It isn't late at night, but it is late in the year, and the sun went about its business quickly ere it departed.
Jacqueline Somer walks beside a busy road, with her back to oncoming traffic, which she's read you aren't supposed to do but it makes the stupid LED headlights somewhat less unbearable.
She flinches every time a car passes her.
Cars are loud, and she has enhanced hearing.
She'd be much happier, she thinks, in a world without automobiles.
"Oh, while you're here do you have a moment to hear me out and possibly help me with something?"
That's the hazard of talking to people, right, is that they can always talk back.
Wiser to shun the entire field of endeavor.
That "hear me out and possibly help" has one acceptable response, which is of course to say "what do you need help with," which will prompt the request that Seren is waiting to make, which will be delivered such that Owl can't refuse without making it a whole thing.
It's not that Jacqueline would prefer to be ordered around outright, so much as that she'd rather not help anyone with anything ever.
"Well... I received a number of abilities from the goddess that, so far, have been consistently replenishing when I take a rest of 8 hours or more. And umm.. I still need to test most of them out; the only one I know the effects of is one that provides healing for a single target, a far target, or in a burst around me. I have a vague sense of what each one does but I believe it would be helpful to have a better understanding of what their specific effects are. Would you mind helping me test some or all of them out?"
No. No, you cannot test your new and unknown powers on her??
That's such an incredibly stupid thing to suggest that Jacqueline thinks that maybe she misunderstood what was said.
But... what else could "I have targeted powers, help me test them" mean.
"What would helping you test your powers entail."
"For the combative powers, I suppose I'd simply activate them one by one and we could observe what they do. O..Oh! I don't mean like targeting you. I would fire them and you would help me determine their results. The other ones I'd just need you to help figure out the extend of their abilities. The first spell I'd like to test is some sort of protective magic but I'm not sure what it does."
Owl can almost hear that one news anchor with the hair and the gratingly wobbly voice going "in other news, five dead on Chartara today, when an extremely late bloomer developed eremetic powers. Her last words before disaster were 'I'm not sure what it does.'"
And then the other news anchor shakes his head gravely and you can tell that what he's thinking is what an idiot.
"Does no one have powers on your home planet."
No one from elfplanet has powers? That's... peculiar.
Jacqueline Somer has red eyes and gigantic pointy teeth. She really wouldn't have thought she'd have to spell out that she has some kind of power.
On the other hand, she is talking to someone with pointy elf-like ears, so maybe it's on her.
But people from Chartara have powers, though.
"Do you not trust the Ignarans?"
"It's not that they're not trustworthy. I just feel like they might want me to blast them instead of a rock or something. And then I'd have to be awkward and explain that I don't feel comfortable blasting them with unknown attack magic."
"So ummm.. will you help me? Worst case scenario I can heal you? But I really don't think it will come to that. The goddess gave these to me while knowing that I wouldn't know how to use them. This makes me assume that they are safe to test?"
The worst case scenario is that you need to scrape what's left of Jacqueline Somer off the ground with a spatula.
No.
No, that's not even the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is that Seren uses her "healing" power on Owl and it replaces her missing organs with parasites that imitate the functions but can hijack her body at Seren's whim - no, too optimistic - automatically hijacks her body when it believes that to be to Seren's advantage, using simplistic heuristics and faulty logic. Or copies over her with an earlier cached version, or slowly turns her into Seren's (healthy!) duplicate, or any of the thousand horrible ways that healing powers will mess a person up.
No, that's not even the worst case scenario, because that's assuming that all Seren's powers do is injure her! When they could do literally anything!
"We don't have the facilities to safely test your powers."
"Some powers have lethal radii measured in miles. Your powers are probably safe for you to use, but there's never any guarantee for the people around you."
Is it strange that the Ignarans aren't aware and more cautious of this?
Quick estimate, how many people has Owl seen in the camp?
Owl has probably seen about 200 distinct individuals. If all of the carts were full of 10-20 people there would be 1000-2000 people.
She thinks that wildly eremetic powers are supposed to be something like one in a million? Less than that? She doesn't know the exact number, there, but maybe the Ignarans haven't seen how bad things can get?
Not that non-eremetic powers are passively safe...
"How do Ignarans test new powers?"
"So far I don't think anyone purposely tests a power, it just kind of emerges either while fighting monsters or while going about their daily life."
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