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Fonts really wasn't complete without a Yvette, was it
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Rinara sighs and waves goodbye as Vetareh leaves. She's genuinely tempted to follow her - just run off from her life, leave the one functional place in the world to defend itself, let Civilization take over everything - if it means she can KNOW WHAT THIS PERSON CAN TEACH HER.

But that is silly and Rinara is a good person and so she will stay and help defend Lemrysh against the Forces Of Evil.

She just really, really doesn't want to.

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Shortly after Vetareh leaves, the reinforcements show up and, and Madera gets treated to TWO SEPARATE VERSIONS of what's going on from her Sisters. They agree only insofar as a WEIRD MAGIC PERSON showed up and then left and both of them are saying the other one behaved super badly. Why does her life have to be like this?

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"This way" is apparently a REALLY LONG WALK. There's a lot of forest! If she keeps going long enough, she'll eventually run out of forest, and then there will be a rather hot and dusty plain! It is conceivable that Rinara did not have a good intuition for how far away Qalmir was, but it is apparently more than 'a day!'

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Ugh. Okay.

Well, it's not like Vetareh is unfamiliar with walking. (Quite the opposite, ha, ha.) At least this time she has the novel problems of 'finding water' and 'finding food' and 'finding shelter' to break up the monotony. And she can sleep! That's nice. Respectively: she has known how to find water since she was twelve and furthermore knows a minor signet for drawing it from underground in a pinch, anything small and tasty looking can get blasted with magic and made edible with the power of fire, and Vetareh can in fact make aforementioned fire if she has to. She resents it, though. Not her specialty, she has to do it with, like, sticks and rocks? It's really annoying. And then when night is near she can find defensible locations to set up an illusion to sleep under and eat and whatnot in.

The hot and dusty plain is at least bizarrely safe? She would have expected a couple beasties to have shown up to try to murder her by now, but. She's fine with nothing immediately trying to kill her the minute she's away from dubious safety. That's weird, but fine.

Rather boring, admittedly.

But she does have a problem to work on, as she travels. There is this irritating 'language barrier' thing going on, and she doesn't like it. Probably there's a way around that problem with sufficient application of magic, and if any branch of magic would do it, the one of minds and illusions and concepts would be it. Which is what she's primarily attuned to. So. You have a stick, Vetareh, get to leveraging. As you walk. Like you've been doing for who-even-knows-how-fucking-long-anymore.

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Nothing in particular tries to kill her! She occasionally passes a river, but not usually much of one. She hasn't hit any villages yet.

She has an unfortunately large amount of time to spend working on solving magic linguistics puzzles.

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Joy of endless joys. Just what she needed. More time to herself to work on puzzles of her own creation. Whatever, it's fine. She's fine. Totally, completely fine. Well. Functional. She's functional. That counts as fine, right? In some definitions? Right.

So, while solving the fundamental language problem by transferring knowledge from one party to another is theoretically possible, it'd take quite a bit of work, experimentation, and a willing subject. Probably also a better understanding of the language, too; she'd start with transferring her own language to someone else and seeing how that took before moving on to trying to copy someone else's. 'Knowledge of a language' is rather finicky, after all, and probably this whole thing either needs a willing subject offering up their language consensually, or a couple of years (maybe decades) of hard work by dedicated geniuses to figure out the ins and outs to the point where the person doesn't need to offer understanding and structure to the copy. She doesn't really have the patience for the second one.

What she's going to go for instead is something much more shallow; direct concept transfer between an individual and herself. That is to say, avoiding the language barrier by ignoring it and having direct mind to mind contact. Bit messy, but hey, she's not being judged by her peers for the artistry of her spellcraft anymore. It's straightforward enough to scrape up a spell that will probably work for basic communication, and soon enough she has something she thinks will probably work. Probably.

If she could fucking find anyone, why is this world so empty and boring!

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This world unfortunately cannot answer her, because it does not talk!

Hey, looks like there might be some people over there, aren't there? Narrow, rocky streambed, some sheep, looks like some kind of palisade on a hilltop?

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CIVILIZATION! IT EXISTS!

Okay time to go say hi, and try to prove herself friendly enough that people will hold still and let her cast experimental magic on them so she can skip the dumb charades part of this story. She will try her very best to look so innocent and nonthreatening! Hi, she knows she's very strange and scary, but her scepter is put away and she's going to wave and smile while she approaches the palisade slowly. Isn't she innocent looking, please accept that she's not a threat in this bizarrely nonthreatening world?

