"Are you clear on how very little I understand what might or might not constitute starting shit, such that my word that I will not try to suffices?"

"...You've so far given the impression of being one of the least shit-starting people I've ever met, but I suppose that's fair. Don't attack anyone with a weapon or with magic. Don't brandish a weapon at anyone to make them think you might hurt them. Don't steal anyone's car, don't break into anyone's house, don't take things from stores without paying. I realize you probably have no local money but I'm sure I can find someone with a spare room for you. Don't, er, try to have sex with a woman who'd rather not." He would hope that a religious man wouldn't, but Artigas made a good point that he probably shouldn't be assuming.

"I would say 'don't get drunk and start political arguments in the grocery store' but this town is full of werewolves and I haven't arrested any of them over it. ...Oh, and please actually don't go around getting any of our fae indebted to you on purpose because you'd like to acquire some traumatized refugees as servants, I'm– I was assuming the thing before was an accident," ugh and what are they even going to do about it, he really hopes that isn't the thing that's going to explode next, "but I should probably be making fewer assumptions, and I would really prefer you didn't. Which probably means not healing anyone with your religious magic unless they agree to it? I could write a sign, if you can't give everyone you meet the translation magic. Er. Does most of that roughly make sense, as things your planet or your religion would agree count as 'starting shit'?" 

"...does 'anyone' include anyone who is themselves already threatening me or a third party, for the attacking and brandishing items? I told - Doctor Blackwood, is that the person's name - that I didn't intend to collect on any debts - I can carry a sign but sometimes people who need healing are unconscious and in any event they won't speak any of the languages I do."

Oh, he likes this guy. 

"I think that self-defense doesn't count as starting shit. Killing someone in self-defense is - the sort of not-a-crime where there would be a trial to establish if it was really definitely a proportionate use of force - that's a bit hypothetical because the paperwork would be a nightmare, but if you have nonlethal ways to defend yourself I would be much less likely to regret this. I - would generally recommend not intervening in altercations between third parties, in these parts, unless you're very sure that you know what's going on, because some of them are altercations that both participants want to have and believe are lawful." 

Ugh. He really can't ask a religious man whose religion gives him healing magic to not heal unconscious people, that would be fucked up.

"I was thinking I'd write the sign in our language, but I'm realizing a lot of the affected people can't read that either. What if I inform our best gossipy housewives that we've got a healer in town who's not under the Compact, and they'll put the word out, and anyone who would prefer to be dead than owing a stranger a life-debt can avoid going outside for a while just in case, does that work? And if something happens anyway we'll figure it out somehow. I'm not going to ask you to watch someone die in front of you because you're not sure." 

Danby doesn't personally think that gossipy housewives are the best way to make important public announcements, and he's letting it show a bit on his face, but the relevant population certainly won't speak to him about it, what with the whole 'terrified of any government ever anywhere knowing that they exist'. Ugh, he really hopes it's true that there's a spare-room open. The housewives don't tell him how many boarders are sloshing around, because: see above, and - well. Events. At least there's some warning, sometimes the only way he knows that the population of his town is suddenly up by 20% is because the grocery store is all out of cereal by Wednesday and MacArther is calling the desk asking if Something Happened On The Other Side Again. 

"I am unlikely to achieve surety of what is going on. I am not prepped right now for nonlethal combat - I can prioritize that tomorrow but it is even with magic hard to calibrate, especially if I don’t know if anyone involved is Evil, and has not much featured in my career to date especially with weak opponents. I am... unfamiliar with housewife based news distribution... and was assuming based on the sign idea that most people are literate..."

"Our system for housing people is– isn't a system, it's housewives with spare rooms who don't tell me anything. There's some sort of fae cultural thing where they hate being - documented - and I work for the government," ostensibly, the government just doesn't know a fraction of his heroic services to the province, "I have paperwork obligations." 

It feels like he's rambling, but - he's going to stick with overexplaining everything, for now, because someone should, and also it's kind of nice to rant, in a language no one else in the room can possibly eavesdrop on, to someone who is politely disappointed about all of it. It's been a frustrating day. ...It's been a frustrating decade.  

"I think most of them are literate in something but I don't know how big a favor it'd be to ask Xavier to write it for me and I would kind of prefer not to deal with that today, he seems like he might be irritating. And like you pointed out, someone might be not be in a state to read, and you might not want to wait around for someone to figure out who could decide it for them. If Dr. Blackwood shows up again I can ask them and it'd probably be covered under the Compact." 

Pause. 

Guy from a completely different planet, right. 

"...Has anyone actually explained the Compact? It's - you would think Blackwood was qualified to do that, if anything, but I probably shouldn't assume they made it clear." 

"I would not describe it as clear. I told the doctor that it seemed difficult to have neutral healers; on Golarion, my planet, most healers are clerics and must be presumed to have some commitments of some kind."

Nod. "The Compact is - a commitment of some kind, I think it's fair to say. With some very useful perks, though nothing quite as useful as range-effect instant healing. - would you like the full wording of their oath, I have it written down in my office. With annotations." 

