She sighs, flops back on her bed (in her new house - the yurt was getting annoying, and Verita seems delighted with it), and reads Connor her newest spell.

"I think maybe I have to actually fight stuff to get combat spells that, like, do any sort of damage."

"I guess that makes sense. As long as you're just using harmless spells it's gonna think you want harmless spells."

"I guess that's valid of it. I don't wanna make anything intelligent just to destroy it, really, but there've gotta be things that I can fight that won't know to mind it." She flips through her bestiary. "Zombies. Zombies aren't intelligent at all. I can fight zombies. And probably I should mix some other stuff in there."

"Zombies and slimes and animated rocks and stuff."

"Yeah. Probably that'll do it. I can just use wands a lot."

"Just, you know, don't die."

"Yeah. Pretty much no telling whether anybody could ever get me back. But I think with the armor on it shouldn't be very dangerous."

Nod.

Snuggle. 

"How's being a cleric so far?"

"I get magic powers! I like magic powers! You don't need to worry about messing it up."

"It mostly seems like it'd be really weird to pray to someone you also knew before they started being a goddess. And who you live with. And are dating. But maybe it's less weird if you've never prayed to anyone before."

"Do you hear me when I'm doing it - I guess you can read my mind anyway -"

"No more than usual, which is to say not unless I'm focusing on it. Probably a good thing, or else it'd get really hard to think after I had more than three followers. - d'you want me to listen?"

"I don't care. I guess it might mean we got distracted in the middle sometimes?"

"Yeah, maybe."

"Anyway I just think about you and about what magic powers I want. It's always worked so far."

"Cool."

She looks like she might say something else and then turns telepathy on instead.

She's thinking that it's kind of convenient that he was already her slave, or else she might at some point have to start worrying about power imbalances. Also that she really likes being a tiny baby goddess and she hopes that people aren't annoyed with her for it.

Worrying about power imbalances sounds like her being sad and not cuddling him, which would be terrible.

(Whenever she is glad he is her slave he wants to burst from delight.)

If people are annoyed at her for being a baby goddess, that's on them for being dumb, except Korva, who has a point, but also she's with Hagan now so he's not sorry.

Yeah, she really hopes she can make it up to Korva and also be more responsible in the future, probably.

Him wanting to burst from delight is so good. He's wonderful and important and she is so so so glad he belongs to her.

He's not that important and she's definitely getting up there to the level of important-person where she'll have lots of slaves, probably, which he doesn't like to think about not that he figures anyone would do anything different when becoming a god. But it's really nice how she still likes him.

She's not going to have lots of slaves! Probably. Maybe something weird will happen and she'll have to take control of all of the armies of hell while she attempts to rehabilitate them or something. And she might have lots of clerics someday, sure, and other people who decide to listen to her for other reasons. But there won't be anybody like him.

But it'd be okay if there were. 

(It'd make him sad. But he is trying to be reasonable and it is very unreasonable to expect to be a god's Most Important Person just because you got there first.)

Snuggle. He's her most important person because she's in love with him already, and because he's the person who's been with her through all of this nonsense, and because she trusts and relies on him more than anybody else.

Probably she'll have to marry him at some point, then it'll be very obvious to everyone that he's the most important. Possibly after everything stops changing quite so fast, though.

Gosh. She still wants to marry him. 

Of course she still wants to marry him! She loves him and wants him to be with her forever, and maybe when she's a sensible grown-up goddess she wants to have kids. Although she will probably have to wait until she has more of an idea what she's doing, so she can do a really good job.

But doesn't she realize that if she is a goddess then she can do anything she wants and therefore she doesn't have to marry him?

Well, see, she can do anything she wants. And she wants to marry him.

Why is she so wonderful.

Just lucky, probably. (It is maybe weird to appreciate how easy it is to make him really happy but it's probably a good thing that they can make each other really happy.)

She's going to snuggle and kiss and pet him for a while before she goes off to figure out how to safely contain zombie fights. Because he's hers and so she can.

Yes! She can!

Eeeee.

It's sad how the Imrainai they haven't met yet doesn't get any nice goddess-powers and only gets ones that make everybody worried about being around her. Hopefully she's okay.

They should find her a him. The him will love her creepy powers or no creepy powers and can give her all the hugs she needs.

Yeah. Man, they're gonna do so much interplanar exploration while being primarily guided by attempts to set her alts up with people. But maybe there's nothing actually wrong with that.

There's something where - the spellbook picked her, and there's apparently an incomprehensible amount to do, and it doesn't seem like it'd work too well to just try and try and try at it without doing any things she actually likes. And so he doesn't think she should do that really.

Maybe. As long as everything's paused it isn't too irresponsible, probably.

Seems pretty responsible to make sure she's happy and okay when so much depends on her.

Maybe so. She's kind of just been figuring she'd get to the end of this and then take a break, but maybe there won't be an end, so maybe she should be getting really good at taking as many breaks as she needs to make sure everything keeps getting better.

That sounds right to him.

Snuggle. 

Now she's thinking about how if nothing is ever going to settle down then she can't figure she'll marry him when everything's settled down. And so probably she should have some other thing she's waiting for before she marries him. But she's not actually sure she can think of anything. She should really not marry him now, though, probably, because they're still really really young and everyone would think it was silly, and - oh right she has parents! She shouldn't get married until she can tell her parents about it. And... right now her parents think she's a completely normal evangelical high school student with no boyfriend or magic powers and and an older sister who has never been dead. Whoops. 

Possibly at some point they should be told any things. He's not totally clear on why she doesn't tell them things aside from that they could've kidnapped her, is it mostly that?

