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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 interesting part comes in where you figure out the differences, but alignments versus domains isn't as hard a boundary as some people make it out to be. It's sort of like, people used to have a big thing about night air versus day air, or, I mean, some people are more normal about tieflings and halflings now . . ."
"Terrible examples! Male versus female blood, people used to think those were entirely different, but they're exactly the same medically."
"Or sun dogs and sun rods and haloes.
Anyway, domain is like, an imprecise term for talking about a large segment of the metaphysical pattern of godhood that's closer to the Mortal Plane than alignment, but even if you name all a god's domains you still can't predict all the ways they'll be able and unable to act. Alignment describes what they'll want to do, but not fully, just according to Pharasma. And there are clusters that go more by domain than Pharasma's alignments and seem to share goals."
They've never actually gotten to this point with someone who seemed to grasp the concepts so easily and yet be uninterested in trying to pull any of the intellectual weight themselves.
"She's from the River Kingdoms. I guess they have a lot of farmland because people are always dying in the endless wars.
Do they, like, bother breeding pigs out there, or no?"
"Don't tell me you know agronomy doesn't technically include animals and know nothing about agronomy."
"Technically.
I'm just trying to figure out what we're going to use you for."
"I think Tazich has some idea." She squeezes the tiefling's love handle to better communicate what she means.
She waves her arms around Katie in the shape of Tank!Katie.
Then she says to Katie, "She means, like, in terms of your mental abilities, though."