"It might be ideal to save it for when I need a Comprehend Languages up for some other reason, to fit more use into the spell duration, if you're not confident of how you'd translate it."

He wouldn't have thought it was very ambiguous in translation, he's done it on the fly in French before to that vampire that one time who was very angry about something related to Dr. Blackwood having gone and done the Dr. Blackwood act somewhere or other, but maybe Artigas cares a lot about exact wording.

"Sure. Gist is that if a healer is on Compact business - there's a token they wear, to indicate it - then they're obligated to treat anyone they see who's in need of treatment and agrees to it. In exchange, they get to just opt out of all the whole fucking favors and debts thing that fae have going on. No one can mess with them, and I mean 'can' literally, on the Other Side a healer on Compact business can just walk right into the middle of a declared fight, carry the injured party out, and commandeer the nearest house as declared sanctuary, and nobody in that house can raise a hand to anyone else in it until the healer says he's done." 

They don't have a version for officers of the law and he's too old to go back to college now, but if Danby were a younger man he might consider literally attending medical school in order to earn the right to swear the oath and bear that token. The magic doesn't actually care if a person only wears it for thirty seconds once a year. They say Dr Blackwood themselves doesn't travel under it anymore, and has a habit of pulling it out two seconds before touching a patient and wearily declaring sanctuary in 'you know, that voice they have' which Danby can, in fact, hear perfectly in his head right now. 

"I... do not think it is quite appropriate to commandeer people's houses and render all their inhabitants enchanted against participating in nearby fights the outcome of which might matter to them... the example in my holy book is about quartering soldiers so it may not be perfectly applicable but it was considered a regrettable necessity requiring compensation where remotely feasible, not, uh, a perk. I can very easily run out of healing for the day if I use enough of it, and even if we assume for the sake of argument that I and my goddess would both broadly approve of every injured person I come across remaining alive and fully well, which is not necessarily a given, we might approve of this different amounts and prefer - being as She is a goddess of triage - to save some healing for possible eventualities of greater importance later in the day."

"It does seem like much less of a fit for your planet's healing. Dr. Blackwood's kind of medicine needs hours or days of work, and somewhere safe to put the patients in the meantime." Shrug. "It's a big deal over there. The favor-debts thing must be a lot of it, it's - I mean, I'd be a hermit. I wish there was a way to sign on just for that, but apparently it only works if it's been how things are done for several thousand years." 

"I don't think I understand, ah, that thing."

"...Huh. Your language has a word for the fae, did it never come up?" 

"One is generally advised to keep one's distance at, not all costs but most of them, and there are enough kinds that it would be impractical to learn them all even if one had an unusually fae-facing life situation."

Danby isn’t really sure what to say to that, honestly.

“Might’ve been a worse idea here two hundred years ago,” he produces, after a solid eight seconds of silence. “Back when they’d pretty much always have the upper hand. Times’ve changed, at least over on this side.” 

For him the debt thing is mostly inconvenient in the opposite direction; he’d like to do more for those people, he’s just not so enamored with personally gluing himself to their problems. Like, it’d be one thing if he could be confident it was only one specific guy or gal, but he can’t see at a glance who has a complicated situation back home, and wow is accidentally transitively glueing himself to some asshole three crossings over not a complication he needs in his life. Not that he’d judge the people who are willing to risk a mess, there was the whole business with Mrs. Bigby and to be quite honest she deserves a medal for it, just. Well, it’s moot anyway.

"They seem plausibly a different set of kinds entirely."

“- Right, or that, the translation could be doing something odd with it. Er, well, here there’s a fae thing where - how do I put this -“ 

He really hates using the obvious analogy, it’s - you know, pretty fraught, and also right now it feels worse because he’s embarrassed on behalf of Earth, not that that even really makes sense, Canada was always - and it was before he was even born, anyway - 

Shrug. “If there’s a mismatch in how helpful two people can be to each other, and at least one of them is fae, then - whoever’s owed more favors, the magic thinks they’re in charge of the other guy now. Also, I gather it all gets transferred upward, to any other guys who're owed enough favors by the first guy, and then they have a stake in it too. I think for fae it's," what was the word that Artigas had used, again, that was actually a perfect word for it and it's weird how he's never heard anyone describe it before, "- it's like being enchanted, if they owe someone else enough, they - can't say no to anything that person wants from them. I - hmm - I'm not actually sure how much humans, on Earth, would– well, I'm given to understand that either of those factors weaken the effect."

He's a bit flustered about this, isn't he. Why, because it's embarrassing?

"A human who'd run a big enough debt in the wrong direction could be kept against their will, if they were on the fae's territory, that's - well, people say it used to happen sometimes. But nowadays we're shipping them an awful of food and goods through the crossing here. I actually reckon the ones in charge want to avoid pissing us off almost as much as the reverse."

"Ah. ...can I transfer the debts to my goddess and then just be a consultant on how to execute on that? I am in Her service."