They just - make her feel really small and stupid and upset with herself whenever they're disappointed in her. And they would be disappointed in her about a lot of the stuff she's been doing lately. Not that they're bad people! They just - want her to be responsible and Christian and not ditching school to save the multiverse, and stuff. Also she's still legally a minor, so while they can't really actually kidnap her anymore they are kind of legally entitled to do so.

Maybe she should use magic to show them that Christianity isn't true and then they won't be disappointed she's not Christian?

She should probably eventually do this but it kind of seems like it would probably be really stressful.

Well, there's no hurry.

Yeah. 

Maybe she should successfully get one real combat spell as a proof of concept and then they can take the break she said they would take when they brought the other her to the demiplane.

Oh, right, that break. 

He approves of this plan.

Hee.

She heads outside to ask whatever members of the proper adventuring trio are around for advice on how to construct a safe zombie fighting arena.

Sure, they can consult on that. Anything she has to fly to get to is probably pretty safe.

Hmmm. Does anything happen if she tries to make her demiplane bigger.

Nope.

Aww. Worth a shot. 

Can she, like, make an island surrounded by a big moat?

She can!

Woo! And probably she wants big fences around the moat to keep, like, Cecelia's toddler from falling in. She adds those. And maybe, like, a twelve-foot deep pit in the center of the island, zombies'll probably have trouble getting out of that.

"Probably want someone capable of intervening to be watching before I summon any zombies. I guess if I plan enough wands out ahead of time that could be pretty much anyone, though."

"We can keep an eye on you. I think this would under normal circumstances interfere with the experience helping you develop as a caster but your magic runs differently anyway."

"Yeah. It's possible that it'll still interpret it differently than if I were fighting things alone, but I think at that point I should just... find zombies that are actually causing problems for people."

"Once you're less fragile there'll be lots of promising ways to do that."

Nod. "Probably harder without unpausing Golarion. But if nothing else I can try cleaning out the catacombs beneath Moonlight Falls."

Squeeze. "Carefully."

"Yeah. Hopefully I can get the spellbook to give me something for this first."

And she can head to her zombie arena and create and fight zombies. She doesn't think this is very dangerous, given that she's wearing plus five armor and a ring of protection and has a wand of greater flaming sphere.

If all goes well then she can check her spellbook after a couple hours of fighting zombies and oozes and giant amoebas and jack-o-lanterns and an undead owlbear skeleton.

Nothing yet.

Then she can keep this up and check every couple hours for the rest of the day, healing herself and creating new wands as needed.

And eventually her spellbook will give her Giant Flaming Sphere at will.

"I guess you can pick up lots of individual spells that way and that'll get you there eventually."

Sigh. "Wand spells only go up to level four, I can't kill gods with them. Can't really kill them with ninth level spells, not unless I have something else weird going on. I guess I'm hoping that if I fight enough things it'll eventually notice that I want to be really good at fighting stuff in general."

"It does seem to - generalize - sometimes. Dunno how to predict when it'll do that."

"I feel like if I - keep pursuing the same thing for a while, then it gives me more of whatever I'm doing. Maybe we should aim to fight stuff in the catacombs. - which I guess means we're going to be spending quite a bit of time outside the demiplane. Might be a good time to set things up for the Imrainai who goes with Starfarer."

"Yeah. We figured out which people wanted to stay with her and which wanted to go hide, right?"

"Yeah. I think you and your dad and your brother and my sister are gonna head back to Moonlight Falls, Fazil and Mahdi and Hagan's dad and Alex and hell me and probably Rana and Cecelia and her kids are going to Starfarer's planet to be paused, and Hagan and Korva and Asmodia and Cecelia's sister and Valentine and Starfarer are staying here. Dunno about Verita and the pegasus."

"I wanna stay!!"

She did not even realize the kid was here but honestly the kid is everywhere. "Ask your aunt. Has anyone talked to the pegasus yet?"

"I think I saw Alex talking to it a bit, earlier."

"Oh, cool. I should let him know what's going on anyway."

Hey. We're getting ready to send people off and bring the other me here. Also I was wondering how the pegasus is doing, if you know anything about that.

I think she's okay! it might be good for her to be somewhere where there's more wilderness, if that's doable, this place is actually quite crowded.

Working on it. I don't know how to make it bigger yet. Do you think it'd be better to pause her while the other Imrainai's here, or should she stay here?

She didn't particularly want to be moved around until there's a good permanent home for her, so I think better for her to stay, though ideally the new Imrainai would try not to mindcontrol her, of course.

I think that's the ideal for everyone, yeah.

We're ready to go whenever.

Cool. I'll let you know. I should probably talk to Rana first, I'm not sure anyone's actually done that.

I haven't.

She heads off into the rain forest and finds Rana's house. She's left him alone for, what, four days now? Maybe he's a tiny bit less mad after four days.

"Hey Rana?"

"Yes?"

"We're going to bring another Imrainai here. We have reason to believe that she has mind control powers that she might not know how to control, but it sounds like she's doing a lot of extremely important stuff and needs a lot of help, so we're going to try to help her. We were going to pause everyone who doesn't want to deal with mind control stuff until we've figured out more of what her situation is. I'm kind of assuming that you and Cecelia would prefer to be paused during this, but I wanted to make sure."

"I do not want to deal with more people, or with mind control stuff."

Nod.

She heads out of the forest. She heads around to everybody else, and lets them know that she's about to bring the other Imrainai to the demiplane.

He says goodbye to his friends, who are going to go be paused away from the mind control.

She creates a pile of wands of sending. "Anybody needs me, use a wand and call me."

She moves the group she needs to pause to Starferer's planet, then moves the Moonlight Falls group home, and then moves the new Imrainai and Starfarer's father to the demiplane.

