"Okay... hm, how about I hang up on you, I'll call Rembrandt and I'll tell him to call Haley's phone as soon as he can? All you should have to do is figure out how to pick up. Or Haley can help you once I'm off the phone, if she's there and doesn't want to talk to me."

"Thank you! If you not lying, you good man trying to solve hard problem. Even if it no work, I think it good of you to try."

"That is very kind of you, Iomedae, but I'm just keeping my oaths."

He hangs up, leans forwards and pats his horse's neck for a second, just to feel the warmth. She snorts, relaxed, and Raoulin feels a little better. 

"Done chatting? Want some beef jerky? You've had a long day too. It's teriyaki! That's Japanese, I don't know what it means but it's tasty." 

"I do, yes. Raoulin says that police catch us with car, very bad, and if police no catch us, the" wizards "magic people catch when we sleep."

"Not if I'm faster than they are!" Haley says, bravely, because the alternative to that is to think about what Iomedae just said and possibly then freeze in abject terror. "If they knew where we were, why wouldn't we be dead already?" 

"I not know much about wizards. He could be lying. He said we go to Aethylmarc and people wait there for us."

"If Aethelmearc is in on it too... I guess we could try and go north to the East Kingdom but we'd have to go through the DC area and if the whole of the SCA is in on the conspiracy then I don't want to have to fight our way through Caer Mear, Stierbach, Ponte Alto, Storvik and Bright Hills on our way up there. DC's dense, there's like fifteen baronies up there. So maybe we cut back down southwest and we go for the border with Midrealm?"

"Or we go back, and they say they no kill us. Rembrandt going to call, I asked talk to him."

"The conspiracy which has been lying to me for years about the existence of magic, of people you said you could magically detect were evil, is going to call you on the telephone and tell you they won't kill you, and you're going to believe a word they say?" 

"The magic in the car evil. They say the magic they wear evil, but they not evil. Raoulin not evil first time I seed him, evil second time. Probably he not do any killing that hour, so maybe what he say is true. I not think Rembrandt evil at all, is why I wanted to talk to him. And - it is not a lie, that wizards can find a person in they dreams, I think. I did not expect they try that hard to find a running away slave, but if they is trying that hard, they find us. And Raoulin says they trying that hard, because - the police looking for us, maybe learn the evil magic conspiracy, so the evil magic conspiracy has to find us so the police stop looking. This sound likely I think."

She counts to five and tries to calm down and... nope. All the things she was thinking about saying while buying chocolate bars, and trying not to say, spill out like water from a burst pipe. 

"Iomedae, I get you don't know modern technology, I get, look, I can handle reading, and using a phone, and knowing how car insurance and credit cards work, and minimum wage, and immigration law, and how foster care isn't supposed to involve slavery, and I can do all the driving and not ask you to take a turn, that's fine, it's really fine, I can be responsible for handling all the modern American life and you can be responsible for being a holy warrior, sensible division of labour, whatever, but I don't know about being a holy warrior so I'm going to ask you questions and if you tell me something is how swords work or how magic works or how your universe works then I'm not going to start arguing and say oh, no, magic works this other way, right, because you know about magic, and I don't, and all I'm asking for, really, genuinely all I want to ask is for you to give me the same respect, because I'm trying to keep us alive and I can't be dealing with, with, oh we can't buy gas without giving the money back, or, oh we're just going to believe everything the telephone says, we're just going to run away on foot and try to make it to fucking Mexico, on foot, like, and then we're just going to go home with the stolen car because the archery marshal said so and everyone will hug in a circle and sing kumbayah, please, because those things are stupid, this isn't an argument where you're just going to bring up some point I haven't thought of, you're going to get us killed, just, just can you focus on the thing where I need you to defeat an evil queen because that's the thing I can't, I can't do that for you, I don't -"

Haley eventually pauses because she has to actually breathe. This does not feel anywhere near sufficient to punctuate her point, so she stamps her foot (and then immediately regrets it because what even is she, twelve years old?) and gets in the car and slams the door. 

Rembrandt is sitting in his car in his back yard, because that's the most soundproofed box he owns. It is dark and he's a little cold so he brought himself a blanket and he's folded himself awkwardly into his back seat so he can put his feet up and put his laptop on his lap. 

He's calling Haley using his Google Voice number. In another tab he has several pages of Pathfinder wiki open. The cold light of the screen highlights all the archery gear he hasn't unpacked yet in a strangely ethereal blue. 

Rembrandt hopes Iomedae picks up. 

She will, uh, try! Phones are really terrifying and confusing to interact with!

It's a fifty fifty shot - either the green button with the symbol rotated one way, or the red one with the symbol rotated a different way. 

"Hello. I was told to call you. Is this Iomedae?" 

"Yes." Iomedae gets in the car. "You gived me for a time a bow, this day."

"I did that."

Rembrandt furrows his eyebrows and stares at the Pathfinder wiki. He hasn't been able to find anything interesting - there doesn't seem to be an archery-focused god or a particularly well-written set of archery rules, just the same skill system that the game uses for hitting people with swords or spells - so he's currently on the page that explains what paladins do. It isn't helpful. 

He isn't a diplomat. He is close to the opposite of a diplomat. He has absolutely no idea why it is his job to make this call. Is the archery relevant somehow? Does the kid want to check that she still gets her Royal Round score registered even if she runs away to start some kind of rebellion in Aethelmearc? Was his archery advice so offensive that she had to flee the scene? 

"Do you... want to borrow the bow again?" he tries, because that seems like a safe bet. 

"No. No, I - the hard thing is, Raoulin say that he no want kill us, that if we come back it safe. Haley says, any person want to kill us say that, safe is run. I think - Haley is right, any person want to kill us say that. But I think maybe -

- I think maybe a bad person not give the bow. So, if try say if you are lying or no, start with the bow.

Has you changed what I remember with magic?" She's not, in fact, foolish enough to imagine a truthful answer. She is imagining she might be able to tell the difference.

"Okay. I didn't understand all of that but I can say what I think is important, and if I miss anything, you ask your question again, okay?" Rembrandt speaks as slowly and clearly as he can. "I am not going to kill you. I'm not lying about giving you the bow. I don't think anything you remember was changed with magic. I can't promise it. There is magic on some things so they are very difficult to remember, for everyone, and I don't know if you saw any of those things, but nobody aimed just at you and said, we should change what Iomedae remembers." 

Complicated answers. These people keep giving complicated answers. She thinks it is a point in their favor, but she doesn't know how to explain that to Haley.

"Why use lots evil magic?"

"I don't really know. I never thought it was evil before. How does your evil detecting work?" 

"God give holy warriors power see Evil. Great Evils, like Hell and devils and demons and fiends. And evils like a knight kill lots of people with no good cause."

"I don't think any of our magic is from hell. The knights try not to kill people. They do kill demons. Do you think demons are people?" 

"- I no thinked about it before. Where I from most people not think so but also most people think lots of things they wrong about. 

Demons talk?"