It is when things try to kill you a lot.

You're quite right, he says, I'm sorry. I didn't think.

My school lost a student or three every year. And this is with warded paths and everyone carrying a weapon and the grounds being patrolled for monsters. There's a teacher who complains about not being allowed to kill somebody in the first class of the year every year, as an example, anymore.

I think the Outer Lands are similarly dangerous, though the Enemy doesn't teach classes and it's considered less acceptable.

Yeah, I'm not trying to have a contest or anything.

And I am not trying to undercut you, but rather to communicate if you find it encouraging that many of the people here share all of your fears. When Oromë arrived among the Eldar, as I understand it, most of them fled for their lives.

Oh, that would've been a bad idea with a god in my world. Standard procedure is to pretend you're very honored by their presence and not terrified at all lest the god wonder if they have some reason to kill you that you've remembered and they've forgotten, or find running and screaming insulting.

He found it horrifying, not insulting, but was hardly going to hold them back from it, and we tried very hard after that to be less scary. Do you think the hat helps?

It's very aesthetic but I don't know if it makes you appreciably less scary looking relative to sans hat.

I can grow hair from my face! Did you know the Eldar can't do that? We had vague memories that that was a thing and I really expected they would. Does having face hair make me less scary?

...I didn't know the Eldar can't do that. I am not sure if having a beard makes you less scary. Might depend on the kind of beard. Some kinds of beard are cartoon villain coded.

I am probably not going to your world until we know much more about it, but once I do I will check with you to see how I can appear least scary.

Don't overdo it. Some fae do that and now there's all kindsa mixed signals.

Huh. All right.

Some fae are even nice sometimes! But that just further muddies the waters.

What is a fae, exactly?

They're a sort of person who have very powerful supernatural powers. There may be many kinds, it's sort of unclear, they can look all different ways. They mostly live in sylvan areas and they do time dilation and space warping and curses and sometimes blessings. They'll engage people they run across in conversation and sometimes not make it clear they're a fae, and if the person they're talking to is rude according to their definition of rude, or trespasses somewhere the fae doesn't want them to go, or maybe damages a plant or kills an animal or brings something the fae doesn't want to have in the forest or doesn't offer the fae half of their food or a gift or compliment their hairdo - if the person does not behave according to exacting uncommunicated mostly arbitrary standards the fae holds - then the person is in trouble, dead or cursed or not spat back out of the forest for five hundred years when their whole family's dead or something like that.

In that case I certainly do not prefer to have people under the impression I am a fae. But I get the sense it would also be unwise to walk around declaring 'I am a very minor god!'.

Yyyyyeah. I might actually be less scared of a very minor god than a fae because a very minor god is likely to have been recently mortal and sort of comprehensible. Which is not your deal.

Recently mortal no. I am very much striving for sort of comprehensible.

I'm not sure you actually are sort of comprehensible on the relevant scale. You're benign but I'm assuming you didn't, like, grow up on a farm in Prax and always have lousy grades in math, kind of comprehensible, correct me if I'm wrong.

I'd be happy to go to a farm? We're quite good at math, we rather have to be.

She giggles. Going to a farm is not the thing.

In that case I suppose I am out of luck.

Well, you can basically try to look very ordinary-for-wherever-you-are, so people won't give you a second thought until you actually address them; or you can look like you are a completely unfamiliar kind of powerful thing, which you are, and people will fall back on assuming you're probably whatever you say you are or at least they'd better play along.