She and Connor are standing in the fairy circle. 

"Well. It's done."

"Cool! Let's go home."

"Yeah. - you can watch TV now, you know. I dunno if you want to. But since misconduct by anyone entangled with me doesn't cause misfortune, you can."

"Oooooh. What is some TV I should see."

"I dunno. I like Star Trek, but it's not really the highest quality TV ever. - you can watch movies. We could show you Star Wars."

"Sure." He thinks maybe watching some TV will be healthy for her.

She seems pretty excited about it! "And we can all play video games again. Although possibly first we should sleep, since I've been fighting monsters and it seems to be... night. I guess it's still late the same day that we started this."

"Okay. Sleep, then TV and video games?"

"Yeah. - and then I guess zombies. Maybe zombies can be the day after tomorrow. - we should possibly let work know that we are probably quitting our jobs."

"Oh. Yeah. And school."

"Oh yeah. - I don't actually know whether we're allowed to quit school."

"Well, I managed."

"I'm not saying I can't stop going. I'm just not sure giving them advance notice of this would be helpful."

Hug.

"You're being really brave and doing the right thing."

"Thanks. I think you're right. Just - acutely aware of the fact that when I finally touch base with my parents I'll look about like I went down a checklist of every single thing they care about and decided to mess it up as badly as I could."

"But you'll have killed an evil god."

"Yeah. I guess there's that. I think - eventually I'll have done enough things that it stops mattering very much whether they think I'm being responsible or not. Probably."

Hug. "Doesn't matter to me."

Hug. 

And they can go home and cuddle and telepathy and sleep.

(She keeps occasionally thinking about the fact that she sort of wishes they were married so that they would be allowed to do things that are okay if married people do them, and then trying not to think about this because they shouldn't get married yet and so probably it is not constructive. Even though she's not actually sure whether there are actual reasons for it, given lack of Christianity. Lots of people do seem to have independently come up with the idea that sex should only be between - she should really not be thinking about this.)

His opinion continues to be that she can have him if she wants him. (And it makes him so happy that she wants him.) (And the rules for normal humans don't apply to fairies, or to gods). (And he hasn't had very much practice, he should have had more practice before she got him so he'd know how to make it really nice.) (And that's irrelevant since she wants to wait.) (Well, kind of wants to wait.)

(Aaaa she's going to blush and bury her face in this pillow at the thought of Connor trying to make things nice.)

At this point her worry is more like - nobody can stop her but it might be that all of the people who thought that premarital sex was bad for humans were right about something that she doesn't understand and maybe it'll be bad for her and it would be better if she waited. Or maybe everybody just decided this because they were all really worried about pregnancy and if she had a way to deal with that she would be fine. She really has no way of knowing which it is.

He will make things so nice. Once he knows how. She could let him practice on other people but she probably doesn't want to do that. But it'd be terrible if he was bad at it. 

Humans are weird and lots of things are bad for them that are okay on the whole but usually things aren't bad for them while seeming to be good for them? He doesn't think. Well, there's school. Maybe sex is like school for humans in that they think it hurts in a good way but actually it's just destroying them.

(!!!!) (He shouldn't practice on other people though. She's already an overwhelmed blushing mess at the thought of lots of things that aren't even actually sex, so it would probably be pretty hard to make it disappointing. And as soon as she figures out immortality they'll have forever to get better.)

She thinks probably most people who have sex are not doing it for the kind of difficult self-improvement reasons that school is supposed to be good for? Maybe it would be okay if they tried things and stopped if any of them didn't seem good. Except that that's not really the claim about sex, is it, the claim is mostly that it's very tempting because it feels superficially nice but actually it's harming people in important ways. Like drugs, or something.

How do drugs harm people?

- uh, you take them and they feel really nice but then if you don't take more you feel awful, sometimes, and a bunch of them are different kinds of poisons that destroy different parts of your brain or your internal organs or make your teeth fall out or make you die of cancer or whatever. - she doesn't think that sex is literally like drugs for humans but it still seems possible that premarital sex has bad psychological consequences that are not immediately apparent.

Man it sounds terrifying to be human and have all sorts of normal healthy things maybe actually be secretly bad for you or something.

Proooobably most drugs are not normal healthy things. - at least the modern ones. There's, like, a difference between stuff you find in nature and stuff that's been processed to have the strongest psychological effects possible. - this is not really relevant to sex probably unless you're actually talking about porn in which case there are maybe similarities to the processed drugs thing. 

The point is really mostly that she just - doesn't want to make mistakes that everyone has already told her would be mistakes. Well. Maybe not everyone but lots of people.

Lots of people are pretty against having a slave or being a demigod but actually those were great decisions and he supports them wholeheartedly.

....this is true.

Maybe she should be thinking about the things that are important about marriage and see if those things are already true or could be true or should be true.

If they were married she would know that he was okay staying with her forever because he'd have committed to that. If they were married then he would know that she was committed to him, and that she wouldn't go find someone else to replace him, which he periodically does not seem to know. (She doesn't want him to feel like how good a time she has is going to, like, affect how much she likes him.) And everybody else would know that they were committed to each other, and it wouldn't be surprising or embarrassing or anything that they had reached some particular level of intimacy.

Even if they are married she could leave if she wanted to because she is a god. He is not really thinking of marriage as having any power to affect this, because even if it did the spellbook would probably just give her the power to be unmarried to him.

That's - not how marriage works? Like, she technically could leave, yeah, but it'd be - her making a serious commitment to not. Adding that to her list of basic minimum duties. Like, she could just decide to abandon Zana somewhere, but she's - not going to? Because she's made a commitment to take care of Zana? And this would be making a commitment to stay with him. So she wouldn't leave him except in the sorts of bizarre insane circumstances that might make her consider leaving Zana. Like maybe if he decided to become a serial killer or something, that would still be problematic.

