She's not going to seek any of it out, but hey, she's here at a table to talk or flavor food if people swing by, playing her lute. 

Txell'll sit with her, though she doesn't have a bowl, maybe she ate earlier. "Seven guys, they're saying," she says. "Like they think it'll protect them if they've got company."

Seven. "That poor woman. Also - did they think Artigas was joking? What did they think would happen?" 

"Dunno. Heard something about a Zone of Truth, maybe we'll all get to watch and find out what they thought."

She winces, and only mostly keeps it off her face. "Did they say when?" 

"I'd assume the Zone has to wait till the morning. I guess Vallvé would know if Artigas'll have to move his patrol to do the whole shebang first thing in the morning, maybe he wouldn't bother doing that and instead'll let them stew all day and kill them after dinner? Only with the supply I think he might resent the extra fourteen bowls of stew, that's in the handbook too that he can't just not feed them."

...she should - go talk to Blai, ask to be allowed to talk to them before they're executed, just in case they can repent.

She doesn't want to. She really doesn't want to. 

She doesn't reply to Txell right away.

"Don't they do this at Iomedaean forts? What, does it just never come up because they don't have dicks or something?"

"The men are good at keeping them in their pants, at the Lastwall forts, even when there's a gorgeous bard interested," she says, like she didn't just space out really obviously. In a hushed voice, she adds "One can only assume that Iomedae in Her wisdom has instructed them all in the proper usage of their hands." 

All right that deserves a decent quality snicker. "Maybe there should be a workshop on that. Proper Uses of Hands meets right before Demonology, since after it you won't be in the mood, unless you are specifically taking the succubus class and then you shouldn't be."

She giggles weakly. "Yeah. ...I'm not teaching that one, though." 

"Yeah, it should be someone who has lots of practice, like Paret."

"You realize there's fuckall to do up here," says Paret.

"There's kitchen girls, apparently, if you don't value your life."

"She's not even pretty."

"Nothing wrong with spending spare time honing one's blade," Venn says innocently. "You don't want to be caught off-guard if you ever end up needing to use it someday." 

"You wanna check my work? I wanna know how thorough the blue theme is."

"I don't think I could do that to your hand, really, it seems like you've got a good thing going and I couldn't bear to interfere," she says, in the tones of a woman who is definitely turning someone down. 

"Hmmmm," says Paret, "how much do I value my life." But he is not being particularly serious about this, it's just a really Chelish joke.

Venn rolls her eyes and artfully changes the topic to gossip fragments from the further off fort she and Txell were at. Apparently they've got a ranger among the enlisted there and he's good enough to cast one or two first circles every day, which isn't nearly enough healing to keep a fort at combat readiness but has helped them keep people from dying. "He's not the kind with an animal friend, though," she adds, clearly vaguely disappointed about this. 

"Maybe he'll get one. To spite whoever expected to be first in line for healing. Are you this mournful about wizards who don't have familiars?"

Venn shakes her head immediately. "Nah. Familiars are really different. I like them just fine, but it's usually a much less interesting dynamic to me."

She's met enough casters with chatty ravens to have noticed the pattern where they get more cunning as their masters circle up, but not any more independent, and it's kind of distressing to think about what their lives must be like. Most of them can't even talk to anyone else! 

"Huh. What's so great about animal friends?"

"Hmmm, for me it's less about the animals specifically, and more about - how the relationship works? I was told by the least cryptic Druid I've met that there's a bit of Green magic binding them, but it mostly just lends strength to the animal. So they have a relationship that's in a lot of ways set up on the animal's terms, and whether their person understands that intellectually or intuitively it's really interesting to see how it plays out, and it's really different based on the kind of animal."

She grins. "Also, they're often big and fluffy." 

Txell makes a bit of a face, but not for very long. "You've met enough druids to rank them by crypticness, huh?"

...hmmm, that was definitely something, but she's not sure what, and... she is not in an especially investigative mood, right now.

Storytime takes much less mental effort, though. "I've met like four Druids, and one of them was only moderately cryptic and evasive! ...I got the sense from the others that they had already decided that trying to have real conversations with outsiders was a waste of time." She shrugs. "I spent an hour with one of them doing my best cryptic nonsense impression back at them, which was pretty fun. We would just take turns saying things like time is the loneliest wind of them all and nodding gravely while pretending not to notice the way half the pub was staring at us." 

"Oh that sounds absolutely hysterical, I am right there with that half of the pub laughing my ass off," cackles Txell.

"Tend carefully to the roots of the tree that is your soul", she says seriously.