"I'm sorry to hear that. I sort of hadn't expected to be, given that, uh, you are in fact kind of a terrible person, but there we go. Oh well, at least you seem to be the genuinely affably evil type instead of the faux affably evil type."

He snorts. "There's types?"

"Oh, sure. I mean, not that you can fit any person in a nice neat little set of boxes or anything, but people do tend to have things in common."

"So what defines the difference between 'genuinely affably evil' and 'faux affably evil'...?"

"Real affably evil is when you do things like torturing people or sacrificing virgins to dark gods but also have, like, genuine relationships with people who don't happen to be your victims and can generally be taken at face value when being nice. Faux affably evil invites you to dinner and offers to let you stay over in their very cozy beds when it turns out to be raining and then dusts the pillows with poison or arranges for a knife in the back in your sleep or what have you."

"The first one's a reasonable description of me. Second thing sounds exhausting."

"I mean, it's also possible to be both, have a family and friends you love and be a snake-in-the-grass to everyone else, but I don't disagree."

"I hate being deceptive and I do as little of it as possible."

"Neato. That sounds much easier to deal with than the alternative."

He laughs. "Yeah."

"If there's one thing more tiring than lying all the time it's dealing with people who lie all the time."

"Yeah, you're not wrong."

She starts to say something when one of her legs suddenly spasms, not a lot, but enough that she falls over and hits her head against the doorframe. She crumples to the ground, scarlet blood bold against her silver hair and grey skin.

She makes a choked sobbing sound, tries to rise to her feet, fails. The blood is getting kind of everywhere.

He stares at her for a long moment, and then - vanishes.

She lies on the floor until the wound on her head scabs over and she can stand without being so dizzy she falls over again, considers a bath, decides she is not competent to do that and can just prestidigitate the sheets clean in the morning, and collapses into bed. You are really not supposed to go to sleep with a head injury but the reasons do not apply to her. She sleeps.

In the morning there is a cluster of very pretty bottles of water just outside her door.

Ooookay?

By the time she discovers this, she has bathed, magicked the bed blood-free, and prepared new spells for the day including antimagic field and Mordenkainen's disjunction. She opens one of the bottles and sniffs it in case it's some obvious non-water thing that just happens to also be transparent.

A note tucked under one of the bottles says, From the healing fountain.

Huh. Okay.

He showed up pretty promptly when Luar did it...

"Serik? I've got the spells prepared, whenever you're ready."

Half a minute later, he materializes.

"Hi! The water bottles were a nice idea, but I was fine by the time I found them." She no longer bears visual evidence of last night's mishap.

"They're for next time. It seems obvious there will be a next time. You wouldn't have needed five just for last night."

"For next time--oh. I hadn't actually put together that it was the curse that did that, possibly because of the head injury."