...Oh gods don't laugh she's sure Galora can read the expression on her face but don't it wouldn't be kind to Naevys --

...Yeah.  Hugs.  Good plan, Naevys.  She's stealing it.

Okay.  Her face has stopped screwing itself up in novel ways as she tries to suppress the situationally-inappropriate amusement.

She has a reaction to what Galora's said, and that reaction needs to be delivered.  It is as follows:  "...Fuck."

"...As for what I had missed...  Regrettably I have a horrible habit of Not Directly Telling People Sensitive Personal Things Even When That Would Be The Sensible Choice To Make, even when I actually trust them," which, gods fucking dammit, she seems to be doing, "so apparently I'm just going to say that testosterone is a horrible thing to inflict on a girl and hope you can figure out what the hell I'm talking about."

"Would you like me to force you to tell us? It often helps."

She can have that one for free! Naevys pets her head while she quietly tries to process everything, gives that up for doomed, and decides to just carry on and try to enjoy the ride.

"Yeah. Fuck." 

...Is this what happened in all those stories about Dark Wizards who came back from interrogation forever changed. What do they escalate to if this doesn't work. She has so many questions - oh, right. 

Wait hold on a moment. "...Some... mad alchemist was... force-feeding you Masculine Humours?" It's a dangerous kind of thought but she's been exposed to humans for years at this point, she knows dimly what kind of thing happens to human children sometimes. Maybe they should steal them. Rage.

"I can in fact guess what you're talking about. Well done for giving me an obvious enough hint!" She rolls her head a little. "I imagine you have your own solution, but just in case, can I offer you the chance to be entirely regenerated and reborn from scratch, courtesy of the Church of Aphrodite?"

...She is still utterly baffled by the praise, it seems.

"That's basically what's already been done to get me to this point, I couldn't exactly be put in Villarosa while still carbon-based, but I do appreciate very much that you'd offer."

"...I wasn't being force-fed anything, Naevys, it was just...  What was already in the instructions for that body to do when I hit puberty.  But if you can't make your own estrogen, store-bought is fine, assuming you actually know how to do it."  She huffs out the ghost of a laugh.  "Before they figured out how to produce the genuine article, which is...  So much chemistry I have not the faintest idea of - they could collect a close cousin from the urine of pregnant horses.  Which is also something I know next to nothing about, but knowing it can be done is half the battle, when you're facing an engineering problem.

"Anyway, fun human biology facts aside...

"...Actually I have no idea where to go from here.  Oops?"

The praising will continue until morale improves! 

"That's so brave of you! You had to drink horse urine how awful." She is not nearly that attached to having a feminine shape but she did always think it must disconcerting to have no control at all. Some elves do almost always stay one way. 

"Oh, you were going to tell us all about what was missing from your life and how it left you unable to hear anything nice about yourself without melting into quite an adorable puddle of molten archmage. You can cry some more first, if you like. I don't mind. Quite the opposite, actually."

...Yeah, her eyes watered again at that.

"Well, no, the horse pee was long before my time and they took the urine parts of it out of the stuff first anyway, but.  Yeah.  It sucked.  Especially since I didn't catch it for multiple decades despite the hindsight being so fucking obvious --"  She cuts herself off, the fire behind her eyes slowing back to its usual roil.

"But yeah that did not help.  Nor did the pervasive messaging that the only women who were conventionally desirable were...  You could practically snap them in half with a sharp breeze, and I was very much not remotely in possession of a body that could have done that at the time.  Not that I wanted to be that utterly fucking stupid with my health, but it still...  Seeped in.  The 30 to 50 percent of my homeland there who had fallen in behind the politicians who loved whipping them into a froth about hating that which did not conform to their awful, awful worldview - I'm fairly sure they'd offend each and every god of the Pantheon personally qua individual doctrinal insult - also didn't help, though I don't think that's the same issue.  And as for compliments about the intangibles...  I'd never had to work for my intelligence overmuch.  And then when I had to self-organize in further pursuing it I - not literally - exploded and that rather put paid to any ability to believe in the idea that I was actually remotely as good at this as many of the very intelligent people I knew, you know?  I don't know.  And this go 'round...  Well.  I'm effectively cheating like hell."

"Was it obvious? Did anyone else notice? I'm not sure that would have occurred to me in your place! I don't know a lot about heathen lands but I have heard they're horrible places so this makes sense actually. It's not your fault and you did make a better world than that! I am honestly curious about what it was like and what this worldview was, I've never actually talked to a heathen before."