She didn't, like, promise to not leave Zana? She just kind of - started taking care of Zana, and it was important to her. And she doesn't seem any less serious about Zana for not having promised something about it. 

This doesn't quite get at his confusion but it feels related.

She supposes that this is sort of true. What happened with Zana was that her parents died, and so she could have let someone know and made sure someone else would raise Zana, but instead of doing that she decided to do it herself, and she thinks that meant that she had to keep doing it at least until someone else was available to step in. So maybe Zana isn't a great example, maybe Zana is kind of like where she and Connor are right now.

But there are other commitments that people can make that are stronger than that. Like, if you make a baby yourself, you don't get to hand them off to someone else who might want to raise them, if you get tired of doing it. The baby is your responsibility until the baby grows up and can take care of itself. And - this would be her saying that staying with Connor and making sure he's okay is part of her responsibilities no matter what happens. And she kind of thinks that that's probably a stronger assurance than anything else they're going to be able to come up with, because everything else the spellbook can get around, but it can't get around things that she herself has decided on.

And she wants to do that? Just because it bothers her when he supposes she'll find some more people once she's a god?

- partly, yeah? Like - partly because she just has all of these feelings connected to the idea of marriage, maybe like he has lots of feelings connected to being her slave? But also she feels like - if he never worried about her finding other people then maybe she'd figure it would only be a good thing for her, but it seems like the things that he feels about this are always - he wants to be her only slave and he feels like this is unreasonable because in his culture it is. And - it seems like how she really likes having a slave and sometimes feels like this is unreasonable because in her culture it is. But he doesn't think it's an unreasonable thing to give her at all, it seems normal and makes him happy. And - him being her only person like this feels normal to her, too, and it'd make her happy, if he knew that him wanting it was okay and that she wanted him to have it. 

Huh.

It seems kind of ridiculous and convenient that the unreasonable things they want would be actually not unreasonable and they could have them.

It does! And yet.

(She wants him to feel safe and loved like he's hers and not ever have to worry that she's going to ignore him for someone else shinier, and she wants to keep him forever and ever and ever and ever.)

He wants to love her and serve her forever and ever and ever and have her never bother with anyone else because she only wants him because he makes her so happy.

That sounds really really good. She feels all warm and happy and delighted about this idea. 

Then probably at some point they should get married about it? He guesses?

Yeah. They should.

This is still a little complicated because to get married you have to, like, be taken seriously as an adult who can make commitments? And even though she's really eighteen she's pretty sure she's still legally seventeen. And apart from the laws there's just - people don't take teenagers wanting to get married very seriously? But maybe this has something to do with how most teenagers have not spent two years running a household and raising kids. That part is making it kind of hard for her to not take herself seriously about this.

Most people don't like treating children like people and it's not really anything to do with children.

She feels like the rules about not letting children get married make sense? She's just.... not sure whether they're relevantly children anymore.

Probably if it was important to them to do it right they could stand to wait another year before they made it all official, though. She guesses. This feels like kind of a long time to wait on doing any sex things but maybe she only feels like that at all because she's still kind of young and immature or something.

Well lots people find it hard to go a long time without doing sex things, he's pretty sure, so it can't be just that.

But if she were serious and sensible and mature and able to do hard things then she probably wouldn't be that hesitant to do it.

She's not really sure whether she endorses this thought process or if it's kind of ridiculous. But - she does kind of want to be married before they have sex, and she does kind of feel like you're not doing marriage right that you can't tell everybody that you are married. So maybe it is actually hard but she prefers to wait about it anyway?

That sounds like an inconvenient set of things to want to do but he doesn't mind especially. Except that now that he's thinking about sex he wants her but this is not the end of the world or anything.

Snuggle. She's sorry for being inconvenient.

He loves her even though sometimes she is not convenient!

Oh good. 

(Maybe they can do the spell thing before they're old enough to get married. Possibly. Since they can do that now. Although they can't do it right now because she shouldn't go back to her demiplane to make rings of three wishes for a while.)

That'd be fun. She should probably not leave her demiplane without a ring of three wishes for emergencies, really.

That's possible. She maybe should have thought about that. Maybe she can start doing that the next time she goes back.

In the meantime they had a plan. Sleep. And then TV and games.

They did! It'll be so great. She's a fan of being allowed to do stuff like that again. And this time she can do them with him.

There are way too many problems in the world but her own personal life is really really good.

That's because she is really really good.

She feels like it has more to do with him and her family and her magic and with being extraordinarily lucky. But she's very glad he feels like that.

And in the demiplane, Imrainai Tellari appears with Starfarer's father.

She looks around and does not say anything, looking kind of like she is unsure whether she's allowed to do anything besides be as small and inoffensive as possible.

" - weird. Do you know if the ability to make these is learnable, everyone could have one as their house and it'd be ridiculously convenient -" He pulls a blade of grass out of the ground and bites down on it.

The demiplane does not have edible grass.

"The person who made it can't give other people the power yet. I don't think. I guess she might be able to eventually? She kind of seems to believe that she can do anything she wants eventually."

"Huh. Is there some kind of translation effect in place here?"

" - yeah. Uh, it can be turned off but we need Elizabeth to be here for that and I don't think she wants to be here while - you - are until we have a better idea what's going on. It doesn't work on writing."

"Well, I'm not in a hurry. Is there a place for Imrainai to sleep, I think that's our first order of business here."

"There's..." she glances at Hagan. "Fazil and Mahdi's house is free right now, I think?"

