????????????????????????????

She blinks at him.

"...why... do you want to, uh... help random people... that you don't even know?"

...Wherever she grew up can't have been a good place, whether it really was a satanic cult or not.

"It's a pretty normal human impulse, I think,  Now, whether it's practical and sensible for me to be doing that instead of something else with my life is a different question, but - do you not feel happier when you've been kind to someone?"

...She's not really sure how she would know? 

Probably that's the wrong answer.

He says that wanting to be kind is a 'normal human impulse' but that sounds — wrong? She's a normal human, she knows plenty of normal humans, and people aren't — they don't — people will help each other if they're getting something out of it, or respect someone with the power to make them regret it if they don't, or compliment people who are stupid enough to care, but they aren't going to just be kind for no reason.

Probably that is also the wrong answer.

...When she killed Guifré, which was about the strongest impulse she's ever had to do anything, it wasn't because she was going to be better off for it. She knew she might die for it, she knew he was leaving soon, but it was the right thing to do, she knew that with aching-hot certainty. And she was a lot happier when she did it, and when she found out for sure it had worked. If he feels the same way about... being kind to random people he doesn't know?... then maybe that could sort of be similar.

Do you mean like how it feels to kill someone who deserves it? is probably about as wrong of an answer as it is possible to give.

......When she thought she was still in Cheliax, and she was deciding whether to turn in the doctor for being a heretic, and she didn't do it, that was — maybe a little closer? She was helping him, or thought she was, even though he was a stranger, and she hadn't expected to benefit from it. It's still not quite the same thing — whether you turn a heretic into Asmodeus matters, whether you're nice doesn't really — but whether you take in a kid or let them be locked up in a 'correctional facility' matters too, so maybe it's close enough.

She doesn't really think she felt happy, though. She was sick, and scared, and shaky, and nearly certain she was going to die.

"...I think back home it would've been — dangerous, sometimes, to be kind." Not usually, usually it's just the sort of thing that would make people think you were stupid and easy to take advantage of, but that's less important to what she was saying, and maybe he thinks people should still be kind even if it makes everyone else think they're stupid? "So rather than feeling nice, it mostly just feels scary. But maybe it'd feel good if it weren't the sort of thing that might get you in trouble?"

"That sounds like an awful place.  I hope it'll be different once you get used to what things are like here, and you can see how it feels then."  He hopes she will feel safe enough here, but it's not as if everyone does, and things are hard enough for her already.

"But - I do think it's usually the opposite, here?  It makes me safer, to help people, because most of them will want to help me back if I ever need it, or at least they'll know I'm not their enemy.  But it's not just that, it's," he's struggling a little to explain, it feels obvious but it isn't really, "contributing to a society where everyone else feels safe to be like that?  It's not just that if I help someone they'll feel like they should help me back, it's that the more people see someone selflessly helping others, the more they'll consider it a normal thing to do, and do it more themselves, and rely on being able to get help when they need it, and - everything's better, that way.  Of course it doesn't always work, but - it mostly has, for me.  Maybe I've just been lucky."

That feels like it would be nice if it worked.

She doesn't really see how it would, though, especially if you're also helping strangers, where you can't even see if they took advantage of you last time you tried helping them, and can't be sure you're not helping an Evildoer by mistake. It feels like — the sort of thing you'd have to be kind of pathetic to want, only she does want it, or she would if it didn't sound impossible.

She nods.

"Uh, next question, what sorts of things are you going to want me to do if I'm living with you?" (Wait, she told them she was from a farming family, is he going to want her to be able to help out with that?)

He smiles at her for remembering the point of the conversation. 

"Not much, you have a broken leg."  Although he should give her a better answer than that.  ...Right, there's the obvious thing.  "In the fall you should go to school - all children have to, it's not my requirement - and before that we should probably do some studying to get you ready for it."  Is he remotely competent to get a sixteen-year-old ready for whatever class level she should be in?  Well, he'll find out.  "Besides that, help around the house some.  Wash the dishes or do some cooking, help weed the garden or pick fruit once you're up to more walking."  It's not that she really has to, but it's usually good for people to have something useful to do.  "What sort of work do you like or not like?"

Ugh, she doesn't know anything about their history or theology or literature, she's going to get whipped so much. She's not a little kid, she can take it, but it's going to suck.

