"I guess that's reasonable. In my world you sometimes need to be able to fight through pain, and pain will happen often enough that you need to learn to relate to it as - not a distraction."

"There's a Pain Resistance Skill, here, but that would equally make it less effective to put your feet in acid.  I suppose I never considered how a world would need to configure itself if that Skill didn't exist and there was some kind of very painful combat going on anyways."

"You - appreciate the pain for making you less weak, and for motivating you, and you wish for it to end but by your mastery of it, not by your giving up." Shrug. "I wasn't going to do it to you, when I pointed out it might work to level people without danger to their lives you weren't glad."

"Don't misunderstand me, I'd try to stick my feet in acid with no Pain Resistance skill to end up as queen of a country, and I think I could do it.  If you did that to me on purpose and when there were other ways, it would be a serious issue and probably break our employment because it would be - disrespectful?  Showing a lack of concern for - consequences to me, my own experiences, my own preferences?  It's a way you'd treat a slave with an anti-suicide slave collar, a piece of property, because most people won't do that to themselves."

He is still trying to figure out if he should be worried that the Summoned Hero is maybe severely psychologically damaged and does not respect herself, in that way, but this is clearly a complicated interuniversal situation and he doesn't want to Jump to Conclusions.  There are cautionary tales about people who Jumped to Conclusions about a Summoned Hero.

"It's not disrespectful! But doing it properly is a skill, and not one I've been trained in, and while I hope to find some companions who are eager enough to learn they'll tolerate some failures of skill, I'm not going to do it while I don't know how and you oppose the whole concept, I don't expect that'd work to make you stronger!

"It is generally the person you are doing something to, who will decide if they think what you're doing is disrespectful to them; it is not something you can decide for them."  This also being the reason Almys isn't immediately jumping to the conclusion that his liege could not respect herself, her own experiences, or that she is to herself her own uncared-for slave.

" - does disrespectful not imply - motivated by, or justified by, disrespect - it really doesn't seem like it has anything to do with the person affected, it's about the reason they were treated in that fashion!"

"No mindreading here, at least that I'm allowed to know about and it doesn't seem like something that - aspected mana - should be able to do.  People don't know why you treat them a way, and especially if they don't know you're the Summoned Hero, they'll draw conclusions about why you hurt them and then probably be not very inclined to listen if you try to explain otherwise."

"And no, as we speak this language here, disrespectful doesn't mean anti-respect, it means the absence of respect.  If you hurt somebody without asking, even in hopes of leveling them, you didn't respect them enough to ask; that does seem like a correct conclusion, to me."

Carissa is pretty sure that 'you disrespect people if you do things that affect them without specifically asking first if they wanted that, even if it was good for them' defines literally all human activity as disrespectful. Presumably everyone doesn't go around quitting all their jobs all the time and rebelling against all their governments all the time on the grounds that people affected them without asking first.

Or who knows! Maybe eighty percent of the population of this world wanders off into the wilderness to starve to death because people kept disrespecting them by sweeping their streets without asking. Not having gods seems like the kind of thing that could cause a general breakdown of sanity. 

But it doesn't seem worth having that argument right now. "Well, I think I haven't affected anyone without asking, because I've mostly stayed in the Rope Trick. - does this apply to putting out the fire without asking, are we going to have to ask everyone if they personally want the fire put out or risk them being forever angry we disrespected them by not asking first?"

"If someone's house is on fire, in this universe, it's a reasonable assumption they'd rather their house not be on fire.  Somebody who respects them and is friends with them, if they don't know otherwise and they have a relevant spell, will put out the fire; if they're a stranger, they might put out the house fire on expectation that they'd be owed a corresponding favor.  Even if the house-owner in fact really wanted to set fire to their house, they would usually know, they ought to know, that other people would incorrectly assume they didn't want their house on fire, and should therefore believe that somebody putting out the fire was probably trying to respect their incorrectly guessed wants.  If the house-owner doesn't seem to get that, and yells angrily at somebody who put out their house fire, everyone else in this world knows what the common assumptions are that a reasonable person would make, so everyone else thinks the house-owner is being unreasonable."

