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rainbowfic2025-07-03 04:43 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-07-03 04:43 pm
Light Black #19, Realgar #8 [The Fulcrum]
Name: Lost
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Light Black #19: Endure, Realgar #8: Pause
Styles and Supplies: Life Drawing, Graffiti (Disability Pride Month), Brushes (July 3 2025: Desultory), Calendar Page (StartTheConversation Day)
Word Count: 2793
Rating: PG
Warnings: Discussion of slavery
Characters: Setsiana, Liselye, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1912.1.1-3
Summary: Setsiana tries to find a place for herself in 1912.
Setsiana had returned to Nwórza with Qhoroali, and, for lack of anywhere else to go, had wound up right back in the second bedroom in Qhoroali’s apartment where she’d been living as a captive for the past two months. The doors were no longer locked, and she was no longer prevented from leaving, and she did sometimes leave the apartment to walk the streets of the city, just to prove to herself that she could. But it felt the same; she was stuck here in a strange time, in a somewhat unfamiliar place, and could not return to her home. Even if she had wanted to go, she would need to ask one of the others to Guide her there, and though she was nominally free to go wherever she wished, she doubted any of them would agree to take her back, now.
Initially, full of horror at the priesthood’s slavery operations and feeling more than a little guilty for the small part she had played in that as a teacher teaching the priesthood’s version of history, she had asked Liselye if she could help out in some way. She remembered that Qhoroali had said that they did work to free slaves, and thought that maybe she could set aside her feelings of helplessness and feel better about things if she did something constructive along those lines. But Liselye had turned her down.
“You’re on the List,” she’d said. “We can’t take anyone with us who we know is on there; if we are seen in your company, we could potentially all get put on the List. We’re also not in need of more hands particularly, or, I guess it’s more accurate to say that one more person who doesn’t even know how to Guide won’t help us do more than we’re already doing.”
That had made Setsiana ask Qhoroali about Guiding. Qhoroali could time travel by herself; maybe if Setsiana learned how to Guide, she could do the same, and would at least feel less trapped here in 1912. Qhoroali was receptive to this, at least.
“Sure, I can teach you to Guide, if you want,” she said. “It’s always useful to have more people who know how, and to be honest, I don’t really see the List the same way Li does. If you were going to do something to get Li put on the List, for example, she would already be on it — there’s nothing that you, or anyone else can do to change the fact that Li isn’t on the List. So I don’t think it’s really a risk for her to take you with her, but it’s up to her, so,” she shrugged. “Learning even just the basics of Guiding is going to take a whole day, pretty much, though, maybe more. I’ve got some stuff I want to work on right now, so I’ll take you in a month or so.”
“Can I learn to do it the way you do it?” Setsiana asked. “To do it without needing a second person? You seem to be able to do it with much less qoire than Cyaru needed.”
Qhoroali regarded her, seeming to think about something for a moment. “No, I don’t think so,” she said, eventually. “It’s not a skill. It’s just… part of my unique curse. Everything is just a little too much for me, in ways that it’s not too much for anyone else. The loudness in 2434. The texture of meat. The tightness of clothes. It’s just,” she flexed her hands to the widest extent possible and they vibrated in place for a moment. “When I drink qoire, it’s the same — my perception of the timelines is just… more. I can see them fully without having to drink as much, so I can still walk them by myself. But I don’t think it is that way for you, is it? You’re not cursed like this.”
“It’s not a curse,” Setsiana said, automatically, thinking of Zlúnrays.
Qhoroali rolled her eyes a bit. “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I suppose being able to time travel by myself is nice sometimes. Sometimes I just go off to a distant time, all by myself, to be alone for a while, for a week or two, and I return before I ever left, so no one here even knows the difference. But if it weren’t for this curse, if I didn’t get overwhelmed so easily by everything, I honestly don’t think I would even need to do that, and sometimes I feel like I would prefer it that way.”
Setsiana wanted to object again, but what did she know about this, really? She didn’t know, personally, what it was like, and she wasn’t speaking to a child who was half her age, either. She decided to forget about it.
Hesitantly, she ventured, steering the conversation in another direction, “If you don’t mind, there’s one more thing I wanted to ask you. I’ve been thinking about what you said to me, and there’s one part of your story that doesn’t seem to make sense. You were in the Egalitarian heresy, right? You said your temple didn’t have access to the Mirror. So they couldn’t have been kidnapping or enslaving anyone using it. So why did you run away?”
