Gamila startles.

What the fuck?

Where did that come from?

Why is Mister Narvet spitting mad out of nowhere?

He is almost beyond words as he realizes what must really be going on.

"You-! You-! Seductress! Succubus! You were a sorceress this whole time?!? You lying cunt!!!"

Has he gone insane?

"What the fuck are you talking about-"

(Attack: 16)

He strikes her across the face, hard.

"Don't play dumb with me, you slattern!"

It's a shock, but it barely hurts. Like, that was a grown man's punch and it barely rocked her.

After a stunned moment, a part of her goes cold. It's a small part. He has no combat spells and if that punch was representative of the physical threat he can bring to bear, she doesn't feel very in-danger, actually.

Still. He hit her.

(Attack: 21)

She hits back. And she doesn't need a spell to hit him with magic. Her power flows around her fist as it crashes into him, delivering half again as much force as her fist alone. (It's still not very much damage, but it's more than he did to her.)

Omlar is not expecting her to hit back.

He falls on his ass with a wheeze.

This just serves as confirmation, though. This is not a normal girl. She lied about everything. She never needed him to teach her wizardry; she was already a sorceress. There had been no trade, her offered deal was a sham.

It was nothing but an elaborate ruse to make a fool out of him.

He's going to hurt her. If he can.

Is she willing to kill this man?

No.

Well, in that case, fighting him is pointless.

Gamila darts for the window, Slides out of the apartment, and drops to the ground.

She races away and is long gone by the time Mister Narvet can make it down the stairs.

Maybe it's a good thing that her father isn't going to be taking her along when he goes to work, anymore.

Over the next two weeks, a rumor begins to spread and grow across the neighborhoods of Aru-Da.

The name 'Saei' is whispered in hushed tones. The daughter, it speaks.

The daughter, barely flowered, yet already defiled. Tainted blood and dangerous chaotic tendencies. Unfit for marriage. UNFIT FOR MARRIAGE. UNFIT FOR MARRIAGE.

Gamila has bigger concerns than some rumor that Mister Narvet probably started out of spite.

Her monthlies are late.

She was expecting it, but the creeping dread is now ever-present.

From her bedroom window, she can see the Crimson Canal cut below, and beyond it, on the other side of the waters, the High Temple of Pharasma spears into the sky.

She looks upon the spire with loathing.

She's not giving up when she's barely started. She knows what a spell is, now, and she's practiced the ones she has until they're second nature. She has a much better idea of what questions to ask. The puzzle now, is where to ask those questions. She has an idea about that. It's kind of the obvious idea, when you know how to read.

(Bluff: 12)

At breakfast, Gamila askes her father if he'd let her come along with him to work, again.

After he and her mother snipe passive aggressively at each other for a few minutes, he tells her she's welcome, as long as she stays within his sight at all times.

Gamila agrees.

Later, when her mother is out of ear shot, Gamila tells her father that she changed her mind; that she'd rather stay home after all, actually.

Then, when her father heads out, Gamila tells her mother goodbye and claims to be going with him.

Her mother thinks she's with her father, and her father thinks she's with her mother. Gamila now has an alibi for the entire day.

She hurries out of her own neighborhood and joins the throngs of traffic heading into the Rose Quarter. She's never been to the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye, but she's heard about it. Everyone has. Knowledge. Wine that makes you smarter. Crazy wizards doing crazy things.

There is so much blank space in Gamila's understanding of her own magic, her own body, everything. She needs to fill that space in, and she needs to fill it in quickly.

Kesi notices, shortly after her husband leaves with her daughter, that her daughter left her cloak behind. She'll get sunsick without it. She snatches it up and power-walks out into the street, spotting her husband's wagon at the end of the row.

"Mido!" She closes the distance, then stops and look over the wagon in confusion. "Mido, where's Gamila?"

    "What do you mean? She's at home."

"You were taking her with you today."

    "She changed her mind about that, said she'd rather stay put."

"She just left with you!"

    "What do you mean she just left with me? I just left without her. Kesi, where is our daughter?"

"She was with you!"

    "No she wasn't!"

"She, she lied to us?! Why would she do that?"

    "I don't know, she's been off lately..."

"Our daughter is a conscientious girl, in spite of your influence. She wouldn't do that, unless someone's gotten to her, gotten to her and filled her head with poison and lies."

    "That's going a bit far. I think she's just feeling a bit... confined. That's normal at her age."

"Oh don't you start. You had to go and turn her against me. Now she's vulnerable and someone's turned her against us both!"

    "I never turned her against you. You managed that all on your own."

"...how dare you. I'm a good mother."

    "Listen, I need to get to work."

"Fine! Go. Our daughter's gotten into gods-know what kind of trouble, but fine. I will handle the matter. Have a good day at work, dear."

Ignorant of the shitstorm that's waiting for her at home, Gamila stares up in awe at the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye. It really is a lot bigger when you're standing in it's shadow, and clearly built by wizards.

She realizes... she has no idea what the rules are, here.

For lack of better options, she's just going to walk in and look for books and see if anyone tries to stop her.