"Yeah, it is. We should've set one up for you but that'll work."

"So you're already going by Imrainai?"

- nod. "It's my name."

"Huh."

"Is it - all right if I go sleep?"

"Yeah. This house over here. I'll show you." And she guides her towards Fazil and Mahdi's house.

She follows. And then she climbs in a bed and tries to sleep.

She heads back to everybody else. 

"Do you need anything, then?"

"Language lessons, if there are any on offer!"

" - ah. Uh, it might be hard with translation on but - I guess we can teach you our writing systems and stuff?"

"Yes, that'd do!"

She looks at Hagan. "Do you want to go first, or - oh, I forgot, you can't - I guess I can teach you the alphabet, sure."

And she can get a notebook and try teaching him the alphabet.

"Well, that'll keep them for a while," he says to Korva.

"Very striking, how all of the versions of your dad are - like that."

"I guess he's all right."

"I guess I should probably talk to him at all at some point. - yours, I mean."

" - guess so, yeah."

"I guess I'm kind of unclear on - I think normally when people are considering getting married they meet each other's families. But your family's... royalty... and my parents are, uh, stuck in Cheliax, and possibly evil? So there's that."

"I am kind of worried that you'll hate my family. I don't think they'll refuse me permission to marry you, and by Osirion's rules we don't need the approval of yours? But I'd still rather meet them and get their permission if we can."

" - I am kind of not of the opinion that my parents have the right to veto my relationships. But it'd be kind of rude to go off and marry you without them ever having learned that you existed."

"My family does have the right to veto my relationships. But we can make visiting yours more about - getting acquainted, if that's what you want."

Nod. "Why will I hate your family? Or - possibly hate your family."

"They're - Osirian royalty. They're just not going to be very open-minded about whether one should let his wife work outside the home, or promise to only have one of them, or - whatever."

"...I guess that makes sense." 

"And I don't - know of anyone in the palace who's as unhappy as Cecelia but if it turned out someone was it wouldn't be - surprising because that isn't the kind of thing that can happen, just surprising because the pharaoh mostly doesn't like being around people who hate him."

- nod.

"Yeah. I guess - even if I didn't hate them it might still be hard to be around them ever.

" - female clerics can work outside the home, can't they, or does Osirion just not have those - "

"Magic-users are different. - so I guess you're fine, now."

"I am almost annoyed about this. But probably it's better for things to be easier even if it gives me less chance to spite people."

"I am sorry you will miss out on the chance to spite them but probably it is better if I do not punch very many people in the face."

" - yes, probably."

Hug.

Hug!

"I think I prefer to wait until I'm sure I want to marry you and then announce to my parents that they can choose to support this or not. - they might actually think I'm dead right now, I should possibly also fix that."

"And I'll ask the pharaoh's permission once you're ready but I really don't think he'll refuse."

Nod.

"And Abadar can't pick the kids if we raise them all chaotic good."

"Pff. Guess not."

"I used to be - really scared of that. It was stupid. Obviously he would go for someone suitable. But."

...hug. 

"I had a weird elaborate dream the other night where everyone better had died and I was pharaoh and I had barely talked to anyone or done anything for...five years, I think, and they decided they needed heirs, and - this is stupid -"

"It's not stupid. - unlikely to happen, but - I don't think less of you for being afraid of things that would be horrible if they happened."

"No, it's, uh, the rest of the dream that was stupid, that part is a recurring one and I think it's pretty valid, as dreams go."

"Oh. - you don't have to tell me if you don't want to? But I won't think you're stupid for having ridiculous dreams, either."

"They figured they had to get a heir out of me even if I was going to spend my whole pharaohhood moping so they went to a temple of Shelyn for romantic advice and they got your name, somehow, and they went and got you, and of course you hated me."

"Oh dear."

"And I figured I'd hurt you, eventually, because I was so lonely, so I sent you far away and then - died, I guess, and threw Osirion into chaos but I didn't dream about that part."

Hug.

Hug.

"I'm not sure if it's relevant at all but - the reason that all of us are a little scared of the one who does mind control is because she's - probably very powerful and probably very lonely. And might not have the ability to do anything to counteract this. I'm not sure how dumb it is to worry about, and probably there are lots of other saner things to worry about, but - I think we're all kind of worried that she might just be a black hole of loneliness that forces everybody else to orbit her."

"Poor thing."

"Yeah."

" - uh, if I leave you for the you with mind-control powers it's the mind control, just so you know, and I should be fished out."

Hug. "I figured."

"That'd be kind of a concerning amount of mind control to need fishing out of, this early in our relationship, but I trust you'll come through for me anyway. Or Fazil and Mahdi will, being advantaged by not being here to be mind-controlled themselves."

"Yeah, I kind of expect that if I you're a casualty of the mind control then I will be, too. I think the current plan is to only give votes to people who were outside the demiplane on whether the new one gets to stay, later. Which isn't foolproof, of course, but - it's something."

"I feel really bad for her. Not in a way where I want to abandon everything to go cuddle her, but - I hope we get her someone."

"Yeah. Same. I feel like - if I had mind control powers, or Elizabeth's powers, and absolutely no one to lean on - and maybe we're wrong, maybe her sister isn't dead, but - it sounds like it'd be very hard."

He looks appraisingly at Starfarer.

" - I'm happy to give the kid a hug but I'm not looking to get married? I'm not sure what you guys are thinking of here."

"I'm just making observations, I'm not particularly suggesting courses of action."

"Why aren't you looking to get married?"

"Uh... I am not sure she's fifty, I just met her, I don't think she particularly wants anything to do with my life and I super don't want to dedicate the next couple centuries of my life to building her people a stable government, that doesn't sound like my core area of expertise at all, she knows the rest of my family already and I don't think actually prefers me to them in any meaningful sense, Eru pays attention to her and that sounds terrible, and I'm just generally not really looking for marriage at this stage of my life."

