She is slower than the mirror-faced snake, and for some reason it is choosing to chase her, and she is not in dense enough forest to lose it by going up a tree or between a couple too narrowly spaced for it. So it catches her before emergency services can turn up.
And then she is somewhere else, in a not particularly attractive room next to a person who looks sort of off somehow.
"Excuse me," she says, taking a step out of his personal space.
“We could ask Anaander why she thinks so but she’s a deeply unpleasant person. What would be the aim of lying about this, convincing you to stick around?”
"I don't know but I think I'm competitive with a Maitimo trying to pull shit if and only if I don't let my guard down."
"A game. He beats everyone at it every time except me - he and Findekáno will play against me and Rúmil now and then although once I had Vairë on my team for forty-three consecutive games till she got the point. - she's a Vala."
“I’ve never heard of Governor. He’s not - like, the crown improves cognition by three standard deviations and when he gives it to me I can beat him easily. He’s impressive but not outside the range people can boost themselves into.”
"...I don't think this is mostly a general intelligence thing? He wasn't, like, doing magic engineering projects, he sent Curufinwë to learn my language and picked it up at a fairly normal-for-Elf speed himself, he was just - commanding the loyalty of everyone around him in a way that made consensus reality warp."
“We still consider that a cognitive skill? A different one than intelligence but - there’s a spell for it, called Eagles Splendor. Or maybe yours was doing something different, I could just be thinking of the wrong thing.”
“There are spells to enhance three different aspects of cognition, so we think of it as having three elements. I don’t know if they fall out of the data naturally. I think of the pharaoh as - naturally running around like he has the kind of enhanced charisma that most people need a spell for.”
“Sorry, that wasn’t really what I was aiming for. I thought you’d want to know how it interacts with enhancements, since we have those. I - believe you that he’s very dangerous.”
"Honestly don't know him all that well on a personal level? I don't think I'd assign him supernatural interpersonal powers but maybe he was just operating under spectacularly unfavorable circumstances with respect to the breakup, there were... factors. Uh, if you want to consider it predictive he mentioned I was his type one time when it was contextually relevant, but didn't follow up on that at all?"
"I've known him since he was a baby and before today had no reason to think there was anything to worry about. And he in fact can't be doing anything with oaths since we had them adjusted to no longer bind future action. It was mostly for the orcs, but it worked just the same on us and nothing changed about his marriage when the Oath Reform Act was put into practice. All this nonsense has been disturbing but I think my Maitimo will if I ever talk to him again take it as a series of bewildering cautionary tales, not that it has any in-fact bearing on his behavior. Maybe he was set up to do something awful given a sufficiently overdetermining set of starting conditions but we derailed the plot, and - well, I don't think current evidence suggests that being theoretically determinable into something awful is a particularly damning character assessment -" She nods at Cam.
"Cam had a reason, my Maitimo if we insist on this terminology was just thinking with his dick."
"And this affects what advice I'd give one of them versus one of - us - but I do not think everyone has to be us, do you?"
"Landed near some people he was in charge of after I got summoned by a random Elf kid."
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