"If you set fire to somebody's house, reverse all that; most people don't want their house on fire, and everyone else will think you were supposed to know that."

"If it's just a campfire instead of a house, reverse and the stakes are lower.  Somebody with a campfire probably wanted there to be a fire, there, and damping it with Water would be an act of disrespect, but one with lower stakes than setting a house on fire."

"I'm walking through all this because it seems like a classic case where the Summoned Hero comes in with very wrong assumptions about what everyone else in the world assumes, and gets bitten by that, or if they're more powerful everyone else gets bitten by it.  It's standard wisdom in this world - maybe not in yours - that above the physical Creation of affinitied mana and materials, there's a second Creation, the Social Creation, that's maintained by a rut-in-reality worn inside our minds of assumptions about what other people want and believe and our beliefs about what they should've known.  It's not real the way that fire is real, but it's at least a little real and you're from outside that version of Creation too."

"Here, putting somebody's feet in acid is something they probably don't want, which everyone else will assume they didn't want, and will think you should've known they didn't want.  And the most important fact I'm trying to convey - because it looks like it was different where you came from - is that it will be considered a big deal rather than a small deal."

“But if you do it to yourself, presumably, people won’t assume you didn’t want to do it? Since then you wouldn’t have done it?”

"Honestly I have been having some internal mental hiccups along those lines, but am trying not to be the stupid sort of Companion who the Hero has to explain everything to, despite it not even being her own dimension."

"Other people if they see that will be confused, best case they just think you're weird, middle case they think you're crazy, worst case they start paying attention and cross-correlating it with other oddities."

"I will not draw attention to myself in public, and if other people I get to know are like you in not wanting to level faster if it hurts, then I won't hurt them to get them to level faster, because I have no business being more invested in them than they themselves are.

How does one learn the Pain Resistance skill?"

"In my case?  Dungeon raid went wrong, got my left hand bitten off, healer was busy, friend tied a tourniquet around it and I kept on fighting, gritting my teeth really hard and hoping I'd get that Skill soon."

"You get it...all at once?"

"It's usually noticeable when things click into place for the Skill existing versus not existing.  After that, leveling is more gradual.  It's like casting a spell, right, at first you either get it right or you don't, but then you start to upgrade power and precision from there."

"I didn't notice getting Pain Resistance." She frowns. "Maybe I wasn't in enough pain."

"Iiiii would sooner suspect that you already have whatever that Skill gives, to the point where it wasn't noticeable when reality decided that you had it."

She also wasn't fighting with her life on the line, but Almys is not sure he should say this right now.

"I guess the stuff done in my world to make it easier to accomplish your goals under circumstances where you'll be in pain might have the same effect." She frowns contemplatively. " - anyway. How was your day?"

"Somewhat nerve-racking on account of how I was going around looking for the remaining Tier-2 affinity mats and an Acid crafting manual or spellbook, which I did not find outside of previously visited shops I was hesitant to visit again, while wondering if anybody was going to nab my Summoned Hero or if she was going to get herself into trouble while I was away.  Also I checked around, and the Transmuter station I know about does seem to be the only one inside the city."

"And all other cities require crossing county lines, which I can probably do while invisible and flying but which is illegal?"

"There's other cities in Midvale County but you're in the county seat, here, Midvale is the largest city in Midvale County.  Smaller towns might have their own Transmuter Devices or not... I don't actually know, Transmuter Devices haven't been around that long, so they don't replicate as easily as camerons, and I think they might require more expensive mats too."

"Invisible and flying does probably get us across a county line without getting caught, but my own current registration won't be good in the new county.  I don't know if you need to show registration to use a Transmuter Device... that could be tested here, but I didn't want to do anything around the Transmuter station without a plan."

"How hard is it to get new registration?"

"It's not really meant to be possible unless you're a newborn baby.  Somebody sufficiently high up in the local government's chain of command about registration would have to decide to make an exception for you.  Once they did, though, people in the next government over wouldn't know that you hadn't always been part of the neighboring government's system."

"....hmmm, maybe I could be a newborn baby? If that solves registration, and if we have lots more options with registration? Alter Self can't make you smaller than, say, a four year old, but Reduce Person would get you the rest of the way."