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It's an ordinary, quiet night. The . . . patrons, or whatever they are, of the lab equipment shop downstairs, took off about forty-five minutes ago.
There's silence, mostly. You can only be out at night in Sothis if you have business. But there's some business. Every so often a party passes under Katie's window. Their conversation is mostly what Katie has become accustomed to thinking of as "focused", though occasionally some is just downright tense or revelrous.
Wind. Distant insects. Dogs.
Something shuffles downstairs.
And continues to shuffle.
"Are we good?" The voice is insistent, alto, and right underneath Katie. And it's female.
"Yes, fine". Higher. If Katie knows what female halflings sound like, it sounds like that.
The shuffling moves deeper into the shop. A glass clinks. Laughter starts, whispering at first, then merely hushed.
"Oh my god." A third voice.
"All this stuff is fake, you know. This and this and this used to be one bespoke fixture."
"Fuck."
Whoever it is is going through the merchandise.
Expensive, heavily regulated merchandise. Katie's parent have only been in Ulunat for two weeks, but she's picked up that the proprietors of this place have gone to a moderate effort to secure it against thieves.
The wave breaks. Her eyes shut and she goes limp as joy and comfort and the overwhelming feeling that everything is going to be alright wash over her.
She feels it and hooks herself over Katie in a warm slump of vicarious relief. Pets her hair.
Does nothing to disabuse her of her contentment.
"Am I good to just fall asleep here and you'll carry me to wherever you actually live?"
Now is normally the point where she would become paralyzed with fear that she's damned herself and all that, but she's way too tired for that. She snuggles up to Tazich and blissfully dozes off.
She holds Katie.
And purrs.
Soft, feedable stick-human.
Conquerable, even. [ Fuck Teg. ]
She wonders what Katie will do when the rest of them have to go to Cheliax. She rotates it around in her mind, and can't think of anything better than "come with". She tries not to be troubled by this. She continues eating, in a way that doesn't interfere with Katie. It helps.
"Would you mind packing up for me?"
She stands up very gently with Katie in her arms, raising her eyebrows to demonstrate that she doesn't want to disturb the psychic state of the vulnerable new inductee.
She barely assents verbally, but sets about it.
She's used to being told what to do. She was raised to believe it doesn't damage one's pride, although she's since learned she was really taught not to have any pride in the first place.
"What will she do during—?" She doesn't say it aloud to preserve opsec, but her implication is obvious. She has her own ideas, but she's afraid of what Tazich has already decided.
"I've been thinking about it. She's safer with us. Hostage liability." Fifty thousand gold piece operation, hundred thousand gold pieces in capital risked, she doesn't say.
"We should talk about this with Ran." And her Message spell.
The crypto-Good brat has crossed a line. Sure, hogtie Tazich's tongue and force her to defend the plausibility of the liberation of Hell. Almost like Teg doesn't actually have any stake in the keikaku herself.
"Who could you possibly be talking about."
There's nothing she can say. She prays for Katie's soul.
". . . Right, never mind, sorry."
She occupies the bottom right quadrant of the doorway, bag of holding extended.
She sees how close Teg is to Tazich—oh, and Tazich is holding the stranger—and decides not to chance a Message to Tazich, despite ?????. She's not sure what she'd say anyway. Damn her wasted Detect Thoughts!
It's certainly something. The limp stranger's chest is moving.
"Oh? Tell me more."
"She is one of us already." Ambiguation between Katie's personality and Urgathoa's blessing, already granted. Question your god, Somayyeh.
"Believe it or not, some of my female childhood friends have found love, though it were with their parents' chosen beaus."
"Well, this is different." I'm not failing your stupid hetero-brained dipstick test, you poor self-dreamed spinster. Imagine her asking me these questions if I'd ended up with Teg!
Lights are extinguished. They cloak up and move out the way they came, through the ordinary door, using only mundane stealth but re-locking it as they leave. Much has been stolen; no point trying to rectify the mess. But better to let the proprietors wonder if they even touched the door.