"I have. This is actually on the better end."

All right! This does sometimes happen, she's heard it discussed - they do do as much as they can to make it possible for people, even peasants, to get healing magic that powerful when they need it, but clerics are rare and elven cities aren't easy to find, it's at bare minimum disruptive, many people can't manage it and many more probably live in denial, at least for a time... The rest of it isn't quite so clear, but it makes some sense. 

So - suffered pointlessly for years at her own hand, because of who she is, shunned and persecuted, probably for the same reason, feeling undesirable, plus a little standard wizard inferiority complex. This is so much more fun than she was expecting! Alien archmages turn out to be fragile in interestingly different ways.

(She imagines telling wizard apprentices that there's an archmage who'll tell you deep cosmic secrets if you're very nice to her and watching them swarm her like dire piranhas, and smiles at the thought.)

"So," she says thoughtfully, "it's not that you can't imagine anyone thinking highly of you, you just can't accept it, after all that. These heathen politicians must have been very convincing for you to still agree with them. I like you already, and you're saying I'm wrong." She taps a cheek with her finger. "There are some who might call that heresy."

"It was, trust me, very fucking obvious.  I was all but literally thinking 'I want girl puberty' once someone told me what it was."

As for what Galora's saying...  Asgkldfsbs.

(...Also!  Hey!  She wouldn't tell just anyone deep cosmic secrets!  She has some notion of opsec!)

"...To say that I have ever agreed with them is, I think, overstating things.  I was raised well enough to call their bullshit when I saw it, even before I knew why I reacted so strongly.  But that doesn't stop you from internalizing their hatred regardless, if it's pervasive enough."

"...As for the doctrine of those awful people, Naevys...

"To be honest, it was a bunch of cult-y stuff, along with some very much straight-up cult cults, stuffed into a big tent of 'elect this guy because he' - and it usually was a he, there was a horrible gender imbalance even amongst the people who tried to be better than that - 'performs hating The Outsider really vehemently'.  Lots of...

"There wasn't axiomatic Good and Evil there, either, nor any sufficiently reliably-attested divine forces in the case of religion - no clerics or paladins, the people claiming faith healing were charlatans - so they got to sling around the sort of shit that would make anyone be capital-Evil, and call themselves good.  Preachers of the gospel of hoarding, in the cloaks of a religion that praised charity.  Preachers of a gospel of hatred, in the cloaks of a religion where one of its most famous parables is that the self-righteous religious authority who does not stop to help a man wounded on the side of the road is less aligned with their God than the heathen who did.

"And they had their token quislings, the people who thought they'd be safe from the Othering if they were one of 'the good ones'...

"I kind of feel bad for them, because appeasement never works on fascists.  There was ample historical evidence of that to be had.  Of course a lot of the fuckwits were indoctrinated into denying that that history had happened the way all the evidence says it did, which...

"Ugh.  I hate wilful ignorance."

"...It wasn't all bad, though.  There were people who wanted to do good.  Childhood mortality was low enough that replacement rate was 'have two kids'.  We eradicated a disease entirely.  The country I'm originally from pulled off a crash total mobilization of - an economy probably on the scale of the Old Kingdom - to kick some fascists in the teeth when they had actually seized a country and started killing people for murder's sake, for all that it took them way too damn long to get there.

"Of course my generation's lot of fascists that needed stopping came from inside the house, because of fucking course they did, but the principle of resisting genocidal fuckwits by all available means was at least there.

"...I'm not entirely sure why this is the thing I'm expounding upon.  Do tell me if you'd rather I not."

"This isn't something I can speak on - oh actually no now maybe it is?"

She shrugs. "You're an Inquisitor now. You're past the point where we can keep you safe like a parent would a child! Do your best, we'll have feedback."

"...I have heard stories about... powerful clerics making limbs grow back, in front of vast crowds, to convert heathens. Sometimes dying for it which is actually confusing if they were that powerful! Did nobody notice they couldn't do that?"

"No. No they didn't. Unusually good wizards sometimes notice that kind of thing. Most people don't."

"... Can't we teach them?"

"Oh, I've never been to our visitor's homeworld, I'm just guessing because I have met people before. Sort of, Naevys, but there's only one of me and we'd need thousands. ...For humans. I'm not sure there are enough elves stupid enough for that to work. 'Fascist' isn't translating well but I can make a guess. Thank you for the extra reasons why we should just try to conquer certain places if we ever can! There are many among us who think as you do. And please do tell us more. What problem did they have with you?"