"Reasonable. Although waiting until fifty to get married would be kind of silly, humans are mature around twenty and fifty is about when women stop being able to bear children."

" - wow. That sounds rough."

"Never particularly thought of it as that bad? But I guess it'd be neat to be an elf and get centuries to do things in."

"Around what age do your people typically get married?"

"...once you're an adult and have met the right person? You're an adult at fifty though most people won't consider you fully grown until you're a hundred, and then engagements last one year so I guess technically if you're doing everything right you can get married at any age past fifty-one. But most people are older than that."

"How old are you?"

"Two hundred sixty three. Years, that is, Endorë's years are a lot shorter and I guess I'm a lot of those."

"Humans mostly don't live to see a hundred."

"Yeah, I heard. The Valar'll fix that for you if you want."

"Nah, it'd piss off Pharasma. Besides, I'm - supposed to be trying to believe that there are afterlives that're worth going to, now."

"...are there?"

"Couldn't tell you for sure. Haven't been to any."

"There are some that're fine. The problem is not everyone gets them."

"Why not?"

"Uh, Pharasma sorts people by what they were like in life, and most people are neutral and most of the neutral afterlives kind of suck, and some people are evil and all of the evil afterlives really suck."

"Your world's paused right now?"

"Yeah."

"Okay."

"Elizabeth's planning on taking over at least one of the evil afterlives. I dunno how much she told you about stuff. Of course it's anyone's guess whether she's actually capable of succeeding."

"The Valar'll probably do it if she doesn't. And if neither of them can we'll think of something - maybe leave the world paused and evacuate everybody from it? But I don't actually know, I'm not exactly the person you'd want on this."

"Huh."

"What?"

"You kind of suck, and you're lawful, and these are related, and I don't quite know what to make of it."

"You think you don't kind of suck?"

"Not in the same way. Like, I'm sure I have lots of other character flaws, but my society isn't superficially nice enough I can just go 'whatever, they'll handle it' about things, so I have to actually do things about the things, and this was good for me, I think."

"I think there's gonna be an experiment on whether more demanding childhood environments make people better. Or maybe there was gonna but it got cancelled because of consent issues, I dunno."

"To be fair, none of us were doing much about most of these problems until Elizabeth pointed herself at them and decided we were going to fix them. ...which I suppose is admirable, whatever her other shortcomings."

"We were doing as much as we possibly could."

"I guess I shouldn't make assumptions about how much that was. I wasn't doing much, because I assumed there was nothing I could do. I don't think this is particularly uncommon."

"I guess. You did a lot as soon as you got the chance, though."

"Well, there wasn't anybody else around. Starfarer's not in that situation, I dunno what he'd do if he were."

"I think he'd do okay and I think it'd be ...good for him? To be in a situation where he needed to solve things himself. Because like - everyone I know is more competent than me, right, so my only edge is that they mostly suck and won't, like, try to fix the world because they don't mind how it is. And if everyone else was both more competent than me and just as nice as me, then I actually do not think this would be very good for my development as a person. Thus -" he gestures at Starfarer.

"Is this a normal conversation where you're from because it's a super weird conversation where I'm from."

"Nah, not at all, I'm being very rude."

"Okay. I think I see what you're getting at but I still do not think I should marry Eru's new friend. If other opportunities to be useful present themselves I'll try to give them a fair shot."

"I don't think you should marry her either. No good marrying people if you think it'll be bad for you."

"Yeah. It's not that - I'm sure she's a lovely person."

"We'll find out when she wakes up, I guess."

Squeeze.

Hug.

"I don't actually think that any of me have been awful so far. I just don't want to assume that none of us are."

"That makes sense."

She watches Valentine and Starfarer's dad. At some point Verita stops showing off her cantrips to her mother and heads over to excitedly participate in language investigation.

"Well. You guys have anything you wanna do while the new one sleeps? I guess I am theoretically supposed to be coming up with more things Cheliax might need in the aftermath of Asmodeus's death."

"Man, they're gonna need - lots of things. Right?"

"Yeah. I think you can broadly separate most of the problems into the collapse of the church, the removal of material support from Hell, and the resulting power vacuum if Queen Abrogail II is inevitably overthrown. Which is a lot of problems. Being a goddess helps a little, but if she's chaotic good it doesn't help much, since Cheliax doesn't have very many people eligible to be clerics of chaotic good gods. Asmodeus was able to take over because Aroden's clerics were mostly lawful neutral, and were able to metaphorically jump ship. We can't do that with Elizabeth."

Nod. "How much is Cheliax relying on material support from Hell?"

"I don't know all of that. I think a lot of it's the military, which Elizabeth could probably substitute for. But before Asmodeus we also didn't have nurseries."

" - yeah, I don't think anyone else has that."

"They're one of the reasons that lots of things are so much more doable in Cheliax. Especially for women. It would be really bad to lose them, for a whole lot of people, and - I think it's probably pretty important that you not end up with a bunch of disgruntled people yearning for the good old days of listening to devils."

"And killing their kids."

"...what?"

"Cheliax has legalized infanticide. Most of the continent does."

"Why?"

"Sometimes people get pregnant when they're not ready to raise a baby. Andoran made infanticide illegal and the most obvious consequence besides alignment is that their orphanages are overflowing."

"Okay, so, uh, we can take all the babies that people don't want to raise."

"How many of you are there?"

"Counting orcs, tens of billions. If that's not enough we'll fork."

"That'd be plenty if people preferred handing their children over to orcs to killing them. I'm not really sure whether they do."

