Two bits from the WIP

[elfs]

She was a historian, she told herself. There wasn't a single culture that didn't fail some segment of its population, somewhere. There wasn't a single principled ideology that, as a consequnece intended or otherwise, didn't create a vulnerable and exploited segment. She would rather have lived in one that didn't do so with deliberate malice.

And

That was one of the things the people from her world were good at: brutal honesty. An Abian might hold her tongue in the face of small injustices, but ultimately the truth would out. That's what came of a world populated with the children of religious fanatics. They might eventually forget what they had their parents had been so fanatical about, but they still came with a great set of tools.