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Ab Khorshad is a tiny village on the Westwater, and they are expecting the Tafnoi. They are always expecting the Tafnoi; 'not expecting the Tafnoi' is one of these things that small villages are evolved not to do, in rather the same way that you will never find rabbits that like to cuddle up with hawks.

When a red-haired girl with unnaturally pale skin (no tan - no sunburn), wearing clothes that do not really cover enough of her, wanders into town, the people of Ab Khorshad react about the way you'd expect sensible people to react.

First, they panic that she's one of the Tafnoi in very very good disguise, and run for safety. Then their brains start coming up with hypotheses, most of which, oddly enough, end up surprisingly close to the truth. Then they delegate the job of taking risks related to these hypotheses to one of the people who is very well paid for the job.

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Ashakhar Firuz Gholman blinks, then rushes to put his helmet on while the rest of his cohort armor themselves. Foreign noblewoman wandering through the desert is the sort of thing that every warrior in the Western Marches with the faintest grasp of either political acumen or romantic heroism wants to hear, and though his superiors wouldn't have posted him to Ab Khorshad if they hadn't thought he had a decent head on his shoulders, that doesn't mean he isn't a warrior or that it isn't the Western Marches.

 

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What this looks like to Vetareh is that people (looking very poor by her standards, probably malnutritioned) appear almost out of nowhere as they get close, fleeing for the gate in the palisade or driving their flocks for it, and then what comes out of the gate is a healthy young man looking vaguely similar in ethnicity to the forest-women, hair somewhere ambiguous between brown and black, armored in steely grey-blue scales gilded on the shoulders and girded with a sword. His armor and sword are both slightly magic with rock-magic, but there's nothing supernatural about him; he looks very straightforwardly alive.

"Greetings, my lady. What aid do you require from the knights of Qalmir?"

He's going to try that once in High Qalmiri, once in the Low Qalmiri this region of the Western Marches speaks, and then in bad Karakralin and worse Laukeran.

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She wasn't exactly expecting everyone to flee quite so ostentatiously, but, well. Sensible enough, she supposes? A bit much, and honestly if their defense is mostly 'run away' that seems... kind of garbage, actually. Well, regardless, she's going for nonthreatening. Instead of following any of them, she sits down where she'll be easily visible, and waits to see if someone will come out to talk to her. And meanwhile, she people watches, smiling at anyone that looks like they're actually looking at her. Which they're mostly not. Vetareh is... a little concerned about the status of the people she sees?? Are they okay?? Why do they look, what is that, malnourished? But feeding people is the easiest part of having people, you just give them food and then they eat it???

While she waits to see if anyone will be brave enough to come talk to the strange stranger, she wonders how people could possibly fail at farming so thoroughly that malnutrition happens. Is there a famine going on? Do these people not have very advanced magic? Ooo, oo, does she get to start a magical revolution, because that sounds like great fun, even if she doesn't.... quite know how to turn her own magic specializations into something for farming. That's really more Melandru's area of expertise, and Vetareh always found the nature shtick kind of... one note and boring. Maybe something with necromancy? Speed up the rate of decay of dead things, maybe? Hmm...

And then someone does come to see her! One guy, by himself! Wow, either they trust this guy's abilities a lot or he's being thrown out here as a potential human sacrifice if she's crazy, which fortunately she isn't, but still.

"I really, really doubt we have any languages in common," she says apologetically, shaking her head as way of reply. But she will dutifully listen to each one of his language attempts, and confirm that she doesn't know any of them. Then, when it seems like he's done, she makes a little tiny purple light in her left hand, points at it with her right, and then points from her mouth to him, and back again. Magic to talk! May she?

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Firuz has no objection to any attempt to use magic to help communicate! He's rather confused about who she could be, though; red hair suggests Viranatui, but there's only three of their royals (generously), they're all darker-skinned than that and the Red Witch is twice her age. Maybe she's from one of the overseas countries? He's never met anyone from overseas!

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Excellent! Then she casts, uh, shit she never named it. Vetareh's Shitty Discount Relay! ... Better name pending when she's worked out the inevitable kinks and gotten the whole thing neatened up so it won't fall apart the minute someone magical sneezes on it.