In any case, she needs to figure out some types of work that she knows how to do, that the person she's claiming to be would also know how to do, that it's not ridiculous for someone to like, and that don't make it seem like she's just trying to get out of any real work.

"I like watching my siblings, and tidying, and bringing clothes and broken things to the laundry wizard." (She doesn't have siblings, but how hard can watching little kids be?) "And I can read and write and do figures and keep a book of accounts."

This upsets him for some reason.  "You have siblings?  Of course you do, I hope the police can get them out, do you think they're all right?  How old are they?"

... Wait, he's not sure to what extent he believes the satanic cult thing is true.  But, again, does it matter very much?  If she ran away from a normal home for normal reasons, they were probably good normal reasons and her siblings being back there is still something to worry about.  And even if her reasons weren't good, it must be upsetting for the younger children that she's gone, and hard for her to be away from them.

Well, if they find Sofrituró they'll know she made that part up, but she already gave them fake names for parents that don't exist, it's not like she's making things any worse. "Uh, I think we count years a little differently back home, but Melcion is twelve and Caino is ten and Waleria is nine and Ludoviro is five — I don't watch them as much as I used to, since they're mostly old enough to take care of themselves, unless they're really having issues in school or something." (Obviously anyone would help their siblings if they might end up hurt badly enough that they can't help with the harvest, that's just good sense.)

"I... don't know if they're alright, it probably depends on whether anyone blamed them for me leaving? —And I had some others that died, but not because anyone killed them or anything, they just got sick." She says this in a tone of voice that suggests that having multiple siblings die of illness is completely unremarkable.

"That's not supposed to happen, with modern medicine children don't just randomly die of sickness!  If any of this is true then I can't possibly explain how much these people need to be found and stopped!"

Deep breath.  "And I'm not going to accomplish that by shouting at you in a basement.  I'm sorry."  Whatever's happening, he can't get useful information about it if she doesn't trust him, and he cannot force that to happen.  "Was there anything else you wanted to know?"

Well, she's lying about having siblings, but she's not just making up a bunch of dead people for no reason, she thought it'd seem a lot less likely to claim that she had a normal number of siblings and none of them had ever died of illness!

"—It's not just — even the lord's children sometimes got sick and died, and he had a travel pass, he was allowed to leave if he wanted to."

That isn't a question, and maybe he'll be mad about that, but if they're trying to figure out what's going on it seems like it might be important. Her lord was furious about Guifré's death and he wasn't even his heir, she thinks he'd've probably brought his children to a doctor if he thought it would work.

Well, if she wants to sit in this basement and help him figure out what's happening (or get to know him better by watching his reactions to fictional problems), he is certainly happy to do that.

"That's even more confusing.  If he did travel, he couldn't have not known - you've seen what everywhere is like, with asphalt roads and train lines and electricity, I don't think it's possible to go out and not notice that the world is different than the people you grew up with told you it was.  I would guess - probably he's one of those people who don't believe modern medicine works, or think it's harmful for some reason?  They're rare but they do exist.  It's just superstitious fear and lack of education."

There's a lot of things communism was wrong about, but it wasn't wrong about that one. 

"But - it basically doesn't happen.  I've known probably a hundred families with children, and," he thinks for a moment, "three dead ones, ever.  One was born wrong, one died of sickness as a baby - it does sometimes happen, it's just very rare - and my cousin drowned when she was two.  I'm sure it's worse than that, in some places - but two or five times worse, not so much worse that most families would have a dead child, that's horrifying."

"People did say that doctors didn't actually do anything, and it was better to just rely on the priests — there weren't any doctors in my village, but people told stories about other places. Maybe not true ones."

Is there a safe way to point out that what people said is... well, not true, because priests of Asmodeus suck, but still kind of true? "...They were definitely faster at fixing injuries, if they wanted to, but the circuit-priest wasn't strong enough to cure sick people. ...And I don't know if he'd have helped babies even if he could, besides the lord's."