“You mean, why didn’t I try to use this information against the main branch, to show the Emperor that we were the good guys, and he should be funding us instead? That we should be considered the main branch of the religion?” Qhoroali sighed. “I did. Or at least, I tried to get my mother to do that. But when I told her about the Sohanke slavery and what the main branch was doing, she wasn’t surprised , or shocked. She already knew all about it. She already knew about it, and she wanted the main branch to give her access to Mirrors so that she could start doing it too, and get her own free workforce, and then we wouldn’t have to sell as much qoire illegally. She didn’t see anything wrong with the slavery, and she wasn’t going to do anything to end the main branch’s access to slaves, because doing that would mean that in some completely fictional alternate universe, she wouldn’t have access to them, either. That’s when I knew I couldn’t stay there any longer.” She seemed somber, almost wistful, for a moment.
“Isn’t the slavery a secret, though?” asked Setsiana. “How did she know about it, if it’s one of the main branch’s closely-guarded secrets?”
“Yes, it is one of their secrets,” said Qhoroali, “although it’s not as well-guarded as the information about Mirror operation, or the Mirrors themselves. But some of the women who wind up in the Egalitarian heresy are defectors from the main branch, who know at least some of the secrets — some of them figure out how to leave without getting put on the List, others are on the List, but manged to leave and survive anyway. For all that the main branch is so draconian about it, they don’t actually manage to contain all of their secrets. The main thing that does the heavy lifting for them in keeping those secrets away from the government is actually just the fear that the government has of them and the ghost stories they tell about priestesses rewriting history.”
There were other things Setsiana might have asked about the heresy, but in truth, she’d been at least sort of hoping that they would turn out to have been against the slavery, that they would have been at least a priesthood-like place where she could apply her skills and maybe do some of the things she’d hoped to do with her life without compromising her morals. That didn’t seem to be the case, and she was too overcome by disappointment to ask any further questions about them. Ultimately, she still felt lost and untethered, without a proper home to return to, or a proper goal to strive for.
She and Qhoroali awoke at such different times that they often passed each other like ships in the night, now that Setsiana was allowed to leave the apartment freely, but a couple of weeks after the new year she found herself having dinner with Qhoroali, in the kitchen for once. The question Qhoroali asked took her a bit by surprise.
“Did Sapfita ever tell you whether she approved of the Sohanke slavery or not?”
“I thought you didn’t believe my dreams were real,” Setsiana said, somewhat tightly.
“I believe that you have dreams that you take life advice from. I don’t think it’s necessarily the best advice, since something caused you to come with me when I came to abduct you, and I still don’t believe that was actually me, and I don’t think that decision has benefited you at all.”
“Don’t you? If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to leave the temple when I found out about the slavery. I would have been stuck there.”
Qhoroali seemed pensive for a moment. “For my part, I would say that learning about the priesthood kidnapping slaves and leaving my temple over it was a good thing, because it allowed me to start working to counter it here. But I’m not sure the same thing has benefited you. Li won’t let you help in practical matters due to you being on the List, and you seem unlikely to have become involved in taking slaves if you had stayed — for whatever reason, their propaganda seems to have failed on you. Maybe you would even have been in a position to fight against it from within your temple. So I think all you have gained from this is that now you are miserable.”
“I remember what you said before,” said Setsiana. “They justify taking the slaves by teaching a specific version of history to children, before they even join up with the temple… I was one of those history teachers when I was at the temple. I taught them that history. So I was part of that problem.”
“Did you really have a choice about what you taught those children? Or, if you had refused to teach them the prescribed agenda, would they not have just replaced you with someone else who would?”
Setsiana said nothing.
“I think you are too quick to classify yourself as a villain, here,” Qhoroali continued. “The slaves are forced to work all day at the temples without pay beyond what it takes to keep them alive and healthy, but they are not the only ones in that situation, are they? You were a junior priestess — it was much the same for you, wasn’t it?”