It does feel like there's some kind of connection made, to both parties. Sort of... like there's a pool, or perhaps a pit, at the edges of his mind, that he can throw thoughts into. And which spits out obviously-foreign concept packets at him, as follows:

((Greetings/Assurance of nonthreatening nature!/Apologies if this is freaky!)) ((Is this intelligible/Understandable/Not-garbage enough to communicate with?)) ((Link should be two way/Replying should be obvious/I think I can hear you if you mean and intend to tell me something?))

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WELL THAT IS BIZARRE he's a Hero, Heroes are supposed to be able to roll with bizarre things. He wonders what her element is, 'thoughts?'

((Greetings/Assurance of lack of hostile intent/Desire to extend nonharmful assistance.))

((I can comprehend your meaning/I think I know what you're doing/your message was received.))

(([I/I but not a very unimportant I/I but not like a SUPER unimportant I/I, a person who stabs things/I, a person who works for the government/I, a male person)),

((Ashakhar (which is a word)/important person who stabs things/but not like I'm in charge of anything/but not like I'm some random farmer who got given a spear))

((Firuz (which is my name)))

(([Gholman which is my name/slave of the state/person who stabs things/person from a long military family))

(([desire to offer/obey my job by offering/offer]))

((You who I am talking to/you who are of royal blood/you who have magic/you who are high status/you who are female))

((the polite greetings/moderate assistance/a place to stay))

((of [Qalmir the country I'm from/Qalmir that rules this place here/Qalmir that is TOTALLY THE BEST/the representatives of Qalmir who are right here/this town/me and my buddies.))

(It was a shorter statement in his head.)

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Vetareh does not burst out laughing, because she's a professional, but she does quirk a little smile. Okay, so. That's something to work on in the next, less shitty version. Maybe some sort of... consolidation part. That seems like a thing that is necessary. Because: wow. Oops.

But this is nonetheless better than charades! Even if many of those concepts were a bit too foreign to really... understand. Slave of the state?? That's a thing? Why is that a thing. Royal blood??? Well, yes, she has like half a drop of it on her mother’s side, but she has no idea how this person would have guessed that. Her clothes, maybe??

Regardless:

((I'm Vetareh/A mesmer/meta-mancer/illusionist/concept-meddler/massive magic nerd/person completely uninterested in starting hostilities with, like, anyone, especially nations))

((I'm from far away/Probably another dimension/The trip was long and terrible and absolutely the sort of thing that would spit her out on another world))

((And I am lost [So, so, so lost], but friendly/Looking for something prosocial to do/Bored/Inclined to be helpful/Sick to death of wandering alone no seriously she doesn't even know how long it's been!))

((It's lovely to meet you/Find your country/Not be greeted by someone trying to stab me in the first five minutes here [Good job!]))

((Could she request hospitality from [this town/maybe this country she guesses?] in exchange for [being friendly/helpful/a huge magic nerd at literally any problem they put in front of her/pretty and interesting]?))

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... Yeah, Firuz blushes when she gets to "pretty and interesting." Does she not understand that she is higher status than he is???

((Welcome to Qalmir/we will offer you shelter/I'm extending this without explicit orders but expect my superiors to back me up.))

((This town/little place/town not in Qalmir proper))

((Is part of the Empire of Qalmir/under the authority of the Empress of Qalmir/will be protected by the Qalmiri army if anyone attacks it, which is a serious concern))

((We are glad you have come to Qalmir/because Qalmir is AWESOME)

((However far you are from/wait really other worlds seriously/I bet it's like another continent you look like a human.))

((We do not know what a Mesmer/wielder of an unknown magic/magic person not from a known royal house is))

(unless it's a witch but he isn't saying that, you don't call people witches unless they go around saying I AM THE RED WITCH, it's rude.)

((But I am sure/well I confidently expect/I offer assurances that))

((you can do great and helpful things for Qalmir/and be rewarded for them like a lot/I'm going to get super promoted because you landed on me!))

((We hope that, however poor an impression the other lands you have been have given you/It is very unfortunate that people apparently try to stab you/they shouldn't do that but it's not surprising all other countries suck))

((Qalmir will not be a disappointment/Qalmir IS NOT going to be a disappointment I repeat it is the BEST/we're going to treat you like royalty.))

((Despite the limits of my own humble abilities/I'm not that humble but I have WAY LESS resources than back home/this town isn't Qalmir we just own it.))

((I offer you the hospitality of Qalmir/this is a formal invitation to come in/and if anyone tries to mess with you we'll beat them up.))

