"...dunno. Just—I dunno, I might be making it up. Just the way they talked about each other and about Phobe? It was different from the way everyone else talked. The two of them were trying to pretend they weren't in a panic but they were. I think. I don't know for sure—"

Taharqi lifts an appeasing hand. "You don't need to convince me to trust your instincts. I know what it's like when something makes the whole picture make a lot more sense than it would otherwise even if you don't know it's true for sure."

"...yeah, that's it. The picture makes a lot more sense if Mr. Vincent and Ms. Jenny are Phobe's parents.

"And there's just not really a motive. It feels too, too—coincidental."

"Because of the political factions involved."

"Yeah. High Priest Zhed is the leader of a group of, they call it moderates, I guess? Which as far as I can tell is people who think that maybe the whole thing where they subjugated the locals and imposed their customs on them and killed a bunch of them wasn't very nice of them and wasn't super about Freyja's love. And High Priestess Niren is the leader of the conservatives, who—I don't understand what they think, I talked mostly to people who like Zhed." He's much more sympathetic anyway. "So I think it's something political to make Zhed's faction look bad, like, look, obviously the natives suck, see, you tried being nice to them and what'd that get you, it got your jewel stolen is what."

"How sure are you that the kid isn't just stupid?"

"I'm not, but I've—been poor," she says. It's probably fine to say this, right? "When I was a kid. I lived in the streets. Of Einbroch, then Einbech. And if you—if someone helps you, gives you work, honest work, gives you somewhere to live—you don't do that. You don't just—steal a random jewel and run away."

"And, you know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it really is just what they say it is, maybe he's—stupid," and ungrateful, and mean—no, maybe High Priest Zhed was mean, actually, maybe— "But the way to figure it out is to investigate it either way, so."

This pack here has twenty individuals.

Oh boy! Okay! This is gonna be harder!

Her party members are competent, though, especially if she focuses mostly on support to make sure they can keep going despite focused fire.

Yeah, she can do that. She has continuous release white potion patches, and stunners for their foes, and a couple other experimental tools besides.