“That’s not the same! I chose to be there— I got to do research— there were promises that I would be priestess one day—”
“No, it’s not the same, but it is similar. You were privileged over them, but you were not in a position of power that would have allowed you to change how things worked there, and you were being exploited, too. Think about it. The Emperor pays the temples for what? The pharmacy, the school, the free meals and help the temple gives to the people who need it. The money goes to the full priestesses to spend as they please, but who are the ones actually running those services? None of the full priestesses are expected to do that work, they are busy conducting their research, of course. It’s the junior priestesses who do all of the labor that actually brings in the money, and who produce all of the value that the temple exports to Cheanya society at large, and you never see any of that payment. Maybe the full priestesses will eventually reward you for your labor by promoting you, but it’s not a sure thing, is it? It only happens at their whims.”
Setsiana reflected that she had often had bitter thoughts like this from time to time, when pleasing Priestess Fyäccheira had seemed most out of reach, but she’d always brushed those thoughts aside as being ungrateful and wrong. But now, knowing that the full priestesses had had no problem at all with enslaving people from other timelines, she wondered if maybe Qhoroali did have a point, after all. Maybe if they hadn’t taken free labor so much for granted, they would have treated the juniors differently, as well.
“Anyway,” Qhoroali continued. “Have you received any more divine life advice?”
“…Yes. But I am not taking it this time.”
“Oh, that’s interesting. I wouldn’t have expected you to disagree.”
“Does that mean you believe me now that it’s really Her?”
“No, it’s just interesting. Why do you disagree?”
Setsiana sighed. “Sometimes I think that as a god, Sapfita doesn’t really understand humans very well.”
Qhoroali sighed, softly, too. “I don’t think you necessarily even have to be a god to not really understand humans very well.”
Setsiana looked at her sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Qhoroali looked up her again. “Oh, nothing about you, don’t worry.” After a moment, she added, “You can stay here as long as you like, by the way, I don’t mind.”
“Do you need me to pay rent, or anything like that?”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. We have tons of money, and it’s not like that room would be being used for anything, anyway, if you weren’t here.”
“Really? It didn’t belong to someone else before you kidnapped me?”
“Really. Why do you ask?”
“You didn’t convert that room into a bedroom for me. It has a bathing room attached, and there is a very nice bed in there that I don’t think you bought just for me. I don’t think you got a two-bedroom apartment to live in all by yourself, did you?”
Qhoroali shrugged. “I got this place eight years ago. If you must know, at that time that room was Li’s room, but it really has been completely empty since 1906. We came here, me and her, escaping our mothers, and we were flat broke so we rented this place together, and paid for it and our food by working in Mosetai’s café. Then Cyaru moved into my room, and we all lived here together for, oh, a year or two. Then he broke up with me, and I wanted to be alone, so I made both of them leave. We had plenty of income by that point, so Mosetai just rented them their own places.”
Setsiana pieced this history together with what she thought she already knew about the three of them. “And then they got together with each other?”
Qhoroali actually laughed. “Right after that? God no, do you think I’d still be friends with Li if she’d done that? We were doing more, I guess you could say, direct action at that point, moving weapons and breaking slaves out of temples and trying to take them back to their native timelines, and we needed Cyaru for that since he was the one who knew more about the Sohanke timelines and languages, but he wasn’t as familiar with the time travel part, or as good at it, as you saw before. I didn’t particularly feel like helping him with that, I didn’t want to be thinking about… all the stuff with him while I was doing that, and we didn’t have a lot of other experienced Guides back then, so that basically became Li’s job. After spending a lot of time working together for three years, I guess they got close.”
“And you stayed behind and did research by yourself.”
“To tell you the truth, I kind of prefer it that way. It was a little bit much, sometimes, to be sharing this place with two other people.”
“I thought you wanted me to help you with your research?”
“Well, that was really only because you specifically told me that you were going to contribute something important, and give me some clue or idea that I needed. I’m honestly not sure if I still believe that — maybe that only happens in some other timeline, where we meet under better circumstances, I don’t know.” Qhoroali had some expression now that Setsiana couldn’t quite read; something wistful or longing or regretful. What outcome had she been hoping for, by bringing Setsiana here?
“You’re sure you’re ok with me staying here?” Setsiana ventured.
“Yeah,” said Qhoroali, “Like I said, I really don’t mind. It hasn’t been much of a problem having you around for the past two months — really all of the problems only stemmed from the fact that I’d kidnapped you. I don’t mind having you around as a guest, if you don’t.”