"- why?"

" - I mean I guess it depends on your orcs? Most orcs on Golarion are chaotic evil, which is a pretty dim option on the whole."

"I mean if they'd rather we raise them we can do that, just, orcs are crazy about babies and accordingly more numerous. I - guess they're kind of screwed up compared to our species but they're not worse than death."

"We should meet your orcs. Could be it's a great idea."

"If they don't work we'll take them instead."

Nod.

"Still don't want to lose the nurseries. Be better if nobody who wanted a kid had to decide to give them away."

"I think I might need more context to understand what the nurseries are for."

"If a woman has a baby and can't be with it all the time, she can drop it off at a nursery for several hours and pick it up later. Without them, unmarried mothers, widows, and married women who work and don't have stay-at-home family members have a lot fewer options."

"So the kids get taken care of by...strangers? Is that bad for them?"

"Possibly? They still spend time with their mothers in the evenings. And they get to interact with other kids, and the nurseries can have better toys and equipment than individual people can afford, for kids who are a little bigger."

"Okay. I guess we can also pay to keep those open if they're really the best thing for humans."

"You mostly can't get humans to do the best thing. It's probably better than what they'd have otherwise."

"It's not obvious what the best thing is. If you ask people in Cheliax they'll give you different answers than they'll give you in Osirion. But I don't think it'd help anyone if the nurseries closed."

"The best thing is for kids to be born to at least two married parents and parents not to be trying to do other stuff while the kids are young, unless it's something that gives them more energy to spend on their kids. But - we can keep them open if they're helping."

"That - doesn't sound feasible, given that maybe half of adults at any given point are parents?"

"Why would that make it infeasible?"

"Because - if half of society stops doing anything besides childcare then everyone will starve."

"We will get you guys better crops so that no one ever starves."

" - I would think that someone would still have to grow them? I suppose maybe if the yield were enormous enough you could maybe limit agriculture to slaves?"

"What do you need in order to stop having slaves - no, wait, this is probably going about this in the wrong order or something. Uh. In my world, no one is required to work, and food grows in the wild abundantly enough to feed everybody with minimal effort, and jobs are worked by people who particularly like them, and money is used for allocating inherently scarce things like apartments in the desirable parts of cities and concert tickets, or really expensive things like lightleapers and newly terraformed planets. I think that other societies should also work like this, probably, but I don't know all of the stuff you are doing so I don't know which changes are most urgent - there are slaves? If they were all freed what would happen?"

"People would starve. - I guess we might not starve, but we would starve if the slaves in fact decided to move away and we weren't able to replace them with free people who knew how to farm.

"In our world almost everyone works because if people generally stop working then, most obviously, we will starve, or people's children won't be taken care of, or their houses will fall apart and not be fixed, or there won't be clothes for people to buy. I don't doubt that Hagan could survive in the wild, if he wanted to, but most people can't, and even the ones who could would need to put a lot of effort into not dying. So people have to work, or rely on the charity of people who are attached to them, or else they run out of money and die."

- nod. "So, cheap food will help, and maybe the thing the Valar do in Valinor proper that stops clothing from falling apart and houses from falling apart?"

"I mean, it'd help."

"You don't think it'd be enough?"

"I think that ending both scarcity and the cultural effects of a history of scarcity is probably going to take a lot."

Nod.

"But it would help a lot if we didn't have to worry about food. Although I imagine that Cheliax will be pretty hesitant to end up fully reliant on a foreign power. I suppose if Elizabeth conquers them it might not matter."

"Oh, I thought we were putting you in charge."

" - uh. I have no qualifications aside from being from Cheliax. I'm just doing brainstorming because Elizabeth can't be expected to come up with these things herself."

"Okay. I guess maybe we can pull in someone who we want in charge later."

"We probably have a fair amount of time before Elizabeth's ready to kill Asmodeus anyway."

Nod. 

"That's the third set of problems, anyway, figuring out how to prevent a civil war. I'm not very sure how to solve it. Elizabeth can conquer the country but I don't know that she can feasibly run it."

"You think people'd revolt?"

"Depends how competent the people in charge looked, I think. And how much reason people had to be mad."

Nod.

"Anyway. There are going to be a lot of things I can't foresee. But it'll help if there's enough food."

"Well, we can do that."

"That'll be good."

Flop.

Snuggle. ...defensive glance at his alt.

His alt does not seem to be judging them at all!

Snuggle. 

"You know there's not actually any evidence that any of you are more disapproving of snuggles than you are."

"I mean, his society doesn't kill kids, so it probably judges extramarital sex. I think everyone - picks one of those."

"They do? Why?"

" - uh, because the only way a society can manage how many children it has is by putting a lot of pressure on people to not have them when they aren't committed to supporting them."

" - well obviously I think it's horrible to have children when you aren't committed to supporting them!"

" - okay I guess there's also an added premise that if people are having extramarital sex then they'll have kids they don't mean to."

"Yeah, that? Horrible. We do not have that. The Valar will fix it for you, too. Sex can only result in pregnancy through an act of deliberate will by both parties."

" - well that sounds really convenient."

"I don't really spend much time thinking about it but, yes, it sure is."

"So then do people just - run around sleeping with whoever they feel like?"

" - mostly not while running around? That sounds difficult."

" - nah I just mean, uh, I wondered whether, if you don't have to worry about pregnancy, everyone just has sex a lot and it's fine, or if it's still - 

- uh, in the palace in Osirion you don't have to worry about kids but it's actually bad, because no one loves each other or respects each other except incidentally -"

" - you should only have sex with people you respect."

- nod.

