great quests in my youth, and they kept turning into massive disasters. And- It's important, I get it, but... I've seen two or arguably three human wars and just those contained such a vast amount of hate and suffering and pointless atrocities. To take that to the kinds of power the higher beings use... Don't think messing with the affairs of the stars is likely to do anyone any favors in the long run, without a massive game changer, the kind my time in Milliways keeps not giving me."

"Is 'exploded for thinking about it' part of the metaphor, because if not Bar might be able to get you something to cause short-term memory loss if you ask her right now."

"Mostly a metaphor. I know I've forgotten and made unthinkable something. But not what it is, obviously."

"…alright then. I'm glad you don't have to wipe your memories of this conversation too. I'm not going to call you selfish for working within your capabilities, it's good to know your limits, and war is awful. If we can patch whatever causes you to age, though, maybe you can stay here long enough to get a massive game-changer, by working Security shifts?"

"The world is broken and we live in the cracks! Gotta make the best of it, and maybe make things a little better. And I do have ways around aging, though they're expensive to run. As for some soul tinkering, maybe maybe. I'm sort of trying to feel you out with this conversation, you know. Kind of obvious but, yeah."