Got you. At some point someone should teach this girl to react naturally, 'stead of blanking out like that. But outwardly she nods.

"That's so. But I have to ask: are you a mother?"

Alas, she traded all her lying ability for more magic resistance.* 

"No, priestesses where I'm from don't have children."

*Author's note: literally.

"Huh!" She doesn't have to feign surprise. "Not even of, what's her name, Pharasma?"

"Pharasmins and Erastilians do occasionally. Iomedaeans, basically never. But I've known a lot of parents, and I helped with my little sister, so even if I don't really understand, I at least have some idea of what it can be like."

In some circumstances, anyway. She's not sure if anything in her mother's life would feel relatable to the woman in front of her. Except for love, and that's hardly nothing.

"Yeah, I thought that too, before I caught, but it's different when it's yours.  I was scared when I saw the pregnancy test, but for the first time in my life, there was something that was - "

She cuts herself off, ashamed for no reason she can readily place.  Mine.  Everything else, my clothes, my time, my body, that all belonged to my parents or my teachers or God, but not Elijah.  He was mine, and come Hell or high water I was going to keep him.

She clears her throat, tries to get her momentum back.  "What I mean is, I heard what you said before about options.  About not shuttin' doors too soon.  But in parenthood there's no such thing as saving yourself.  I could get myself out without 'em, any time, and it wouldn't mean a thing, y'see?  I closed that door years ago."

Not, quite, when Elijah was born.  It was two years later, when his power came in and he was Mastering her every hour of every day, and she'd lost her job because he wouldn't let her give him to a babysitter or even leave the apartment, when a woman in a fedora turned up out of nowhere and said, that boy will kill you if you don't give him up.  And said, I can take him somewhere he'll be safe and happy.  Christine replied, take him off my corpse, then, 'cause I'll never give him to you, and she realized she meant it.  But it turned out there was a third choice, a vial that might kill her but might protect her.  She drank it in one gulp, and she didn't die.  Or none of the parts she likes did, anyhow.

Her mind is wandering.  "I believe in Hell," she says at last.  "Most people don't, even when they say they do.  Maybe it's different where you're from, but here most religious folks are just talkin'.  My boys aren't any different.  Hell ain't real to them.  Even death isn't, really."  Which is plain ridiculous, considerin' how much of it they've seen.  Teenagers.  "That's what I need.  A way to get through to 'em about eternity."

"I'd be happy to talk to them, too, if they're willing."

"Could be I could arrange that. What would you tell 'em, that you didn't put on your blog?"

"Depends what seems like it'll help. Some people just need to hear that the things on the blog still apply to them. I'd ask them what they were getting out of what they were doing, and whether it was really making them happy, and offer them Owl's Wisdom. And, if you permit it, I would tell them you love them and that you don't want to lose the chance to spend your next life with them."

An invitation to come back! How thoughtful. Not necessarily wise. There aren't any good pictures of Mama Mathers -- her power works on technology, and she has ways of dealing with sketch artists -- so they might not make the connection to "Christine Beauregard" even when Samora reports. And if they did, they might not choose to retaliate; they let her alone, a lot of the time, when she's not bothering anyone too important. Still, though.

"That's very kind of you. I might take you up on that," she allows, then changes the subject, sort of. "Do people have to die, where you're from? Cure all the diseases, heal all the wounds, and a person could last a good long while, seems to me. Not to mention anything else your powers might accomplish." She's been chatting with Rachel Crowley in the background, trying to come up with more angles for this conversation now that she's wiser, or whatever you'd want to call it. Rachel doesn't remember that much, she quit playing when her daddy married Margo Crowley, of course, but there's some. For example, Christine has just now learned the word "vampire".

"Not really. There's items that can keep people as strong as they were in their youth, but they still die. Old age does a kind of damage no healing can fix. People try all kinds of things, but they all end up insane, dead, or insane and then dead." It's understandable to prefer lichdom to Hell, but Samora's hardly going to advertise it. 

"Except the same way your goddess did it, I suppose. Or - what is a goddess, really, from a mortal point of view?"

Shrug. "I don't know if She's the same person as Her human self. She cares about the same things, pursues the same goals, but . . . gods aren't like us."

"I'm sure that's so."  But her mind is harder to steer than usual, and it's racing down a different road.

"There's a story in the Bible, about the prophet Elijah and the priests of a false god named Baal.  He challenged them to a contest to see whose god was real.  Simple rules: they both put a sacrifice on an altar, and whichever god burned it up with fire from heaven, that was the god the people would follow.  Elijah won, of course.  The Baalites prayed and prayed, but got nothing for it, and Elijah's sacrifice burned to ash even though he soaked it with water first.  He had some style, Elijah did.  This was thousands of years ago, but people back then weren't so different from us.  You pray to the god who can set you on fire.  Stands to reason."  That's half the McVeay philosophy, right there, and the other half isn't any too coherent.  Though to be fair, it's a half more than the Crowleys have.  Christine tries to keep the Mathers clan a little better organized.

"One more question, then I'll get out of your hair.  Can people ever move between afterlives?  Or once you're dead, is that it, that's your one shot?"

Owl's Wisdom isn't quite done, but she wants a few minutes alone with it.

You pray to the god who's able and willing to answer your prayers, is what it sounds like to her. "People can move between the Good afterlives and Axis, for sure. Maybe also the Maelstrom? And of course if you go to the Boneyard they send you somewhere else. But the Evil afterlives don't have people leave except to fight against wherever they're going." Wanting a few minutes alone with Owl's Wisdom is so normal and reasonable and she will go away and let Anonymous Villain keep the reading room if this is preferred.