"I was several times over an easily-Otherable minority.  We have," she starts counting fingers, "being female in the first place, having decided to be such, also being both romantically and sexually interested in women now that I was one...  Not liking their favorite religion to hide behind after I found out that it was not remotely as accepting as the congregation I grew up in, as a matter of doctrine, though I'll give some of the various splinter sects credit for being better and even the big church took some prosocial stances...  Actually, technically you could count having been part of that church instead of a Protestant one, given my country's specific breed of assholes, but I think most of that was well before my time.  ...Believing that actually abuse of power was bad...  Similarly about the untrammeled excess of the noveau riche hoarding money and power for merely having bought up all the useful legal fictions of ownership of important necessities like food, healthcare, and logistics...  Honestly I may be a bit of a hypocrite on the hereditary-wealth front by now but at least Villarosa's an elective monarchy...  ...Practically the only thing they didn't hate me for was my skin color."

"...The only vaguely historical account we have of somebody doing anything remotely like that, Naevys, is, well, probably a complete fabrication on the miracles front, even though I am under the impression that they actually traced some of the myths rolled up in that faith, back to actual events and people, to some degree of confidence.  ...It's also more than two thousand years old.  ...Actually, no, most of that was completely wrong, I just fucking forgot about the existence of a bunch of other major religions, one of which incorporated that guy wholesale and another of which that religion sprung from to begin with, though honestly they were probably the most sensible of the lot - but none of them really have proof of things that don't have an explanation that relies only on physical coincidence.  ...Interestingly we did have an Aphrodite, of a practice in times yet further in the past, and now I'm dreadfully curious if yours recognizes the name 'Sappho'.  She...  Well, she became retroactively important enough a person for her poetry, that the words my native tongue uses for being a woman who is interested in other women came from her name and where she lived, and - well.  I'll just quote a bit that's stuck with me ever so long, that will also explain why I'm asking.

"Sweet mother I cannot weave — / slender Aphrodite has overcome me / with longing for a girl."

"...That bit was very popular to re-quote," she says, surprisingly matter-of-factly for the way she put on a Serious Mien to actually recite it - like it was an act of devotion that she had been given a chance to witness, and share again unto them, despite not being of particular faith in the goddess herself.

Very far below Her, just for a moment, a little rose flame kindles in a foreign soul.

All questions of a deep and timeless familiarity, all riddles of the nature of the Far Realms and the foundations of reality, quite aside

More than the content or intent of a prayer, is the underlying shape it impresses, on a soul

The future is even more uncertain than ever 

But what is not

Is that that was a sincere thought

Of love and of joy

And that soul does not

Have enough of those. 

There is a part of you that was always Mine when there was no Me of Whom to be.

It's not even really a glance, only the faintest sense of a facet of Something vast and dreadful aware of you, like being out under a darkening summer sky, and the tiniest touch of electric warmth. For a moment colours around you deepen and sharpen into rainbow ecstasies, shadows deepen and lights brighten in a way your eyes and your heart will never forget.

"...How are women a minority? Did - most of them change - why? I - you know what I should stop asking you questions and give you another hug."

She looks slightly arrested for a moment, because you have to give people something. 

Sorry, Naevys, she'll get to you in a second, she's busy processing what - what - what -

"...If anyone was wondering," she says faintly, "I was not expecting to succeed quite that hard on that particular Knowledge: Religion check, but apparently I did so anyway.  I, uh.  Wow.  That happened.  I'm.  I was not really.  Expecting.  Anything, of what I just experienced."

...Aphrodite may be a figure of dread power beyond human comprehension, but in that moment of contact, she nonetheless was kind.  Thank you, she thinks, in the hope that her appreciation will be heard.  I wasn't expecting any of this, and I thank you for it.

"I.  Ah.  You asked - no, women weren't less frequent.  They were... Given less access to power, by force and by societal pressure, for many, many years.  But you're right.  More hugs is a much better idea than - more of me talking about things that hurt us all to hear, that are all in a past I've left behind."

She still seems - rather stunned.

She leans over and takes Alicia's hand in both of hers, squeezing gently. She holds on for a moment. 

"I know. You were not expecting it. In case you were wondering, the Goddess Herself does not directly acknowledge very many people. Well, in a certain sense She does every day, every time anyone looks at a sunset or drinks wine or makes love, but not quite so directly. I'm afraid, my dear, that you have just been called a good girl by a primal force of ancient creation Herself. I think you probably ought to be crying by now. Also, no, it's not blasphemous to flirt back."