They finished the meal in at least somewhat companionable silence.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Light Black #19: Endure, Realgar #8: Pause
Styles and Supplies: Life Drawing, Graffiti (Disability Pride Month), Brushes (July 3 2025: Desultory), Calendar Page (StartTheConversation Day)
Word Count: 2793
Rating: PG
Warnings: Discussion of slavery
Characters: Setsiana, Liselye, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1912.1.1-3
Summary: Setsiana tries to find a place for herself in 1912.
Setsiana had returned to Nwórza with Qhoroali, and, for lack of anywhere else to go, had wound up right back in the second bedroom in Qhoroali’s apartment where she’d been living as a captive for the past two months. The doors were no longer locked, and she was no longer prevented from leaving, and she did sometimes leave the apartment to walk the streets of the city, just to prove to herself that she could. But it felt the same; she was stuck here in a strange time, in a somewhat unfamiliar place, and could not return to her home. Even if she had wanted to go, she would need to ask one of the others to Guide her there, and though she was nominally free to go wherever she wished, she doubted any of them would agree to take her back, now.
Initially, full of horror at the priesthood’s slavery operations and feeling more than a little guilty for the small part she had played in that as a teacher teaching the priesthood’s version of history, she had asked Liselye if she could help out in some way. She remembered that Qhoroali had said that they did work to free slaves, and thought that maybe she could set aside her feelings of helplessness and feel better about things if she did something constructive along those lines. But Liselye had turned her down.
“You’re on the List,” she’d said. “We can’t take anyone with us who we know is on there; if we are seen in your company, we could potentially all get put on the List. We’re also not in need of more hands particularly, or, I guess it’s more accurate to say that one more person who doesn’t even know how to Guide won’t help us do more than we’re already doing.”
That had made Setsiana ask Qhoroali about Guiding. Qhoroali could time travel by herself; maybe if Setsiana learned how to Guide, she could do the same, and would at least feel less trapped here in 1912. Qhoroali was receptive to this, at least.
“Sure, I can teach you to Guide, if you want,” she said. “It’s always useful to have more people who know how, and to be honest, I don’t really see the List the same way Li does. If you were going to do something to get Li put on the List, for example, she would already be on it — there’s nothing that you, or anyone else can do to change the fact that Li isn’t on the List. So I don’t think it’s really a risk for her to take you with her, but it’s up to her, so,” she shrugged. “Learning even just the basics of Guiding is going to take a whole day, pretty much, though, maybe more. I’ve got some stuff I want to work on right now, so I’ll take you in a month or so.”
“Can I learn to do it the way you do it?” Setsiana asked. “To do it without needing a second person? You seem to be able to do it with much less qoire than Cyaru needed.”
Qhoroali regarded her, seeming to think about something for a moment. “No, I don’t think so,” she said, eventually. “It’s not a skill. It’s just… part of my unique curse. Everything is just a little too much for me, in ways that it’s not too much for anyone else. The loudness in 2434. The texture of meat. The tightness of clothes. It’s just,” she flexed her hands to the widest extent possible and they vibrated in place for a moment. “When I drink qoire, it’s the same — my perception of the timelines is just… more. I can see them fully without having to drink as much, so I can still walk them by myself. But I don’t think it is that way for you, is it? You’re not cursed like this.”
“It’s not a curse,” Setsiana said, automatically, thinking of Zlúnrays.
Qhoroali rolled her eyes a bit. “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I suppose being able to time travel by myself is nice sometimes. Sometimes I just go off to a distant time, all by myself, to be alone for a while, for a week or two, and I return before I ever left, so no one here even knows the difference. But if it weren’t for this curse, if I didn’t get overwhelmed so easily by everything, I honestly don’t think I would even need to do that, and sometimes I feel like I would prefer it that way.”
Setsiana wanted to object again, but what did she know about this, really? She didn’t know, personally, what it was like, and she wasn’t speaking to a child who was half her age, either. She decided to forget about it.
Hesitantly, she ventured, steering the conversation in another direction, “If you don’t mind, there’s one more thing I wanted to ask you. I’ve been thinking about what you said to me, and there’s one part of your story that doesn’t seem to make sense. You were in the Egalitarian heresy, right? You said your temple didn’t have access to the Mirror. So they couldn’t have been kidnapping or enslaving anyone using it. So why did you run away?”
