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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.
eeeeee she likes being picked up and feeling special and important and valuable. "What's a scut?"
"I'm learning so much today!" Gods, Teg is cute. If she's so fancy and special and shit, she can have two girlfriends, right?
She puts on multifocals and turns back to a strange little silkweaving project. "Katie is making me think. Most recent thoughts on why energy production remains as inefficient as it does?"
"Primordial god-coalition is the only thing that explains it. That's why we can trust that Paradise has the leverage to win, it's a metastable configuration."
"Wait, what do you mean by 'energy production'? Like, coal mining, or something to do with the way the gods give their clerics Channel Energy?"
Really, Katie's brain is so giant?
"Energy production per land area, I should have said. There's no known limitation on making more food if you have more land."
"I still would've said 'farming'. Of course you get more food if you have more land, but producing more output per unit of input is what 'efficiency' means."
"Right, and there's not an apparent hard cap in how much all of mortal civilization working together can increase the efficiency of most 'simple' processes."
Having nothing more to say on this, she awkwardly ignores Somayyeh and sidles over to the vampire. "Hey. Heard a lot about you from Taz, but I wanna hear your side of the story. Tell me about yourself."
She's fucking famished, it's not entirely trivial to think straight.
"Me? It's pretty simple. I found out through a series of hard ways that Iomedae doesn't stand for what She claims to.
Are you feeling alright?"
Somehow it's easy to talk to Katie.
Teg has taken a step closer.
. . . Fuck.
Well, she can't just jump back now and leave Katie all betrayed and confused!
"Of course I'm alright, a pretty girl is expressing vulnerability to me! Care to go on?"
Oh, right, 'vulnerability' is a Lastwallian tactic. Um. Fuck.
"I—" didn't mean to be vulnerable "—wait, are you serious?"
"That I think you're pretty, that you're expressing vulnerability, or that I want you to go on?"
"That the main influence on your present wellbeing is that I'm expressing vulnerability."
"I mean, ok yeah, there are a lot of other factors at play, but it is really nice when cute girls feel comfortable talking about their emotionally sensitive tragic backstories around me."
"I—" was raised in a cult where that's an obligation and not a choice
no, can't say that, that's also emotionally manipulative vulnerability—
. . . 'like I said, I'm really not that complicated'? Somehow that feels like the wrong thing to say.
"—think you're aesthetically appealing too."
Of course she does. Eyeroll. The interloper is about to start telling Katie she likes her exactly the way she is.
She tries to focus on her work. If Katie has chosen Teg to assist for the first few minutes, well, she's a damn traitor, but so be it.
God this girl is adorably traumatized. Katie wants to hold her and kiss her chubby cheeks and tell her everything is going to be alright. She needs to give her an opportunity to open up without feeling like a burden. "Thank you! Now, I don't want to invade your privacy, but I'm curious how exactly your beliefs about Iomedae failed to match up to reality. I don't actually know all that much about her, truth be told. Cayden is the main 'violently confronting Evil' god where I'm from."