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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.
She's a little annoyed, but she'll let it slide for now and wait to move in until Teg's properly flustered "Can you answer the question, though?"
"Mmghh."
"I feel like I'm supposed to have a--great extent or reach or something. I don't know. I'd probably dislike it if I had more of my old life left to lose. Maybe I like it because of how forcefully it separates me from my old life. Maybe I like not looking down at myself and seeing somebody who could still--have never fucked it all up.
I don't know why you'd want to know all that."
"Would you say that you enjoy taking up space?" She really wants to get closer, but continues to hold off.
"Like, you were raised to just be a disposable, interchangeable, nondescript cog in a machine, so you like standing out, feeling important by virtue of size, having a body that has features that exist purely for your own pleasure rather than to serve others. Something like that?"
"How much Lawful nonGood are they teaching in the River Kingdoms these days?
I was raised to be--" a hero, and a custodian of hope "--good things."
"Sorry, I'd take off, but." She pirouettes her hand indicatively from the vampire's direction to the waif's.
"I'm sure that's not how they phrased it, but it sounds like an accurate description from what I've heard. Why else would they object to you being so gorgeously vast?"
"I'm trying, but she keeps distancing herself from me because she's afraid she'll hurt me."
"You should note that your present physical shape is making you way more effective at evangelizing to me. Still not going to listen unless you let me cuddle you, though. I'm not that pathetic."
"... because I said the thing about you being raised to be a cog in a machine? The thing I most expect to be scolded for right now is putting my desire for physical contact with you above self-preservation, but that's not especially Iomedaean."
"Been healed by positive energy. Nothing else extraordinary about your birth or childhood circumstances, right?
Not saying we should trust her. I think she's just weird."
"Not in terms of like, being a sorcerer or a changeling or something. What are you getting at?"
The obvious option is to let Tiar psychoanalyze her. Neither of them are going to be the one to suggest that.
This is where she's supposed to make something up so she doesn't give away exactly the behaviors that will let Katie pass their tests for normalcy, right?
'Most people are instinctively repelled by vampires?' Forget it, too fragile of a fraud.
Vagueness? No . . . She settles on evading supplying the answer herself by making Katie supply it under the guise of blinded scientific investigation.
"Have you been, like, previously aware of ways in which you differ mentally from normal people? That aren't attributable to you being a princess, or a wizard?"
"Yeah, but like, I didn't previously expect them to be supernatural in nature, as opposed to just part of the natural variation of humans, like how some people are really tall and others are really short."
UGH she thought she was prepared for this but they are going to be here ALL fucking afternoon and Tiar has GOT to be up and around by now
"It's hard to quantify. It's like the difference between elves and humans. The pointy ears are the big thing, but there are a bunch of other little differences that are subtle individually, but taken together you can tell you're looking at an elf even if the ears are hidden behind hair. The way I would phrase it is that I'm actually capable of thinking logically, unlike regular people who just follow the consensus of the herd. People tell me I move weirdly. I'm grossed out by things other people find normal, and not bothered by things other people find gross. I had trouble learning to write despite learning to read much faster than normal. All of this is the sort of thing you'd expect to be the result of some magical quirk, but I've read a lot of books on magic and none of them say my weirdness is symptomatic of anything magical." Ugghhhh introspection is hard. She really wants to bury her face in Teg's tits right now.