“You mean, why didn’t I try to use this information against the main branch, to show the Emperor that we were the good guys, and he should be funding us instead? That we should be considered the main branch of the religion?” Qhoroali sighed. “I did. Or at least, I tried to get my mother to do that. But when I told her about the Sohanke slavery and what the main branch was doing, she wasn’t surprised , or shocked. She already knew all about it. She already knew about it, and she wanted the main branch to give her access to Mirrors so that she could start doing it too, and get her own free workforce, and then we wouldn’t have to sell as much qoire illegally. She didn’t see anything wrong with the slavery, and she wasn’t going to do anything to end the main branch’s access to slaves, because doing that would mean that in some completely fictional alternate universe, she wouldn’t have access to them, either. That’s when I knew I couldn’t stay there any longer.” She seemed somber, almost wistful, for a moment.
“Isn’t the slavery a secret, though?” asked Setsiana. “How did she know about it, if it’s one of the main branch’s closely-guarded secrets?”
“Yes, it is one of their secrets,” said Qhoroali, “although it’s not as well-guarded as the information about Mirror operation, or the Mirrors themselves. But some of the women who wind up in the Egalitarian heresy are defectors from the main branch, who know at least some of the secrets — some of them figure out how to leave without getting put on the List, others are on the List, but manged to leave and survive anyway. For all that the main branch is so draconian about it, they don’t actually manage to contain all of their secrets. The main thing that does the heavy lifting for them in keeping those secrets away from the government is actually just the fear that the government has of them and the ghost stories they tell about priestesses rewriting history.”
There were other things Setsiana might have asked about the heresy, but in truth, she’d been at least sort of hoping that they would turn out to have been against the slavery, that they would have been at least a priesthood-like place where she could apply her skills and maybe do some of the things she’d hoped to do with her life without compromising her morals. That didn’t seem to be the case, and she was too overcome by disappointment to ask any further questions about them. Ultimately, she still felt lost and untethered, without a proper home to return to, or a proper goal to strive for.
She and Qhoroali awoke at such different times that they often passed each other like ships in the night, now that Setsiana was allowed to leave the apartment freely, but a couple of weeks after the new year she found herself having dinner with Qhoroali, in the kitchen for once. The question Qhoroali asked took her a bit by surprise.
“Did Sapfita ever tell you whether she approved of the Sohanke slavery or not?”
“I thought you didn’t believe my dreams were real,” Setsiana said, somewhat tightly.
“I believe that you have dreams that you take life advice from. I don’t think it’s necessarily the best advice, since something caused you to come with me when I came to abduct you, and I still don’t believe that was actually me, and I don’t think that decision has benefited you at all.”
“Don’t you? If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to leave the temple when I found out about the slavery. I would have been stuck there.”
Qhoroali seemed pensive for a moment. “For my part, I would say that learning about the priesthood kidnapping slaves and leaving my temple over it was a good thing, because it allowed me to start working to counter it here. But I’m not sure the same thing has benefited you. Li won’t let you help in practical matters due to you being on the List, and you seem unlikely to have become involved in taking slaves if you had stayed — for whatever reason, their propaganda seems to have failed on you. Maybe you would even have been in a position to fight against it from within your temple. So I think all you have gained from this is that now you are miserable.”
“I remember what you said before,” said Setsiana. “They justify taking the slaves by teaching a specific version of history to children, before they even join up with the temple… I was one of those history teachers when I was at the temple. I taught them that history. So I was part of that problem.”
“Did you really have a choice about what you taught those children? Or, if you had refused to teach them the prescribed agenda, would they not have just replaced you with someone else who would?”
Setsiana said nothing.
“I think you are too quick to classify yourself as a villain, here,” Qhoroali continued. “The slaves are forced to work all day at the temples without pay beyond what it takes to keep them alive and healthy, but they are not the only ones in that situation, are they? You were a junior priestess — it was much the same for you, wasn’t it?”