"I–" Wow. What a good question! "...I might have to ask a priest. One with local context, I mean. We do have one and I actually think it might be a good idea to introduce you for other reasons too. The church has rooms to put up temporary visitors, and - it's sanctuary, the real kind, like the Compact. While you're there, no Other Side natives could raise a hand to you. Seems less likely you'd end up in a spot where you'd have to defend yourself. - and it still holds even if their treaty over there falls apart." 

...He's so expecting the treaty to fall apart, isn't he. It might have taken him longer to notice if not for the pre-emptive twinge of embarrassment. 

Rennie said, approximately last week, that the church would stand in spite of it. And that if it happened, anyone who didn't feel safe where they were would be welcome, he'd make space for them somehow. Danby isn't certain how the Vicar even knows that. It's not like he was here for the last go-around either. But he said it, so he must have a reason to believe it's true. 

Rennie's in a very similar position to Danby's own, really, in how he's theoretically under a bigger institution that would have the right to relocate him any day they wanted, which would be a disaster, and it's not workable to tell the bishop the truth about why, and he's constantly having to fudge his paperwork too, what with how a surprising fraction of his congregation does not, according to the province of British Columbia, exist, and yet if he doesn't report them the numbers might not justify keeping a mission out here at all. And the town needs it; the town is using Rennie's church as surely as it's using Danby's cells. It would be a nightmare if the Anglican Church of Canada decided they might as well merge this parish with Terrace. So. Fudging the paperwork, because it's not like the institutions they work for actually want to know, and because - well, it seems pretty likely that when Rennie was sent in to run this mission, the Threshold Guardian chose to poke his nose in and make the man swear an oath too.

The little Anglican church in town is always what people refer to as "the church". It's not the only church in town. It's not even obviously the one that gets the most attendees on a regular Sunday. There's the United Church of Canada, and there are the Lutherans who meet in that lady's basement, and at one point there was a Pentecostal group meeting in some other lady's basement but Danby hasn't stayed up to date. Irregardless, "The church" is the one that still holds sanctuary, in that mildly disturbing way that he now has a word for (enchantment, what an excellently evocative word) in terms of how it affects the fae, and to a lesser extent anyone with supernatural abilities, but it's mostly the fae who creep him out with it.

No, Danby doesn't know why it's only the Anglicans who get the good stuff. Yes, he's absolutely certain that the Sunday church coffee ladies have all sorts of gossip. No, he doesn't want to know.

"What sort of church is this?"

An...gli....can...? 

- another planet. Right. 

Could this be someone else's job, he's not, it's embarrassing when he hasn't been to church except on Christmas for, like, eight years he's the one with the language. It's not as thought Dr. Blackwood of all people is any better placed for it.

AUGH.

Look. Corporal Danby likes to think he pulls his weight as a cop, but he's a really bad Christian. When did he last pray. Like, for real. He...honestly has no fucking idea? Back when his mother was still alive. 

"It's a -" it doesn't feel like 'denomination' is going to translate directly, "a side branch of the church of Jesus Christ. Jesus was, er, the son of God? Who died to save humanity from our sins?"

AUGH. JESUS PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR MAKING YOU SOUND STUPID TO THE PERSON FROM ANOTHER WORLD. THIS JUST ISN'T REALLY MY FORTÉ OKAY. 

"...so the god is dead but the institution is holding on for the time being? Or... the church is the church of the dead one's parent, but this branch focuses on this one event theologically speaking?"

Wow he is really bad at this. Actually. Fuck. Okay. Lord's Prayer. He has that memorized, actually, definitely, for sure, right? Which bit did he forget to include? ugh, no, wait, not the Lord's Prayer, the other one, the long one he used to zone out during and get smacked across the ear by his dad about - he is absolutely going to say something INSANE, his excuse is that trying to explain religion using a language from ANOTHER PLANET that was just shoved into your brain by someone of an entirely different religion is not, the best setup, but that's a shitty excuse,

sorry Jesus he's just. he has a day job, all right. it's a lot. he'll try to do better but

"He didn't stay dead, that part is important and I skipped it, sorry. He suffered for our sins and died and went to Hell on our behalf and then on the third day he rose again and ascended to Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. - they're both God and there's also a holy spirit, they're all God. I don't think I'm explaining it very well. I'm not– I'm not a priest, this isn't my job." 

AND HE'S A BAD CHRISTIAN SORRY JESUS but he's already kind of running out of steam on that. How in the world did they even end up on this topic - oh, right, Artigas was worried he would disturb the peace by accident because he didn't know better, then it seemed he in fact really didn't know about the stupid fae glueing-spaghetti-to-their-complicated-interpersonal-situations thing, then he had a question that needed a priest to answer. Right. Shit he feels like he's forgetting something. The...wall....Elizabeth...fuck. 

"- Please excuse me, I need to make sure the prisoner from the Winterlands isn't about to die of it being too hot in here for him." 

"- I have a spell for that?"