The Temple of the All-Seeing Eye is an enormous building that appears to be made out of glittering pastel glass and crystal, radiating magic, tapering upwards into a spire that is, just by a few inches, taller than the Black Dome. That's what it looks like right now, at least. It's kind of well known that it changes, sometimes as often as every week.

The plaza around the base of the tower is filled with light, airy taverns and outdoor cafes. The wine of Nefreti Clepati is for sale on all sides, at the price-point of one gold piece per mug.

The interior of the temple is mostly hollow, with stairs ringing it, climbing up and up and up to the highest levels of the spire. On the ground level, the glossy marble floor is dominated by a huge, slowly-rotating Silent Image of... some kind of bumpy sphere, with little bits floating around in it, and a smaller sphere inside, which in turn was filled with spools of thread. A quartet of richly-dressed, well-groomed teenagers (three boys, one girl) are standing under the image, gesticulating at it as they argue with each other in low voices.

There do not appear to be any checkpoints or anyone who's job it is to keep the riffraff out.

There does seem to be a gilded plaque with information for aspiring wizard students. Among the information on the plaque is that lessons for absolute beginners hoping to get their first wizard level are three gold-pieces per week.

Her father makes between one and two gold pieces a week, total. These prices are insane.

Her family is relatively wealthy, she thought. All their neighbors are significantly poorer than them. The laundry wizard is probably poorer than the Saei household. Which is nuts if the lesson he gave her usually went for that much gold.

But this. These people, this place, makes her feel like an urchin, dressed in rags.

At least she's a clean urchin. She's not sweating at all from the walk over, thanks to Endure Elements, and she keeps Prestidigitation up constantly while she's awake. She turns her hair emerald green again to show off that she already has spells and isn't just an illiterate child who wandered into somewhere she shouldn't be. Or something. She has no idea. She feels a little like she's suddenly in a foreign country and has no idea what's normal.

Gamila peers up at the hovering illusion, then goes over and creeps up behind the quartet of attractive teenage wizards. What is that thing? "What is that thing?"

"We don't know!" says the wizard girl.

She and the three boys glance backward for a moment. The common-girl look contrasting with the gemstone hair makes all of them stare for a moment, before two of the boys dismiss her with vague distaste. The remaining boy and the girl both smile at Gamila and point at the illusion.

"It appeared last night."

"No one knows who cast it or what it's an image of."

"We think there's a prize for whoever figures it out, though."

"There's usually a prize when something mysterious happens."

"The prize is almost never an explosion," the girl adds, reassuring, but with a small hint of disappointment.

"You've never seen anything like this, have you?"

(Knowledge(Nature): 6)

Gamila stares at the strange... thing. She's not getting any sense of recognition, and she's not having any ideas.

"No. Sorry. I have no idea."

She glances around.

"Is, um, is the library open?"

"It's over th-"

The wizard girls bounces forward with a smile. "Up that way and to the left. I can show you, if you like? Is this your first visit to the Temple? Are you looking for something specific?"

(Sense Motive: 17)

Gamila peers suspiciously for a moment before realizing: no, this girl is actually just being friendly. Gamila isn't used to kindness or interest from her female peers. Not for a long time now.

"I want to look over a, encyclopedia, is that the right word? Of all the spells wizards can learn. Do you think you could show me something like that?"

"That's easy. We've got lots of those. Kind of have to."

The wizard girl holds Gamila's hand and leads her off, up to the broad doors to the left.

"I'm Dana, by the way. It's a pleasure."

The library is beautiful. Eight stories of magelight and concentric bookshelves rise up to a stained-glass skylight at the peak of the space. There are desks sized for everything from gnomish children to full-grown dragons, with a number of well-worn magic carpets heaped over the backs of chairs. There is one ladder, in the corner, covered in dust. It is not a space one can navigate if one cannot fly, either under their own power or using one of the provided enchanted carpets.

Some of the chairs are occupied. Some of the airspace is occupied. There is a lot of reading, happening here.

"Gamila," she says, giving the other girl a smile after a moment of hesitating to give her real name.

Being honest feels right, though. These may not be her people but they are better people than the ones she's used to. Or maybe that's just Dana. Time will tell.

Gamila takes a few moments to just stare, hungry and also intimidated, at this ridiculously grandiose repository of knowledge.

Dana snickers a little at the look on Gamila's face.

"I know, right? But it's not as inconvenient as it looks. Most of the books that matter to you if you're under third-circle are down at the bottom where you don't need to fly to get at them."

Dana can show Gamila where they keep the books with the spell lists.

"Thank you."

Gamila sits down with one of those books and cracks it open. She doubts that what she needs is going to be this easy to find. If it was easy, well, everybody would be different about sex things.

There are a lot of spells. This is a very thick book. This is going to take more than one day, probably.

"If I find a spell in here that I want for myself, is there someone I should talk to? Or does this library have usable spellbooks too?"

Dana spocks an eyebrow.

"There are example spellbooks you can copy most of the well-known spells from, but you can't take them with you. You don't have your own spellbook?"

Gamila really doesn't want to answer that question.

"Hey, can I ask you a really scandalous question?"

Dana's attention is diverted immediately.

"Absolutely."