“That’s not the same! I chose to be there— I got to do research— there were promises that I would be priestess one day—”
“No, it’s not the same, but it is similar. You were privileged over them, but you were not in a position of power that would have allowed you to change how things worked there, and you were being exploited, too. Think about it. The Emperor pays the temples for what? The pharmacy, the school, the free meals and help the temple gives to the people who need it. The money goes to the full priestesses to spend as they please, but who are the ones actually running those services? None of the full priestesses are expected to do that work, they are busy conducting their research, of course. It’s the junior priestesses who do all of the labor that actually brings in the money, and who produce all of the value that the temple exports to Cheanya society at large, and you never see any of that payment. Maybe the full priestesses will eventually reward you for your labor by promoting you, but it’s not a sure thing, is it? It only happens at their whims.”
Setsiana reflected that she had often had bitter thoughts like this from time to time, when pleasing Priestess Fyäccheira had seemed most out of reach, but she’d always brushed those thoughts aside as being ungrateful and wrong. But now, knowing that the full priestesses had had no problem at all with enslaving people from other timelines, she wondered if maybe Qhoroali did have a point, after all. Maybe if they hadn’t taken free labor so much for granted, they would have treated the juniors differently, as well.
“Anyway,” Qhoroali continued. “Have you received any more divine life advice?”
“…Yes. But I am not taking it this time.”
“Oh, that’s interesting. I wouldn’t have expected you to disagree.”
“Does that mean you believe me now that it’s really Her?”
“No, it’s just interesting. Why do you disagree?”
Setsiana sighed. “Sometimes I think that as a god, Sapfita doesn’t really understand humans very well.”
Qhoroali sighed, softly, too. “I don’t think you necessarily even have to be a god to not really understand humans very well.”
Setsiana looked at her sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Qhoroali looked up her again. “Oh, nothing about you, don’t worry.” After a moment, she added, “You can stay here as long as you like, by the way, I don’t mind.”
“Do you need me to pay rent, or anything like that?”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. We have tons of money, and it’s not like that room would be being used for anything, anyway, if you weren’t here.”
“Really? It didn’t belong to someone else before you kidnapped me?”
“Really. Why do you ask?”
“You didn’t convert that room into a bedroom for me. It has a bathing room attached, and there is a very nice bed in there that I don’t think you bought just for me. I don’t think you got a two-bedroom apartment to live in all by yourself, did you?”
Qhoroali shrugged. “I got this place eight years ago. If you must know, at that time that room was Li’s room, but it really has been completely empty since 1906. We came here, me and her, escaping our mothers, and we were flat broke so we rented this place together, and paid for it and our food by working in Mosetai’s café. Then Cyaru moved into my room, and we all lived here together for, oh, a year or two. Then he broke up with me, and I wanted to be alone, so I made both of them leave. We had plenty of income by that point, so Mosetai just rented them their own places.”
Setsiana pieced this history together with what she thought she already knew about the three of them. “And then they got together with each other?”
Qhoroali actually laughed. “Right after that? God no, do you think I’d still be friends with Li if she’d done that? We were doing more, I guess you could say, direct action at that point, moving weapons and breaking slaves out of temples and trying to take them back to their native timelines, and we needed Cyaru for that since he was the one who knew more about the Sohanke timelines and languages, but he wasn’t as familiar with the time travel part, or as good at it, as you saw before. I didn’t particularly feel like helping him with that, I didn’t want to be thinking about… all the stuff with him while I was doing that, and we didn’t have a lot of other experienced Guides back then, so that basically became Li’s job. After spending a lot of time working together for three years, I guess they got close.”
“And you stayed behind and did research by yourself.”
“To tell you the truth, I kind of prefer it that way. It was a little bit much, sometimes, to be sharing this place with two other people.”
“I thought you wanted me to help you with your research?”
“Well, that was really only because you specifically told me that you were going to contribute something important, and give me some clue or idea that I needed. I’m honestly not sure if I still believe that — maybe that only happens in some other timeline, where we meet under better circumstances, I don’t know.” Qhoroali had some expression now that Setsiana couldn’t quite read; something wistful or longing or regretful. What outcome had she been hoping for, by bringing Setsiana here?
“You’re sure you’re ok with me staying here?” Setsiana ventured.
“Yeah,” said Qhoroali, “Like I said, I really don’t mind. It hasn’t been much of a problem having you around for the past two months — really all of the problems only stemmed from the fact that I’d kidnapped you. I don’t mind having you around as a guest, if you don’t.”
They finished the meal in at least somewhat companionable silence.
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