A hug is probably too ambitious, but she'll try for a handshake when Samora's on her way out.

Samora, blissfully unaware of any reason not to do this, shakes hands with her.

She probably won't ever need that, but it's satisfying to collect.

Her first thought, once Samora's out of the room (not "when she's alone", she's never alone), is I believe in Hell, I just don't believe in Heaven. And what's weird is, now she thinks about it, she's felt that way for a long time. It just sorta fades in and out, depending on who she's talking to. A lot of Fallen are still religious, in a scratchy sort of way, and a little God talk goes a long way toward smoothing them out. And really, it's not like she's an atheist. She believes in sin, and punishment for sin. Redemption, though? Really now, look around you; if you were God, would you sacrifice yourself to save all this? Or would you scrape it off your boots, and walk away as quick as you could? Their pastor growing up was the same way: all rains of fire and pillars of salt, God's wrath poured out on a deserving Earth. Nobody in that congregation was surprised when Behemoth showed up, you'd better believe.

Now in the Good Book, Jesus says "this generation will not pass away" before the kingdom of God comes to pass. So maybe it's just that all the righteous got raptured away to the kingdom in say 50 AD, and the next two thousand years of war and slaughter are just what happens when you try to have a civilization with no Godly influence whatsoever. Or maybe it happened when Scion showed up, and there were so few righteous that nobody noticed. Or, maybe the whole New Testament is just a pack of lies to begin with. Howsoever, civilization is coming apart now, carved up by Leviathan and smashed to pieces by Behemoth. It's only the Simurgh who seems to know how to build anything, which to Christine's way of thinking meant they'd all better learn to live in the world that she and her siblings were making. No civilized ways, no cities, no trade. Each community a strong pillar, standing alone. That's what the title "Fallen" means to her: people who know how to live in a fallen world. People who can admit the world is ending, who can see what's there without flinching.

Not everybody responds to that by trying to build. The different Fallen take after their Endbringer totems, or maybe sort themselves by their natures. McVeays take the chance to do all the things civilization would never let them do, riding free and smashing everything they feel like smashing. The Crowleys think of themselves as activists, trying to get people to look things the way they really are. Sometimes it works; they do a lot of recruitment, she has to admit. The Simurgh worshippers, when Christine found them, were a drug-addled afterthought, the laughingstock of the Fallen. She sorted that out in a hurry. Now, though, she's questioning it all. The main thing is to come out top, yes, but where is the top? Who's in charge here, really? And if you can't win, and can't at least tread water, how do you get out of the game?

Her last thought under Owl's Wisdom is, I need to talk to more folks from Golarion. Evil people, especially; "evil", in Christine's experience, is a word weak people use to hide from things they don't want to think about. But she can't make any more plans now, let alone act on them. She has to wait and see what her new source brings her. Musing on that, she tells her boys in the car to come collect her, and suddenly in her head she's Mama Mathers again.

Samora doesn't feel like that went well. Sometimes she knows exactly what to say, to comfort or inspire or convince, and sometimes she doesn't. Maybe the person she met wasn't being straight with her, some way or another, or maybe their outlooks on life were just different enough that she couldn't get her head around it. She says a whispered prayer to Sarenrae, asking Her to succeed where Samora failed and to help her do better next time.

And then she gets somewhere nobody can see her and teleports to the Master/Stranger containment cells, because she decided before the meeting she was going to do that so that's what she's going to do. Meeting villains alone is never going to be the safe choice, but she can at least make it not a completely stupid choice.

...she what.

The duty officers down in M/S 3 are getting to know Samora pretty well, what with all the Scrying.  It's alarming that she wants to use the space for its intended purpose, but if someone wants M/S confinement it's against procedure to do anything that might slow them down, so they don't ask any questions as they lock her in.

(It's a bit of a farce for someone with her Mover power but, again, procedure)

It starts with basic identity and memory checks, delivered by a dispassionate computerized voice.  Does Samora know the day's password?  Does she know her personal password?  Can she pick her parents' names from a list of plausible alternatives?  Does she know the name of the cape who tested her blood, on the day she appeared on Bet?

Then it gets a bit more abstract.  Look at the screen, please.  It runs through a set of colors and patterns, broken up by a flashing violent light.  It beeps once, then starts showing people and places.  The Rig.  Armsmaster.  Director Piggot.  Samora herself.  The UN building in Brussels.  Pride.  Legend.  A succession of known Master and Stranger capes, a smattering of whom Samora might recognize.  None resemble the woman Samora met today.

The annoying thing is, probably most of this doesn't work.  They're reasonably well-covered against single impersonators, Armsmaster thinks, but if somebody smart gets a power like Heartbreaker's then probably the whole department will have to be recovered from the outside with Thinker support, and as far as anyone can tell there's no sustainable way to do better.  "Someone smart with Heartbreaker's power" isn't even the worst-case scenario, nowhere close.

After Samora has run through the automated program, and after he's had a chance to let his for fuck's sake Samora now what emotions settle, he opens an audio link to M/S 3.  "Hello, Samora, this is Armsmaster.  What's happened?"

"Nothing, I hope. I met with a villain to provide spiritual counseling, and 'right after being alone with an unfamiliar villain' is a time for checking into M/S containment even if it seems like a silly waste of time one could totally skip. But I sure do appear to be fine this time."

The machine says her eye movement is consistent with her baseline, and she doesn't show any inappropriate emotional reactions to any of the prompts.

Such a classic new-hero mistake, and she'll keep making it until it bites her.  "Which villain?"

The machine is mediocre at best at reading human emotions; it'll catch obvious effects like Krakatoa or Skald, but wouldn't do anything if the mystery villain was, say, Valefor.