"Don't be too hard on her. She is only twelve or so."

"--yeah, fair, I do interrogations at the Worldwound and I haven't talked to a twelve-year-old since I was one, do you want to sit with her and help."

"I'm happy to supervise the both of you."

"All right, doctor, you think we can leave the patient to sleep for now?"

"She should be fine." Against his better judgement, he leaves the porridge nearby for her (it probably isn't going to grow anything exciting while she's asleep?)

"Whatever shall we do in this vast empty bookless house while we wait for the agar to thaw overnight and the injured girl to wake up."

"Truly it is a mystery." Tanidio likes him enough to do this more than twice!

"It's so unfortunate. I work so much that I've only had the chance to develop the one hobby."

"You've had enough time to get pretty damn good at it, though."

"Well, let's not wake up the sleeping girl, that would be discourteous."

"Good idea." He starts heading slowly bedroom-wards. "The one hobby I ended up with was cooking. Which only involves having to organise one person. I'm kind of impressed with what you managed."

"Wizards tend to fuck a lot, Cheliax encourages it so we can have more kids and there are more wizards in the next generation."

...

???

"Do you have any kids?"

"Three I know about? I guess I wouldn't know if any of them died. And if someone I'd had sex with once got pregnant from it I wouldn't know about it. Probably about three."

This is probably just how it's done in Cheliax and he shouldn't look so disturbed, but, uh-- "Have you... Met any of them?"

"No." Wow, he hates this line of conversation. "The Crown pays the moms, it's not like the kids would go hungry."

That's... Better than the alternative? "--I'm assuming there's an arrangement between you and the mother..s?"

"The second two were servants at the Worldwound and if you're a pretty girl working at the Worldwound you're trying to have a kid with a wizard or a sorcerer, so maybe your kid will grow up to be able to use magic and then you'll be rich in your old age."

'Cheliax has a worrying economic situation' is not surprising given the tech level, but, uh, he's still surprised. "I'm glad you were able to... Help them?"

"I was a lot better than their other options. I'm very pretty and I don't like hurting people in bed and I don't get jealous unless we actually agreed to something."

!!!

"Is this a problem they had?" Does he need to fight several wizards?

"...Lots of people like hurting other people in bed? It's like the most common thing for people to like, other than kissing or stuff involving your genitals."

Okay, so there was that shop in town. "But they were doing that to the servants. Without asking or them wanting it."

"...yes?" Oh, come on, he knows that even in non-Evil societies they have sex with girls that the girls don't want, he has ever met an Osirian.

No, he hasn't, he's from Earth. "They shouldn't take advantage like that."