"I think - uh, the general advice I've heard is that you should only have sex with someone if you are really happy with the stories you have to tell yourself about it, all of the ones that might be true. So if you would be really unhappy to ever have the story 'we loved each other and had sex and then stopped loving each other and drifted apart' as part of your life, then you shouldn't have sex with anyone you aren't married to. But if you're happy with the story 'we spent a year together in the mountains doing mathematics and having sex, and then we promised to hold each other in our hearts fondly and never saw each other again', then that's fine, right, to do that. And some people are fine with 'we met and had sex that evening and never saw each other again', but that's rarer.

And some people really won't be okay if they love someone and lose the person they loved, but that's not about sex at all for them, and they can't save it by not having had sex, and they can either try never to love at all or to accept some chance of heartbreak in their life."

" - oh."

"I'm not, like, a philosopher of sexual ethics."

Snuggle.

"It's a harder problem. For humans. Mostly because of the accidental pregnancy thing and partly because - if you all have to work and you need to have kids between twenty and fifty or not at all, and you need other people to survive and one of the main  kinds of relationships people have involves sex - there are just a lot more pressures on everybody. Probably. But the accidental pregnancy thing probably accounts for a lot of the problems."

"It sounds really hard. I'm sure you're doing the best you can with what you've got."

"I'm not, really? But - we're trying."

He looks confused.

"Doing your best is a lot to expect of people when everything is hard."

"I mean, you want to be doing your best given that everything is hard?"

"You can try to do your best? But - even if you're trying, it's hard to know how much strength you have in you. And a lot of people eventually get too tired to keep trying very hard."

"Oh."

He glances at Valentine.

She's still dutifully writing things out for Verita and his father.

"What happened to her?"

She glances at Valentine too.

"Dunno specifics. She - had some kind of situation where she couldn't feed her kids, and ended up signing a life contract with an organization run by devils."

"And those are?"

"Oh, uh, lawful evil outsiders. They run Hell."

"Is she safe now?"

"Her plane is paused. She's afraid that if anyone unpauses it the organization will immediately recover her. And is also afraid that the organization spans several different planes, and that some of them might not be paused, and eventually one of those might notice her. So - maybe. But whether she is or not, it'll be a long time before she believes she is."

Nod.

"Like her?"

"Not in a - like I said, I'm not looking to get married. But she seemed - like she needed to be somewhere safe and pretty and not full of people, where she could do something that wasn't awful, and - I guess I get more of what's going on now but I still think I don't get most of it -"

"I don't think any of us do. She's been quiet. You'd have to talk to her, probably."

"Maybe I'll do that."

"It'd be good for her, probably."

"Long as you're not, uh, easily wounded and vague about what you want and using words completely differently than she does."

" - I'm not very hard to injure if you have, like, a knife? Or a slingshot? I won't take it personally, though."

She hugs Hagan.

"He's being metaphorical. You'll be fine as long as you don't get very attached right away and then end up very heartbroken due to failed attempts at communication and overinterpreting things she doesn't know she's saying. Like some people."

"Gosh. Okay. I will - not do that, that sounds like a bad idea."

"I really can't recommend it. 'S better now, though." Hug.

"Long as you're happy. And, you know, know to ask for help if you end up in a bad situation which humans where you're from solve with murder."

"I sincerely do not at all expect that to happen, but if it does I am not going to murder any of my children." She looks at Hagan. " - unless they, like, grow up into murderous tyrants laying waste to countrysides, I might consider it then."

"Well, we super gotta destroy Hell if we have murderous tyrant children to kill."

He looks very concerned at both of them but smiles and heads over to Valentine.

Still teaching his dad! She's not exactly enthusiastic about this but she understands it to be the usual price of assistance from this cluster of people.

"Shoo," he says to his dad, firmly. "There are books, go try reading them."

"It's much harder without -"

"So it'll be an interesting challenge! Go, go, I'll set Huan on you."

" - do you need something?"

"Not really but he'll keep you up all night. He did, to our Imrainai, until eventually she bit through her hand trying to concentrate on the poetry he had her translating. You'd think that would've taught him a lesson."

" - gosh." This is really concerning but she can also totally see herself doing it if she were scared enough.

"Anyway, you can just - tell him you're bored. Everyone does, eventually."

"Well, there isn't a lot else to do here. Especially if you can't read Latin or fight monsters. I guess I'm also supposed to be brainstorming problems that eleventh century Norway probably had."

"Well, you can go track him down if you wanna."

"...yeah."

"But I'm going to shoo him away every hour or so so you can decide whether you do in fact wanna."

" - okay."

"Korva and Hagan attempted to explain to me what was going on with you but they didn't know very much about it."

"Oh. Uh - you mean, like, where I was before?"

"Yeah. With the devils and stuff."

"I work for an interdimensional law firm called Wolfram & Hart. They do a lot of - keeping wealthy criminals from facing consequences, arranging and covering up slave trades, illegal weapon smuggling, and murders, and probably most every other horrible thing you can think of. I'm a secretary, so - I schedule meetings and send a lot of emails and answer the phone a lot and order appropriate demon snacks for clients and call in cleaners when someone gets blood on the floor."

"Do you have ideas about how to get them to stop all that?"

"Not... really? They're really big. And they take a lot of precautions that I probably haven't ever even heard of."

"Why are they doing it, what things do they get from it?"

"They're... evil? I think. Like, the beings at the top just terminally value evil, I think. A lot of the individual people there are stuck or scared or in it for money and power, I think."

"Huh. Okay."

"I realize that's not very helpful."

"I wasn't expecting you to have it all figured out. The war with our evil god took years and years to plan. Woulda been nice if they just wanted - something we could just give them. But it's kind of tricky when people just want to be evil."