"Oh. Okay. Um. Well, there's—I don't know how much of this stuff is common knowledge? Like, uh, the thing about natives? Or the Sacred Jewels? Do you guys know about those?"

Annika looks at Taharqi.

"...I guess I do know a bit about the history of the place," he concedes. "Uh—Arunafeltz was colonised by migrants from the Kingdom of Rune-Midgard, but there were already people living here before. They didn't worship the gods, though, or not in the same way. They have concepts and stories that can be mapped to similar entities, but much less personified, and in their stories they occasionally merge some Odinist and Freyjan gods with each other or split gods Odinists and Freyjans consider to be the same. And the Freyjan colonists were pretty religious and unhappy with the idea of coexisting with people who didn't share their faith. They were also more technologically advanced so they subjugated the natives and now there's sort of a class separation between natives and non-natives. It's a whole mess.

"I don't know a ton more about it than that, though."

She nods along with his explanation. That was more or less what she'd managed to piece together, with a bit more historical context. "So there's this bounty I found that's not an official Eden bounty and it was posted by the police. It's a bounty for a fifteen year old who vanished a few days ago at the same time as High Priest Zhed's, uh, symbol-of-office? It's a crystal, it's called the Sacred Opal, every High Priest has something like that, High Priestess Niren has a Sacred Ruby. Anyway it vanished at the same time as Phobe did—that's the fifteen-year-old—and Phobe is a native orphan who Zhed employs—employed—at his estate." It was very much an estate. She thinks she's never used that word before. She's not sure. "And there's, um, some stuff about politics, there seem to be two factions? Two big ones, anyway. And High Priest Zhed is the leader of one and Niren is the leader of the other. Zhed's faction is friendlier to natives."

"Why don't you tell us more about it while we make our way to the Ice Cave? That should give us some time and privacy."

"—yeah okay."