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Okay, maybe her relay is actually perfect as it is, because this is incredibly entertaining and kind of adorable. She doesn’t mean that, she’s totally still going to improve it, but it is still great to get the extra flavoring for all sent content. This is very charming. Probably irresponsible to cast on people, since it seems to be sending... kind of a lot... but still! So cute!!

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But also, more seriously: there seems to be a lot of formality, here. And a lot of structure. Certainly more than what she's used to in Orr. A whole country beating people up for messing with her sounds nice on paper, but also sounds... a little alarming. What happens if she decides she might want to go somewhere else or do... something else? Will they be offended? Will they stop her? A place with apparent slaves of the state sounds less like 'We want to assist with goals that align with ours and get along with you' and more like 'We want to use you to reach our goals, whether you're willing or not.' Being treated like royalty also sets off some alarm bells. There's a reason her mother renounced her titles and left Ascalon for Orr, and it was to the tune of 'Sick of being used' and 'Being pampered isn't everything.' Or maybe she's jumping at shadows, but she feels very much like she's run into a large and powerful beast that she doesn't quite understand, and she thinks blithely walking into its lair sounds like a shit idea.

((I wouldn't want to impose forever/make a permanent deal right out of the gate/align myself permanently with a political entity without greater understanding of my situation))

((Could I stay in this town/village/do small scale things before getting involved with greater powers?))

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Oh no, Firuz is not a diplomat. Is he leaking accidental thoughts? That would be bad!

((We would be pleased to host you for as long as you desire/we aren't going to just tell you NO))

((However, I am confident my superiors will desire to speak to you/and then they will be in charge of making decisions not me))

((And I must send word to them immediately/no really that's an explicit order))

((I have no doubt they will be able to assist you in whatever your goals are/they are also going to treat you with full respect.))

((And no dishonor will come to you so long as you are in Qalmir/did I mention that WE ARE THE BEST.))

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((Sure/That would be fine/I understand the importance of procedure and wouldn't want to get you in trouble.))

((Thank you for your hospitality/It's extremely appreciated/I cannot express how much I want a hot bath))

Which is to say: okay, so clearly this person is not really... in charge of much and she should make sure he doesn't get in the middle of any power struggles that might be about to occur. So she should say he did an excellent job and gave her a wonderful impression of Qalmir and smile like a stupid vapid princess and then break out in the middle of the night to run back to the wilderness and maybe talk to those tree stab happy people again. That sounds like a plan. If she decides she needs to, which she might not.

(Ugh, why did there have to be politics.)

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((Excellent. Please come in//this is a physical invitation to enter))

((Tragically, however, we cannot provide hot baths/though to be honest one sounds nice))

((As we are too far from proper civilization/this is the ass end of nowhere.))

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((That's fine/That's less shit than my life has been lately, so I will accept it. Thank you anyway.))

And then she can accept the physical invitation and go wandering into the place that may or may not want to use her as a political pawn! Well. Be led into the place that may or may not want to use her as a pawn. Same thing.

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It's a tiny hill fort. There's a palisade, there's a well, there's a few buildings to provide shelter from the rain, there's a roof you can stand on to look over the palisade. There's some peasants sheltering inside; Firuz explains something to them and they treat her with respect but not with fear and get back to what they were doing. There's some other soldier people, and they are happy to provide her with food, shelter, and rest.

All of them, like Firuz, treat her like someone higher-status than themselves.

Oh, and there's a BUILDING with FOUR-LEGGED ANIMALS that are not sheep and are MUCH LARGER THAN SHE IS that look slightly like ELONGATED COWS. Apparently one of the soldier people is going to climb on its back?

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...

Okay, so. Those kind of frighten her, but presumably they're domesticated? Especially if they're rideable? Why couldn't this world have a sensible mount of choice, though, like a raptor or even a dolyak or something. No? It's the weird quadruped with the too-thin legs that look like they're going to snap if someone sneezes on them? Okay. Sure. You do you, world.

The stable gets a bit of a strange look, but otherwise: yep she's being so cooperative and pliant! Please feed and water her, even as you all... carefully set her apart and above everyone else, thus making her feel isolated. Again. After who knows how long of isolation. Yes. Perfect. At least she gets a bed.

Gods, there goes her plan of getting laid the minute she made it to civilization, it's just too creepy when everyone's got her on a pedestal for no reason.

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