Fere tries to punch the magic snake in its weirdly reflective face. It turns out this doesn’t work at all but solves the majority of her problems anyway.
Somewhere other than Sesat, a very skinny person appears. She has facial tattoos, what might once have passed for a short dress, and a spectacularly awful haircut.
[Countries? The ocean, the one with... fish... and salt? I don’t speak any other languages, I'm sorry.]
She sips warily at the ice water.
It's cold.
[I don't know any countries under those names. Do you know which continent?]
[Okay. Well, I have no idea how I'd go about getting you home unless you're about to tell me that in spite of all that you can pinpoint Sesat on a map, but Jackson says he and Brian, his dom, can put you up for the night, at least.]
[Your who? Are these people I could look up to figure out where you were?]
[...I'm so sorry, I don’t know the proper titles for you, I'm sorry, I don’t mean any insult, I'm sorry.]
[Ma'am is all right - though my name's Isabella and in this culture that's the more normal thing to use - and your hosts over there are Jackson, who I know from school, and Brian. I guess you can call Brian 'sir' if you want but our language doesn't actually have a great term of address for male subs, that's one of the reasons we're sliding into names for everybody.]
[Oh. Am I also allowed to have a name?]
She realizes too late that it’s possible they couldn’t otherwise recognize her as a slave, would care, and will be able to guess from that question, but maybe at least one of those things isn’t true!
[...yes, everyone here is allowed to have a name. Should I stop assuming you want to go home?]
[...I wouldn’t ask you to trouble yourself to arrange it. It’s not like I'd know if I like this place better yet, I just got here, but it wouldn’t surprise me. And you can call me Fere.]
[Yeah, you don't seem to be from a place that is really hopping with cosmopolitanism. It's a big country, covers a big coast to coast swath of a continent.]
[...You’re very generous? I can work on a farm if it’s the same here as it is in Sesat but I don’t think anything else is the same so far.]
[I don't know if it's the same but if there's no available refugee program it might be the best you can do, it's something people manage without documentation allowing them to live in the States. There should be something for you if you got here via magical accident, though, I'll check.]
[Thank you.]
She’s putting less effort into seeming deferential now. It seems like they’ve decided she’s on a level with Jackson, who seems to be a free person who works as a servant. And there’s only one servant and Brian also works. And they can ask Isabella for favors on no notice.
[You said it was a magic snake? And you have no idea who did it so you might have just been some kind of, uh, test subject?]
[Yeah. It had this weird face, you could see yourself in it like water. And then when it touched me I was here. I don't know where it came from, it just appeared out of nowhere.]
[Weird. I guess a mage could turn into a weird snake with a reflective face before teleporting people but I have no concept of what would motivate one to do so.]
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