She frowns slightly. "I think... if the lord knew that there were doctors that, uh, could help with sicknesses" (and if that part is actually true) "he would have brought his children there, and just said that he brought them to a more powerful priest. ...The lord might have known that things were different out here" at least if she didn't time-travel or something "and just lied about it? If everyone knew that they could just walk a few days and not be living under Asmodeus lots of them would have tried to leave, but it's not like it's hard to see why an Evildoer would want to stay and be an Asmodean lord." She doesn't think her mother was lying the whole time, she's pretty sure she would have noticed, but the person she's pretending to be doesn't have a mom who went to wizard school in Egorian. "So either way I think he thought the doctors didn't do anything, even if he knew about Europe."

She's also confused about what ??lightning-spells?? have to do with anything, but that seems less important.

"Yes, it makes sense why he'd lie, just doesn't make sense why he'd let his own children die unless he was also wrong about doctors.  Which... seems like a strange combination, but what do I know about people who run horrifying cults in the woods."  He sighs.  "I don't know if that helps the police much - the descriptions of the lord and the priest and whoever else had contact with the outside world, maybe, but if they can't find an entire hidden village I don't think they're going to have better luck finding a few people who don't want to be found."

"Anything else you can think of that would help?  Or just that would - help the two of us make sense of how all this happened?"

"If you have any powerful wizards here I could help them do a scrying?" She kind of feels like they won't, though. "I don't really know what else would be helpful, we studied history in school but it changed a lot."

"We don't have any wizards.  Wizards are fictional.  I think this is another thing where you don't have a good enough reason to believe me," which is fair enough really, "and we're going to have to think about what to do about that once you're, uh, out of this basement.  Unless you want to talk more before you decide?"

Okay but she has seen a wizard do magic! Wizards are definitely real! 

"...Is it illegal to think that wizards are real?"

"No!  You can think wizards are real all you like, people will just think you're wrong.  I suppose children at the school might make fun of you.  But - I've never seen any magic, nobody I know has ever seen any magic, none of the books or newspapers talk about magic unless they're fiction, I just - have no reason at all to think there's such a thing as magic.  And I know people have a reason to lie about it and to fake magic tricks, to scare people or get money out of them.  So that's what I expect happened, when you were growing up."

She is confused about how they made the Lights and the train and the Wand of Sending if no one here knows how to do magic, and also about the giant dragons. Maybe there are also dragons that aren't magic?

...Actually, now that she thinks about it, if he's telling the truth about all those things not being magic here, then maybe the Asmodeans were lying, and it's possible to do more things without magic than she thought? Only then she's still confused about why their doctors can't just fix her leg, and about how they tricked her mom into thinking she could do magic, and about why they didn't just try to pretend that only Asmodeans would be able to do magic.

She nods. 

"I think there are... things that still don't make sense if magic isn't real?... but we can figure that out later. I can't think of more questions but I might think of more later?"

"Is that an 'I want to go home with you and we can talk more then' or an 'I want to talk more before I decide that but we should take a break'?  You can do either one of those, it'd just help to know which."  Bit of a smile.

He's guessing the first one, but it's not the sort of thing you should guess about.

She is not really under the impression that she has an actual choice, but if he's not secretly Evil and lying to her then going home with him sounds... good? Much better than Cheliax, at least.

(She'd like to know whether she's allowed to change her mind later, but that's the sort of thing that might not be safe to ask.)

(She'd like her knife back, but that's definitely not the sort of thing that's safe to ask for.)

"I'd like to go home with you." Tiny smile. Everyone here does so many things with their face all the time.

A tiny smile!!  She's doing it a bit... oddly... but it still seems a good sign.  "Let's do that, then."

There's a brief conversation with the orphanage staff - no, she can't get any of her things back, they're police evidence - and then a tram ride back to the train station.

"Ah, what should I call you?  I really should've asked earlier."  Her paperwork was a little confusing on the name question.

Right, that makes sense, Mr. Dąbrowski is acting nice but the Crown still hasn't decided for sure whether to torture her to death send her to a 'correctional facility'.

...Did they not tell him her 'name'? Or, no, probably this is another confusing test.

"My parents named me Nessa, but one of the men at the orphanage said it could be short for Agnieszka, and I like that better."

They showed him her papers and he took some notes about them, but there were two first names on that and for all he knows she might not like either of them!

"Agnieszka, all right.  Well, the next train's in two hours, so we have a while to wait.  Want a toasted sandwich?"  There's a kiosk selling them in the outside part of the train station.  They have melted cheese and fried mushrooms on them; she can smell them from here.

Oh, that smells so good. "Yes, sir."